CAUT will mark the 60th anniversary of its founding in 1951 with special events at the April council meeting. “We hope all associations will be present to celebrate this milestone in our organization’s life,” said CAUT president Penni Stewart.
The history of CAUT begins with the decision, in 1948, of the faculty at the University of Alberta to initiate an exchange of salary information with others and to strike an ad hoc committee to sound out the sympathies of their colleagues at other universities for a national association.
Heartened by the response, they sat down in 1950 at Kingston primarily with members of the faculty at Queen’s University to design such an association. Frank Knox of Queen’s convened a founding committee that drafted a constitution and prepared a slate of officers to be ratified the following year at McGill University.
The organization was formally created in 1951 with the adoption of a constitution that provided for a federation of local faculty associations governed by an executive council whose working officers were each year to be drawn from a member campus. The first council came from Queen’s and Knox served as president.
In 1953, CAUT published the first issue of the CAUT Bulletin. By then CAUT represented 1,200 faculty members from 13 associations in eight provinces — UBC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Carleton, Queen’s, McMaster, Toronto, Sir George Williams, McGill, Laval, Dalhousie and Memorial College in St. John’s.