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 Although the soaring post-secondary enrollments of the Baby Boom were still a generation away, war’s end in 1945 brought a 43 per cent jump in St. Dunstan’s enrollment for the following academic year. Subsequent growth was less dramatic, but the student body continued to expand throughout the postwar decade, an era that St. Dunstan’s began with a “dilapidated old campus,” inadequate to the task at hand. Although flanked by a hockey rink, playing fields, and handball courts (the famous “Elephant pens”), and the barns and silos of the campus farm, the core of St. Dunstan’s campus was comprised of just three buildings:  Main Building, opened in 1855; Dalton Hall, the campus residence, opened in 1919; and the Science Hall, opened in 1940. All three were handsome enough edifices—especially Dalton and Main—and were to prove durable (indeed, they continue to serve UPEI today), but 1945 found them badly overcrowded, and the two older buildings rather worn by the privations of the Depression and wartime austerity.
 Contemplating the challenges ahead in his May Convocation address for that year, the University Rector, Reverend Raymond MacKenzie, remarked, “That there is need for the extending and improving of our facilities to cope adequately with the work expected of us, is a well-known fact. The minimum facilities of a generation ago will not satisfy the youth of today....” A year later, he reported, “The crowded conditions were most uncomfortable.”
 Happily, help was on the way. In the summer of 1945, the Diocese of Charlottetown launched a fundraising campaign for St. Dunstan’s, with a view to raising the remarkable sum of $250,000 (roughly equivalent to $2.5–3 million in 2004 dollars). Previous campaigns had failed to raise even half that amount, and some doubted the current effort would meet its target. In the event, the province’s Catholic population, in an extraordinary display of “sacrificial giving,” pledged more than $500,000 to St. Dunstan’s.
 With campaign monies and other gifts—most notably some generous endowments from alumni—in hand, the University embarked on a six-year building program. Since most students were boarders, a new residence was the first priority. Work began on Memorial Hall in 1946, and it opened the following fall, as St. Dunstan’s welcomed a record-breaking enrollment of 306 students (including 256 boarders). In 1949, ground was broken on a combined central-heating plant and laundry, and on a facility to house a chapel, convent, and expanded dining hall. A fire that summer added to the challenge, damaging the campus farm so heavily that it had to be almost entirely rebuilt. The new buildings were completed by 1950, however, even as work began on an urgently needed gymnasium. The Red and White noted in its Autumn 1950 issue, “St. Dunstan’s is really expanding as far as buildings are concerned.”  The new gym—named the Alumni Gymnasium, in recognition of the Alumni Association fundraising campaign that helped finance its construction—was ready for the May 1951 commencement. At that ceremony, the Rector, with uncharacteristic zeal, proclaimed, “Our overwhelming happiness in being able to assemble for the first time with some share of comfort in our new auditorium.... It is ... the wildest of hopes, suddenly brought into being.”
 In a few short years, the St. Dunstan’s campus had effectively doubled in size and value, a pleasing prospect, but also a bit unnerving. Postwar inflation and materials shortages had caused some of the construction work to go over budget, and the University was now in debt. Fortunately, gifts and endowments continued to flow to the University, and, in the early 1950s, the federal government, acting on the recommendations of the Massey Commission, began to provide maintenance grants to Canadian universities. For now, however, the building boom at St. Dunstan’s was over.
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