Church Politics and Education in Canada: The PEI Experience

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island.

This book presents the author’s views on the impact of church politics
(more specifically, those of the Roman Catholic Church) on higher
education in Canada, with particular reference to Prince Edward
Island’s Prince of Wales College. In 1949, the province’s premier
chose MacKinnon to be principal of the College. MacKinnon resigned in
1968, shortly before his public nondenominational, degree-granting
college merged with the Island’s other university, the Roman Catholic
St. Dunstan’s, to form the University of Prince Edward Island.

This is a deeply disturbing and intensely revealing book. According to
MacKinnon, “the Island does little for itself and depends too much on
Ottawa; churches and politicians are divisive; gossip is rampant.” The
current icon of the Island is curtly dismissed as “a harmless writer
of girls’ stories.” MacKinnon, a first-rate scholar, is scathing in
some of his comments on St. Dunstan’s as an academic institution. In
brief, he campaigned for the implementation of his concept of what a
university should be; another concept, no less valid to many, won out.