William Edwin Beckel

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William Edwin Beckel is a Canadian academic and former president of Carleton University in Ottawa and the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.

Beckel, a zoologist, was an early proponent of the use of television as a teaching medium. In 1964 he became the first dean of the University of Toronto-affiliated Scarborough College, which led a costly, failed experiment in teaching half the courses using TV-only lectures.[1]

Beckel was president of the University of Lethbridge from 1971 to 1979.

Like many Ontario universities at the time, Carleton was in financial trouble when Beckel took the helm in 1979. That year it was running a $1.5-million deficit. Beckel oversaw several controversial faculty layoffs, and the next year the school had to dip into academic scholarship funds to help cover its debts.

Unlike Carleton's rival universities, most of whom were raising admissions standards to compete for better students, Beckel decided to keep Carleton open to high-school graduates with averages as low as 60 per cent on the premise that "every student should have the right to fail."[2] An unfortunate consequence of this egalitarian philosophy was that when students did, in fact, fail, the school's retention rate dropped precipitously, robbing Carleton of future tuition revenue. (Beckel's critics were also the first to coin Carleton's pejorative nickname "Last Chance U.")

On July 1, 1989, the same year he received an honorary doctorate of laws from Carleton,[3] Beckel was succeeded as president by Robin Hugh Farquhar.

Academic Offices
Preceded by James Downey, acting	President of Carleton University 1979–1989	Succeeded by Robin Hugh Farquhar
Preceded by W.A.S. "Sam" Smith	President of University of Lethbridge 1972–1979	Succeeded by John H. Woods