Established by petition as the
Academy of Liberal Arts and Sciences on December 13th, 1785, by 1829 the Academy had become known as
King's College, officially opening, by Royal Charter, on January 1st, 1829. On April 13th, 1859 King's College became the University of New Brunswick by an act of the Legislature of New Brunswick. The
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton (UNBF) remains the
First Public University in North America. The first public university in the United States, the
University of North Carolina, was chartered in 1789, four years after UNBF.
By 1968 antiwar sympathy had become widespread, even in Canada, and a professor at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton (UNBF), one Norman Strax, had become an activist, not only an antiwar activist, but had begun to protest actively against all sorts of authoritarianism, injustice and, in particular, the U.S. participation and Canada's
complicity in the Vietnam War. His activism came to a head with his heading of protests against the implementation of Photo ID cards at UNBF in September of 1968, leading to the occupation of his office by supporters, Strax's suspension, arrests and lawsuits.
The affair ultimately led to the writing of a book on the affair by author Peter C. Kent, entitled
Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick, published September 25, 2012.
See further information below, from a précis of the book and from Wiki.
Inventing Academic Freedom
In 1968, there was political ferment everywhere. In Paris, students were in the streets. In the U.S., civil rights, the Vietnam War, and protests against the draft brought out millions. In this atmosphere, a young Jewish-American professor in the quiet town of Fredericton, New Brunswick sparked a controversy that established the principles of academic freedom on Canadian campuses. Norman Strax was an unlikely figure in a conservative town with a sleepy university campus. He didn't dress like other faculty members, he drove a funny car, and he didn't socialize much with his colleagues. The university president, Colin Mackay, was a young scion of the local establishment who ran the university as if it belonged to him. With his links to Lord Beaverbrook, the Irvings, and the provincial government, he was confident of support for his paternalistic way of doing things. When Strax and some students protested a new library regulation, Colin Mackay abruptly suspended Strax.
From Amazon
Strax affair
The Strax affair was a sequence of events at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton in 1968 and 1969. It began in September 1968 when the university president suspended Norman Strax, a young physics professor, after Strax led protests in the university library against the introduction of photo ID cards. The suspension, and UNB's subsequent legal proceedings against Strax, led to the institution's being censured by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). Other components of the affair were the lengthy occupation of Strax's former office by his supporters and the jailing of a student for an article that appeared in the student newspaper questioning the objectivity of the New Brunswick legal system. The formal lifting of the CAUT censure in September 1969 brought the Strax affair to an end.
From Wiki