Foreword

The president of a great university was once asked: "What does it take to make a university great?" "Time," the president responded with a smile.By the standard of many American and European universities, Queen's has had a relatively short life.Yet we are among the oldest of Canadian universities, and mark our 175th anniversary in 2016-17.From its humble beginnings -at the initiative of local Kingston leaders who saw the need for an institution of higher learning in the eastern reaches of the newly reorganized Canada West (of which the city had become, that year, the capital) -Queen's has grown and prospered into the mid-sized university that we have inherited and which we will, in turn, hand on to our successors.As an alumnus of our department of history, and now as one of its professors, I have long taken a personal interest in the history of our institution and will make the following observation: our path has virtually never been a smooth one.The fledgling college of a small cohort of students and a tiny faculty complement -without even its own building for a few years -could easily have been a failed venture through much of its first half-century.The threat of absorption into larger Ontario schools hung over our predecessors like a sword of Damocles, its fragile suspending thread frayed, little by little, by a series of financial challenges.Under our sixth principal, Rev. William Snodgrass (1864-77), a measure of stability was restored following a major Canadian banking failure.The foundations of the university's strong relationship with, and reliance on, its alumni, were thereby laid, with no better early example of alumni loyalty than Robert Sutherland, Queen's first black student, whose generous legacy in 1878 would prove a game-changer.Moreover, during Snodgrass's tenure, Queen's became the first university west of the Maritimes to admit women as students.The visionary seventh principal, Rev. George Munro Grant (1877-1902) continued and extended Snodgrass's work during a principalship of a quarter-century.Closely tied to Canada's founders, including Sir John A. Macdonald and cpr builder Sir Sandford Fleming (later our Chancellor), Grant energetically pursued a bold vision of a national institution that would produce not merely a well-informed local citizenry and clergy, but

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