Two universities in one city
The rivalry is not about teaching. It is about two address books that overlap and never merge.
I have degrees from both of them. A science degree and a commerce degree from the University of Ottawa, and a commerce degree from Carleton. That was never a plan. Nobody sets out to collect two of the same city’s universities.
The consequence I did not anticipate is that I have spent my whole working life in a city where the question of which one you went to keeps arriving, in conversations that are not about education at all.
What two does that one does not
A city with one university has a straightforward relationship with it. There is a pipeline, the local employers know what comes out of it, and the graduate market clears in a fairly boring way.
A city with two has a market with two suppliers in it, and the effects are not subtle. Every graduate hiring round has an implicit comparison running inside it, whether or not anyone says so. Employers develop preferences, often on almost no evidence, sometimes on one bad hire from six years ago. Firms end up weighted, and once a firm is weighted it stays weighted, because people hire people who remind them of people who worked out.
The second effect is the one that actually matters, and it is not about quality. It is about who already knows whom.
Two institutions produce two address books. Not two networks in the abstract sense that people mean when they say networking. Two literal sets of people who were in a room together for four years, who now sit across desks from each other in a professional community that is small enough for it to matter. In Ottawa those two sets overlap constantly, at the same firms, on the same files, in the same buildings, and they never merge. Overlap is not merger. You can spend a decade in offices where both are represented and still watch a piece of information travel along one of them and not the other.
Being in two groups is not additive
I thought the rivalry was substantive. That one place produced a better accountant, and that the argument, however tribally it was conducted, was ultimately about something.
It is not. I have worked alongside people from both, and from neither, and I cannot construct the difference. The curriculum is not the variable. The variable is who you already know when you walk in, and the schools differ on that enormously while differing on the other thing hardly at all. The rivalry is real and its stated subject is wrong, which is a shape I keep running into in other places.
The second thing I got wrong is more personal, and I held it longer.
I assumed that having been at both would give me both address books. It gives you a partial claim on each, which is a genuinely different object. In each room there is a version of you that is one of them and a version that is visiting, and which one shows up depends on details you do not control. Being in two groups is not additive. It makes you slightly foreign to both, and the foreignness is small enough that you cannot point at it and large enough to be there.
I do not think that is a complaint. It is the same trade as most other kinds of being between things, and it comes with the same compensation, which is that you can hear both rooms describe each other and know that neither description is accurate.
The geography of it
What still strikes me is how short the distance is. The two campuses are a handful of kilometres apart on the same transit system in a city that is not large. Any of these people could be in the same room in twenty minutes and frequently are.
None of which does anything. The physical distance between two networks has almost no relationship to how permeable they are, and I suspect it is the opposite of what people assume. Two institutions in one city are close enough to compete and close enough to be constantly compared, and that is a better explanation of why the boundary holds than any amount of distance would be.