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STUDENT LIFE AT ST. DUNSTAN’S
 Although sporting endeavours tend to loom large in reflections on the postwar years at St. Dunstan’s, student activity and achievement were certainly not confined to the rink and the playing field. Indeed, while SDU athletes won provincial and regional championships, it was the intellectual arena of debating that saw St. Dunstan’s win national honours. In March 1952, the SDU debating team, already twice victorious in the 11-team Maritime Intercollegiate Debating League, were crowned Dominion champions in Ottawa. In 1954, having won its third MIDL championship in four years, the SDU debating team—coached throughout the postwar decade by Rev. F. L. Cass—was given permanent possession of the League’s T. Eaton trophy.
St. Dunstan’s students didn’t have to travel to regional or national competitions, however, to find outlets for their creative energy. In its Winter 1948 issue, The Red & White college magazine remarked that any shortcomings in campus life were “not caused by the lack of societies,” and listed eight student organizations then active on campus:
- The Student’s Union, constituted the previous year to improve the distribution of funding to student societies and to help with a student medical plan (an especially important consideration in an era of no Medicare and epidemics of diseases such as polio that occasionally closed the SDU campus);
- The Amateur Athletic Association, one of the more active societies on campus, as noted in our Athletics chapter;
- The Debating League;
- The Canadian Federation of Catholic College Students;
- The Dramatic Society, reorganized, after a wartime hiatus, in the 1944–45 academic year;
- The Glee Club;
- The Canadian Catholic Students Mission Crusade;
- The Photo Club.
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In total, about 50 individual students are listed on the executives of these various groups, while a photo taken later that year shows a dozen students on the staff of The Red and White itself. In other words, of the 300 students enrolled at St. Dunstan’s for the 1947–48 academic year,  some 20 per cent were very active in at least one of the student societies. And more campus organizations were on the way: the following year saw the formation of a sorority, Sigma Delta Upsilon, for the ever-growing ranks of female “co-eds,” and a campus  committee of the International Student Society (ISS), dedicated to helping European “displaced persons” struggling in the aftermath of war (this committee would soon be successful in sponsoring some of St. Dunstan’s first overseas students).
 As the foregoing list of societies shows, Catholicism was, naturally, a strong influence in student life at St. Dunstan’s. Although it had long since ceased to limit its mission to preparing students for the priesthood, St. Dunstan’s was still run by the Diocese of Charlottetown, and very much a Catholic school: most of the faculty and administrators were priests; attendance at chapel was compulsory for all save the minority of students who were Protestant; religious instruction was included in the core curriculum; and every class opened and closed with prayer. Discipline, while not harsh, was strict, with attendance and conduct closely monitored, and a rigourous daily regimen of prayer, classes, study hall, and curfews, leaving students little free time. Punishments ran the gamut from confinement to campus through to suspension, with expulsion reserved for a few serious offenders. The University was firm in its commitment to act in loco parentis, an authority not challenged by the students until the more rebellious 1960s.
While St. Dunstan’s took its educational and spiritual mission seriously, however, it was certainly not a cheerless place. The Glee Club, for example, sang regularly at the weekly off-campus socials, which were begun by “the Catholic ladies” of Charlottetown in the early 1940s to encourage social graces in the overwhelmingly male St. Dunstan’s student body. These events allowed the SDU men to dance and mingle—suitably chaperoned, of course—with young Catholic ladies.  The other student performing arts group, the Dramatic Society—whose repertoire included a remarkable number of comedies and light entertainments—frequently entertained large crowds on-campus, and even “toured” some productions to local schools and theatres. For its part, The Red and White set aside a few pages in every issue for its “Nonsense Avenue” collection of student humour and campus in-jokes. The Senior Prom began in 1947, and with the advent of the Alumni Gym in 1951, it became easier to host dances and other large social functions on campus.
 Students also had some scope for more spontaneous fun, thanks, in part, to a measure of relaxation in the University regulations: although it retained a six-day academic week, by 1954 St. Dunstan’s was allowing its students two full evenings and one afternoon of free time per week—nearly as much as the previous generation of students had been granted in a whole year! These “permissions” were often used for trips to Charlottetown, which offered diversions such as cheap movies and downtown businesses—including such loyal Red and White advertisers as  Milton’s Old Spain Tea Room—eager to attract the ever-growing student market. Few students had cars—there was hardly any parking available on campus, in any case—but taxis would let five passengers pile in, at 10 cents a head, and in good weather tree-lined Malpeque Road offered a pleasant walk to and from town (a poignant contrast with the bleak strip of University Avenue that has since taken its place). The curfew was occasionally violated by more rebellious spirits, and drinking and attendant rowdiness were not unknown, but it seems most students were essentially well-behaved.
 Youthful high spirits need an outlet, however, and at St. Dunstan’s this was often found through informal socializing in dorms or good-natured pranks and practical jokes. From chatter after lights out through general horseplay to more daring escapades, such as kidnapping a cow from the campus farm, students managed to make their own fun. One of the most elaborate—and, to this day, most fondly remembered— jokes was a mock funeral for the mathematics textbook of a student in the Class of ’54, who passed his math course only through repeated attempts.  After viewing of the book’s “remains” in a dormitory washroom, suitably decorated as a funeral parlour with black streamers, a student’s station wagon was pressed into service as a hearse, and the text was paraded across campus in a huge procession, headed by COTC members in full-dress uniform. Undeterred by falling snow, the assembled throng then buried the book with due ceremony in the University quadrangle, where it is believed to remain to this day.
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some 20 per cent were very active in at least one of the student societies. And more campus organizations were on the way: the following year saw the formation of a sorority, Sigma Delta Upsilon, for the ever-growing ranks of female “co-eds,” and a campus 
committee of the International Student Society (ISS), dedicated to helping European “displaced persons” struggling in the aftermath of war (this committee would soon be successful in sponsoring some of St. Dunstan’s first overseas students).
