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Spirit of Sacrifice: Sustaining St. Dunstan’s
 A thread running through every aspect of the St. Dunstan’s story is the spirit of dedication and sacrifice that allowed the University to carry on in the face of considerable challenges and hardships. The “Golden Age” at St. Dunstan’s was not a gilded one: resources were perennially scarce, even as expectations and costs steadily increased. Some federal monies came to St. Dunstan’s in the immediate postwar years, through government sponsorship of veterans’ education (and, indirectly, through the pay provided to Army and Navy officer cadets in the Canadian Officers Training Corps and University Naval Training Division). In 1952, an additional measure of federal support came to SDU with the implementation of the Massey Commission’s recommendation to provide per capita operating grants to all Canadian universities. Historian Dr. G. E. MacDonald’s account of Rector R. V. MacKenzie’s reaction to the first such grant is revealing:
Made tight-fisted by long necessity, Rector Mackenzie was amazed in spite of himself by the first federal subsidy cheque. He could not help regarding it as “something for nothing” and his initial reaction was to lecture his staff on the continuing need for restraint.
 MacKenzie’s shock was understandable, for St. Dunstan’s was not accustomed to receiving money from any source outside the Catholic Diocese of Charlottetown. The provincial government funded Prince of Wales College’s operations, but not those of SDU. Nor did St. Dunstan’s enjoy a large private endowment, as Rector MacKenzie remarked in his 1955 report: “...we have never had any great benefaction comparable to those received by larger centres.”
Yet, St. Dunstan’s, somehow, got by. As noted in our section called “Academics and Teaching,” much of the burden fell on students and their families, although the University was always mindful not to price itself entirely out of reach: “If fees are ... increased, the result will place higher education beyond the financial ability of many good citizens,” warned Rector MacKenzie in 1949. Two years later, he observed, “Of course the mounting cost of everything is a difficult hurdle for young people desiring an education.” When one views St. Dunstan’s fees in the context of the time, “difficult hurdle” seems an understatement!
 Which is not to suggest that no help was available. Many prospective SDU students were eligible for several scholarships, most notably those offered by the estate of wealthy Island businessman and philanthropist Owen Connolly, who, prior to his death in 1887, had directed his trustees to devote the bulk of his assets to educating “poor children, resident in Prince Edward Island, who are Irish, or the sons of Irish farmers....” Over time, the Connolly Estate became an efficient and reliable source of scholarships, with SDU students being the chief beneficiaries. The early 1920s saw the development of St. Andrew’s Society scholarships for Scots Catholic students, and the St. Thomas Aquinas Society began granting scholarships to Acadian students at around the same time, although this program did not make a large contribution until a 1949 subscription drive greatly increased the Society’s scholarship fund. In 1945,  the  Diocese of Charlottetown formed the Catholic Girls Scholarship Association, and the following year saw the PEI Court of Chancery award half of an existing estate to the SDU Board, for the purpose of providing scholarships to Islanders attending St. Dunstan’s.
These and a few other programs provided, indirectly, at least some revenue for St. Dunstan’s— indeed, it has been suggested that SDU might not have survived the Depression years without them—but postwar inflation eroded the value of the scholarships (in 1955, Rector MacKenzie remarked: “What a marvellous thing it would be if these bursaries could be twice as large as they are at present: they should amount to at least $200.”). Other revenue streams were similarly strained.  As noted in the section entitled “Buildings and Expansion,” the members of the Diocese of Charlottetown gave with extraordinary generosity to the SDU fund-raising drive in the immediate postwar years,  yet most of this money was consumed in the urgent task of expanding the campus. Similarly, the Alumni Gym project absorbed all the money raised by a reinvigorated Alumni Association in the late 1940s. While helpful, generous gifts from individual alumni—notably the 1948 bequest by Most Reverend Francis Clement Kelley, Bishop of Oklahoma, of his large personal library, following his earlier $20,000 gift towards construction of a new University library —were typically targeted to specific projects.
 St. Dunstan’s, then, was caught in a revenue crunch, and constantly struggled to control costs, not out of penny-pinching meanness, but as a matter of survival. This parsimony could be seen in the operation of the SDU farm, which produced much of the food served in the campus dining hall, and in the University’s very small administrative cohort, many of whose members did double duty as professors. Perhaps most striking of all, however, is the fact that nearly everyone who worked at St. Dunstan’s did so for very little pay. The priests on faculty received a modest stipend,  a fraction of the salary paid professors at other universities (the exact amount of the stipend is not recorded in most historical sources, but SDU alumnus and former faculty member Frank Ledwell, in his Island Sketchbook, pegs the figure at $225 per annum in the 1940s and 1950s). Many SDU alumni recall clerical faculty having to supplement their meagre incomes with summer work, such as military chaplaincy. Dr. MacDonald records a 1945 University estimate that the priests’ sacrifice in working for far less than a normal professorial salary scale was saving SDU $22,000 a year.
 Similarly, the nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Martha, who had, since 1916, been doing the cooking, cleaning, and numerous other “domestic” essentials for St. Dunstan’s, received only a small salary. For more than half a century, “the Marthas” worked quietly in the background to keep St. Dunstan’s running. As Rector MacKenzie noted, in a rare tribute during his 1954 convocation address: “They receive little reward therefor, nor do they seek it; their hope is a reward for their exemplary charity in the world to come. They may even have to wait for a hundred years more to get another thank you, but it is given very sincerely now.”
Taken together, all these elements constitute what Dr. MacDonald described as “the pattern of sacrifice that made St. Dunstan’s financially viable.”
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