"The Fight of My Life" : Alfred Fitzpatrick and Frontier College's
Extramural Degree for Working People
Authors
George L. Cook
with Marjorie Robinson
Abstract
From 1922 to 1932, Frontier College was an "open" and "national" institution of
higher education, which was empowered to award degrees to working people without
access to the established universities. This experiment was the brain-child of Frontier
College's founder, Alfred Fitzpatrick (1862-1936), a former Presbytarian cleric inspired
by the "social gospel", who championed Canada's campmen and manual labourers. With
minimal resources and without a mature institutional structure, Fitzpatrick developed a
Board of Examiners composed of scholars drawn from across the country's English and
French universities and created an extramural degree programme which was, in fact,
unique in the English-speaking world. However, Frontier College soon met effective
opposition and, thus, the flowering of greater popular access to higher education was
delayed until after the Second World War.
