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CHAPTER 13 191 University for the Canadian Forces At a General Council meeting in November 1981, RMC broached the question whether the name Canadian Military Colleges should be changed to Canadian Military Universities,but the proposal wasquickly dropped.1 At the next meeting of the council, Brigadier-General J.A. Stewart, the RMCcommandant, explained the rationale behind the suggestion and its abandonment. He said the word "university" enjoyed higher prestige in the minds of young people than "college" and a change of name might assist in recruiting. In the discussion at the previous meeting, however, it had become clear that legal and political implications made a new name not worth the complications that would ensue. The council decided that, instead of changing the name, the word"university" would be used frequently in advertising.2 From then on, RMC was sometimes referred to as "Canada's major federal university." Since the CMCs were the only federally supported educational institution of this kind, RMC'S claim could bejustified because it had taken on many of the characteristics that distinguish a university from a college or academy. The RMC calendar and other pro motional literature began to call it a "university with a difference." Definitions of these terms need further elucidation. A secondary meaning of the word "college" is "an institution for special instruction, sometimes professional or military, often vocational or technical." In more general usage referring to higher education, the words "college" and "university" both have several overlapping connotations that differ from one country to another. In one such definition, a university is an institution that covers more areas of knowledge and levels of study than a college ; in another, it is made up of one or more colleges or universitycolleges. A third usage conveys the concept that a university,as distinct from a college, is concerned with the expansion of knowledge as well as with its dissemination to students.3 A simple rule of thumb to distinguish most universities from most colleges in North America is that universities are more likelyto expect their facultiesto engage in research, and that they also undertake the education and training of postgraduate students who will, in turn, become researchers as well as teachers, or who will practise their profession at a more advanced level. University professors do research and also teach graduate aswell as undergraduate students. While most recruits for the CMCS would not usuallybe interested in these attributes, they would still assume that a university with this potential has more prestige than a college, and therefore is preferable. Stewart's reasoning for proposing to use "universities" in place of "colleges" in the name of the CMCS was thus an attempt to attract the better students. The spread of community colleges in Canada had sharpened the distinction between "university" and "college" in the eyes of many high school students. RMC advanced its proposal to change the name of the Canadian Military Colleges to Canadian Military Universities only a few years after the external campaign to 792 TO SERVECANADA "put the 'M'back into RMC" was at its height. That campaign had been based on an allegation that the college had become too much likea civilianuniversity. The painful memory of that controversy may have been partly responsible for the way the proposal to change names was dropped in 1987. If a name change for the three CMCs were to take place, the singular form "Canadian Military University"might have been more logical for all three together than the plural. RMC, however, was already a degree-granting universityin its own right. To change its name to one that incorporated all themilitary colleges might have seemed a lowering of itsstatus. By functioning as a university in the sense of expanding knowledge by research, RMCcould offer a service to the Canadian Forces. Service of that kind had figured in the reopening of the college in 1948,4 but that function had not at first been made explicit. The chief Canadian government institution to do research was, and still is, the National Research Council (NRC), a federal crown corporation that was set up in 1916 during the First World War. Between the wars, NRCwas mainly devoted to pure scientific research of a general nature, but research on defence increased during the 1930s. During the Second World War it came to predominate. In 1947 NRC's laboratory activities in military research were transferred to a new agency,the Defence Research Board (DRB).S Like NRC, DRBwas an autonomous organization that employed...

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