History of the Senate

Read an excerpt from D.B. Clarke’s Decades of Decisions explaining the change from Faculty Council to University Council.

"There was no further change in the nature of University government until the fall of 1963 when it was decided that with the coming splitting up of the monolithic Faculty of Arts, Science, and Commerce into separate faculties, each to be governed by its own separate Faculty Council, that the Faculty Council be replaced by a University Council.

While the responsibilities of the new University Council were to remain largely the same as those of the Faculty Council, it was substantially different in some major respects.

In the first place, the old Faculty Council was made up primarily of all full professors. The new University Council was to be more representative of the whole faculty; senior and junior faculty were henceforth to be elected in proportionate numbers and for fixed terms.

In the second place, much of the business conducted by the old Faculty Council would now be carried on by the several Faculty Councils of Arts, Science, Commerce, and Engineering. These bodies would report to, and make recommendations to, the University Council, which would be concerned to discuss these recommendations at an overall university level and endeavour to maintain some consistency of practice and standards throughout the University.

(…) The first meeting of the University Council was held on January 17, 1964." 1

Find out more about the SGW Faculty Council at Records Management and Archives.

Why was University Council succeeded by Senate?

"The pattern was laid in the late sixties: participatory democracy became the keynote of university government. When in 1973, in the penultimate stage of the merger with Loyola College of Montreal, the University Council was replaced by a joint Senate, it too took on the representative nature of the forms of government that had evolved during those recent years.

The Senate of Concordia University was to be somewhat larger than the University Council; besides allowing for representation from students, faculty, and administration, it also had to allow adequate representation from both the Loyola and the Sir George Williams campuses." 2

Sources:

1 Decades of Decisions by Douglass B. Clarke, Chapter VIII: University Government, 87
2 Ibid., 97