International events and a depleted provincial treasury conspired to undermine the well-laid efforts of Henry Young and then Frank Wesbrook and many others to establish a new provincial university at the Point Grey site. The government did, however, provide funding to complete the concrete frame of the Science Building and to temporarily operate the new University of British Columbia on the Fairview property of the Vancouver General Hospital in the old McGill University College of B.C. buildings. So it was that UBC opened its doors to 379 students in September 1915.

Students and staff celebrated the opening of UBC with a simple ceremony in their temporary home at Fairview on the first day of classes on September 30th, 1915. Wesbrook understood that this was not a time for public fanfare. As if a foreshadowing of the inadequate facilities that would to plague the institution for more than a decade, no formal assembly was possible in the absence of an auditorium large enough to hold everyone. Instead students congregated in one of four classrooms where they were welcomed in turn by President Wesbrook and other members of the staff.

Despite the disappointment in having to begin operations at Fairview pending the construction of the Point Grey buildings, Wesbrook never wavered in his vision for the University as is evident from his message to students and staff in the first yearbook.

We, the present Student-body, Staff, Senate, Board of Governors and members of Convocation of this infant University may well be envied by those who have gone before and those who will come after. To us has come the opportunity of making our Province, our Dominion, our Empire and our world a better place in which to live. May those for whom we hold these gifts in trust rise up and call us blessed. To meet in full our obligation, may ours be a Provincial University without provincialism. May our sympathies be so broadened and our serve so extended to all the people of the Province that we may indeed be the people's University, whose motto is tuum est.

Throughout the war years the University operated at its temporary Fairview location with a limited budget and a small staff. Wesbrook and others continued to lobby for the construction of proper facilities at Point Grey. Unfortunately, Wesbrook was never to see the University at its new home as he died unexpectedly just prior to the Armistice in 1918.

In a tribute to Wesbrook, the Board of Governors lauded his courage, strength and resourcefulness and characterized him as "always passionately devoted to the purpose of making this University one of the great schools of the British Empire and a source of strength and progress to the Province." A Senate resolution commended Wesbrook's democratic conception of a University that strives to meet "all the needs of all the people" and how despite difficult circumstances "kept his view steadily in front of him, and, so far as the financial depression would permit, laid a foundation broad and deep for a university worthy of our Province."

Responsibility for continuing the struggle for proper facilities passed to Wesbrook's successor Leonard S. Klinck in 1919. He, too, was hampered by unfavourable economic times and the multitude of demands on the financial resources of the government.

Unfortunately, during this difficult financial period the land endowment scheme originally established in 1907 to provide an alternative source of funds to help operate the University proved to be of no use. As far back as 1914 when, as Dean of Agriculture, Klinck had toured some of the University endowment lands in the interior, it had been obvious that significant revenues could not be expected in the near future.