William Lyon Mackenzie King - University

University

King earned five university degrees. He obtained three degrees from the University of Toronto: B.A. 1895, LL.B. 1896 and M.A. 1897. While studying in Toronto he met a wide circle of friends, many of whom became prominent. He was an early member and officer of the Kappa Alpha Society, which included a number of these individuals (two future Ontario Supreme Court Justices and the future Chairman of the University itself) and served as a location for the debate of political ideas. He also met Arthur Meighen, a future political rival; the two men did not get on especially well from the start.

King was especially concerned with issues of social welfare and was influenced by the settlement house movement pioneered by Toynbee Hall in London. He played a central role in fomenting a students' strike at the university in 1895. He was in close touch, behind the scenes, with Vice-Chancellor William Mulock, for whom the strike provided a chance to embarrass his rivals Chancellor Edward Blake and President James Loudon. King failed to gain his immediate objective, a teaching position at the University, but earned political credit with the man who would invite him to Ottawa and make him a deputy minister only five years later. While studying at the University of Toronto, King also contributed to the campus newspaper The Varsity.

After studying at the University of Chicago and working with Jane Addams at her settlement house, Hull House, King proceeded to Harvard University. He earned an M.A. in political economy in 1898. In 1909 Harvard granted him a PhD for a dissertation based on his study of "Oriental Immigration to Canada." His doctoral thesis argues against oriental immigration, summed up in the following comments from an earlier 1908 report King authored while he was Deputy-Minister of Labour: "That Canada should desire to restrict immigration from the Orient is regarded as natural, that Canada should remain a white man's country is believed to be not only desirable for economic and social reasons but highly necessary on political and national grounds." He is the only Canadian Prime Minister to have earned a PhD. Current Prime Minister Stephen Harper holds an MA.