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Contents - Winter 2008

Vol. 1 No. 1

The University, The Province, and the Future

For this inaugural Centennial issue, Explore invited history professor and Distinguished Researcher Bill Waiser to offer some thoughts on the challenges and opportunities for U of S researchers in advancing Saskatchewan in the new century.

Opinion Piece by Bill Waiser

The University of Saskatchewan and the province of Saskatchewan have existed for almost the same length of time. In fact, the new province was not even a year old when Premier Walter Scott announced the government’s plan to build a university that would rival any in Canada. It was a decision that signaled Saskatchewan’s great confidence in its future—a future that not simply belonged to the province, but more importantly, could be decided and shaped by the province.

And what was this future? Saskatchewan was to be based on one dominant culture (Anglo-Canadian) engaged in one dominant economic activity (the production of wheat for the export market) in one dominant zone of activity (the southern half of the province). By such means, it was believed that Saskatchewan would fulfill its destiny as Canada’s prairie powerhouse province.

From its establishment in 1907, the U of S was to be an integral part of this ambitious province building program. By making the study of agriculture the centrepiece of the new university, it was hoped that the institution would help realize Saskatchewan’s dominance of the world wheat market, while building a strong and vibrant rural society. And to a large extent, the university performed this role.

Today, however, the province faces a much different, more difficult, future. But unlike a century earlier, it is Saskatchewan that will have to catch up, since the future will not wait.

This future will be profoundly different from the popular image of the province. In the national consciousness, Sleepy Saskatchewan is frozen in time, a place of wheat fields, grid roads, and country elevators, where nothing important ever happens and anybody with talent or ambition leaves to make their mark elsewhere.

The reality is a sophisticated, urban society (two-thirds of the population live in urban areas) with a diverse economic base and a rich cultural life, trying to come to terms with the twin challenges of meeting the needs of a growing, young, urban Aboriginal population and a decreasing, aging, rural non-Aboriginal population. These circumstances, certain to become even more pronounced in the next few decades, threaten to push and pull the province in different directions, all the more so when the drastic changes to agriculture are factored into the equation.

The U of S can be expected to help deal with the complex challenges facing Saskatchewan in the new century. Indeed, pure and applied university research—from the Canadian Light Source synchrotron to VIDO/InterVac to the International IP3 Network—is already addressing the change underway in the province.

But the real measure of the university’s importance to the province and its future will be how it effectively deals with the most critical challenge of the new Saskatchewan—the role and place of its Aboriginal population. Once dismissed as irrelevant to the province’s future, Aboriginal peoples (First Nations and Métis) are now projected to account for one in three people by the middle of the 21st century.

The U of S, in the words of its centennial slogan, must “engage, enlighten, and explore” with the province’s Aboriginal population, or the challenges will become bigger, if not more serious.

The rest of Canada, in particular other academic institutions, should be watching closely.

Prof. Waiser was named this year to the Royal Society of Canada, the nation’s highest body of distinguished scientists and scholars. He is the author of the highly acclaimed Saskatchewan: A New History (2005) and served as host of Looking Back: Saskatchewan History on CBC television (1999-2001). He received two 2007 Saskatchewan Book Award shortlist nominations for two different books—Everett Baker’s Saskatchewan was shortlisted in the non-fiction category, while his Tommy Douglas got the nod in the Children’s category. Says history department head Brett Fairbairn: “Bill Waiser is the public face of the province’s history, and a model of scholarship and outreach.”