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It has been a remarkable 60 years for the University of Calgary's . The faculty has become one of the largest schools of social work in Canada and one of the top schools in north America in terms of research productivity. Over the decades, the innovative faculty grew to provide education across Alberta, and its talented and passionate graduates and researchers have had a profound impact in many ways. 

The school has graduated members of the Legislative Assembly, international and local community-development leaders, and generations of impactful social workers who have helped millions while re-imagining what the discipline of social work can accomplish. 

A stormy beginning 

The fledgling faculty began when the University of Alberta decided to develop two new programs: library sciences, which stayed at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and social work, which went to the new University of Calgary, making what was originally named the Faculty of Social Welfare one of ����APP����’s founding faculties.

“Of course, nobody in the new university had a clue about what social work was or whether they even wanted it!” recalled Dr. Tim Tyler, PhD, the faculty’s fiery founding dean. Tyler was the catalyst and, even when interviewed for this article at age 92, he was an imposing, and somewhat intimidating personality — principled, unbowed, unrepentant and, above all, unapologetic. 

It was the fall of 2016 and I had just started with the faculty a month or so prior, so I was already a little nervous about interviewing Tyler who was something of a legendary figure. In just a few minutes, I understood why there was — to put it mildly — a little friction around his appointment as dean in 1966.

I began poorly by asking him what he remembered about the founding of the Faculty of Social Work. He paused, fixed me with a withering gaze, and said, “Not social work — social welfare! 

“If you want to help people, you do it with legislation, not with sitting down with them and talking about their problems,” he said flatly. Even after 50 years, he remained singularly focused on the role of social work as an instrument to change social policy.

“I grew up during (the) Depression on a farm with nothing," he continued. "James Shaver was the Methodist minister who founded the agrarian political movement called the CCF that later became the NDP. He just made so much sense to me … a minister, a Protestant minister, talking about the poor in Winnipeg when he said, ‘We have to do something. We have to change politics in Canada. We have to have better legislation.’”

This was the fire that forged Tyler’s steely determination. After training pilots in the Second World War, he went to university and completed a commerce degree, which he says “didn't appeal” to him. He then did a year of social work at the University of British Columbia. A few years later, he did his master's degree in social work at the University of Toronto. Where he says he came to understand “the true different models of social work.”

An educational path that focused on training adult students

Interestingly, Tyler then decided to pursue a fellowship to study industrial education at UCLA to better understand the most effective methods of training adults in the workforce, following a suggestion from his supervisor, Dr. Roby Kidd, PhD, who believed that graduate students — especially after the war — were adults with some life experience, and merited a different educational approach than undergraduates. The UCLA fellowship led to Tyler being offered a Kellogg Foundation grant to pursue his PhD under the guidance of Herbert Hunsaker at Columbia University, where he worked on Hunsaker’s famous study that helped to move nursing education from hospitals to universities.

Tyler then came to Calgary where he became the director of research for the United Way and, working with the provincial government, began chipping away at issues like child welfare, authoring a report that recommended that churches should close their orphanages and that the provincial government should take responsibility for the children. 

At that time, the new Alberta Association of Social Workers, along with the Junior League and several other organizations, persuaded the University of Alberta to create the social work program that was subsequently given to the new University of Calgary. An advisory committee that included academic representatives from established programs at the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkley, interviewed Tyler and recommended him as the right man for the job.

“I got a call from the president of the University of Calgary and I had never met him,” said Tyler. “He said, ‘Would you be interested being appointed the director of the social work school we're going to establish?’ I didn't say, ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘Sure.’ The social work committee practically had a heart attack. They couldn't believe it. They knew nothing about my background.”

Education that honours mature students

Not surprisingly, Tyler incorporated much of what he had learned about adult education when setting the course for his faculty, and, for Calgary in 1966, his methods were somewhat unorthodox.

“Graduate education in social work should very much honour self-directed, mature students,” Tyler said. “They've already got a degree. Some of them are married with children. They have a lot of experience, maybe less now than after the war, but still, you should honour them. These are adult students, they better learn what to find out and to figure what's right for them. When they graduate, they better have a model that suits them.”

Tyler said the “wild independence,” as he ironically put it, that he gave his students didn’t exactly appeal to university administration, which led to frequent clashes with the dean of Graduate Studies, adding to then-President Herbert S. Armstrong’s list of headaches with the new Faculty of Social Welfare dean.

Tyler recalled receiving a phone call from Armstrong soon after he was appointed. “So, why do you think the president of the university phoned me and said, ‘I want to talk to you?’ It was because social workers in Alberta were appalled. They signed a petition to get rid of me!” he recalled with a chuckle. “The clinical social workers in Alberta were quite outraged with my approach to developing a school that had a lot of policy orientation.” 

A turning point for the faculty

Tyler recalls inviting the disgruntled social workers to come in for a discussion where he promptly presented them with a lengthy lecture on the history of social work vs. social welfare. In the end, he said he managed to assuage their fears and even recruited some of his fiercest critics.

“Did they want to teach, or did they want to just keep being critical?” recalled Tyler. “Well, they all joined me.” 

This exact moment, when Tyler brought in his fiercest critics to create a larger tent, was in hindsight a defining moment in the faculty’s evolution since it brought in the voice of the clinician and case worker who began to negotiate a balance between Tyler’s strong focus on policy — mezzo (public systems) and macro (structural change) social work — with the crucial stream of clinical research, both of which continue to this day.

When I asked Tyler to reflect on the tumultuous founding of the faculty some 50 years later, he paused for at least a minute and gazed out the window of sunny apartment living room. Traffic and grasscutting sounds filled the room. I cleared my throat uneasily as he turned around to face me once more. His serious demeanour softened, he cracked wry smile and said with a chuckle, “Well, I had a good 10 years.” 

Dr. Tim Tyler passed away on Oct. 18, 2017.