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Authority record

Mount Saint Vincent College

  • AR-033
  • Corporate body
  • 1925-1966

As Mount Saint Vincent Academy expanded and many of its graduates returned to take college courses or complete degrees elsewhere, the Sisters of Charity identified a need for a college aimed at providing education to women in the Maritimes.

By 1921, four of the Sisters of Charity held doctorate degrees, and an additional five more would receive them in the following decade. This, in addition to a growing population of students, made Mount Saint Vincent well-positioned to propose a bill for a college charter, which it did in 1925. The bill passed without opposition, and Mount Saint Vincent College became Nova Scotia’s seventh degree-granting institution and the first and only independent degree-granting college for women in Canada and the British Commonwealth.

In October of 1927, the College opened with 47 students. The first commencement occurred on June 1 of that year, when Rose Orlando earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and Dorothy MacDougall received a Bachelor of Secretarial Science degree from the College. With the motherhouse's expansion, college students were housed separately from academy students, and enrolment continually expanded throughout the decade. In addition to operating as a liberal arts college, Mount Saint Vincent College offered professional degrees, including Secretarial Science (1927), Home Economics (early 1930s), Nursing (1935), Social Work (1940), and Journalism (1945).

The College continued to expand in the postwar period, and in 1966 one of Sister Alice Michael’s (Catherine Wallace’s) first acts as President was to obtain a new college charter. It was successfully passed in Nova Scotia’s Legislative Assembly, this resulted in Mount Saint Vincent College becoming Mount Saint Vincent University.

Mount Saint Vincent School of Library Science

  • AR-052
  • Corporate body
  • 1938-1958

The School of Library Science at Mount Saint Vincent College was started in 1938 by the Mount’s head librarian, Sister Francis de Sales. The school offered a Bachelor of Library Science degree to those wishing to continue their studies beyond a Bachelor of Arts or Science degree. The one-year program taught library methods and techniques and provided training for those students wishing to pursue a career in public, college and school libraries. Practical training was provided within the Mount Saint Vincent College library and other libraries around the city. Sister Francis Dolores was the first student to graduate from the program in 1939.

The school stopped conferring degrees in 1958 due to new requirements for accreditation by the Canadian Library Association and the American Library Association. At the time, the Mount Library was not large enough and did not have enough staff in their employ to maintain this accreditation. However, library courses continued to be taught at the Mount into the 1960s as a Summer School course offered through the Department of Education. These courses provided training in School Libraries for qualified students but could not be used for credit towards a degree program.

Mount Saint Vincent University

  • Corporate body
  • 1873 -

Mount Saint Vincent University had its origins as an academy for young girls established by the Sisters of Charity in Rockingham (present day Halifax) in 1873. The original purpose of the academy was to train novices and young sisters as teachers, but the Sisters also recognized a need to educate other young women and therefore opened the academy to young women who lived in the city of Halifax. In 1925 the Nova Scotia Legislature passed a bill granting a charter to Mount Saint Vincent College empowering it to grant its own degrees. With that, Mount Saint Vincent College became the only independent women’s college in the British Commonwealth. It offered degrees in Education, Nursing and Arts.

The College continued to grow until 1966, when a new government charter was granted and the College became Mount Saint Vincent University, a co-educational institution. The Mount is a primarily undergraduate public university that offers programs in Arts, Education, Science, and Professional Studies.

Mount Saint Vincent University Alumnae Association

  • AR-055
  • Corporate body
  • 1921-

In 1921, Sister Mary Columba Hayes, Mary Reardon (Mitchell), and a group of about 12 other Mount graduates formed the idea for an alumnae association. They sent out invitations, and nearly 200 women arrived for the first alumnae meeting in December. After this initial meeting, a formal Alumnae Association was formed in June of 1922, where committees were established to plan future meetings, various chapters were formed, and the constitution and by-laws were drafted and approved. Elections were also held for the association’s officers and Nan O’Mara (Emerson) was elected president. This meeting also established the motto: Fides, Sapientia, Amicitia-Alumnae.

Formal meetings were held at the Mount in October and at Saint Theresa’s Retreat in Halifax during winter months. News of these meetings was also published in Folia Montana, the school’s paper and later yearbook which was designed to keep graduates in touch with each other.

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