Scott Pound

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50 Years, 50 Voices - Scott Pound - 00:00
Scott Pound, I'm an alumnus of UPEI, I did an undergrad degree here from
1988 to 1992 and I'm currently Associate Professor of English at Lakehead
University


Slide - Campus as Playground - 00:20 
S it's really neat that UPEI is turning 50; I'm also turning 50 this year
and 50 is really young I feel young, it's been really neat to come back and
look around I always kind of come back and walk around the campus and…
but like I said 50 years is young and here's to 50 more. I grew up very
close to the campus and as soon as we were old enough to cross Mount Edward
Road, we were over here, my brothers and I and this was an extension of our
community, this was an extension of our backyard and it was a very informal
time in the 70’s. We were really interested in hanging out at the old
alumni gym we hung out at the old rink, my brother was the water boy for
the football team they called him "onion" they called me "onion sprout" and
we were literally over here all the time and we spent a lot of time at the
alumni gym, I really miss that building it was such a special place. I have
vivid memories of the floor and the stage and seeing basketball games there
and the Curtis Brown era. We would spend a lot of time downstairs in the
weight room just hanging out. The rink was always open and if it wasn't
open we knew how to get in there, we knew where the lights were, we would
sneak in there, turn the lights on, play hockey all morning, head to the
alumni gym in the evening and so yeah we were kind of invisible because we
were children, so we were constantly around and more or less unnoticed and
not really getting up to too much trouble but definitely making liberal use
of the facilities.


Slide - Cheetah - 02:17 
My mom reminded me of a funny story, my dog Cheetah, who is very attached
to me didn't like that I was spending so much time over here and she knew
exactly where I was and if she got the opportunity she would make her way
over here and that happened many a time and sometimes at the most
inopportune moments; She said there was one time I had an exam and Cheetah
was over here and I had to grab her by the collar and take her home. But
the time I remember the most is, was actually in the Library and I went
down to the PIT to get a coffee and there was Cheetah, in the Library,
hanging out in the pit with about 15 adoring admirers around her and so I
had to grab her and take her home, but yeah, it was just really my home
away from home, I was always here as a kid and as an undergraduate and so
these physical buildings, most of them are gone now, the old rink and the
alumni gym, and the football field, and the bleachers and all that stuff is
gone but the Library is still here, the Library is still kicking, which is
great.


Slide - Wandering in the Library - 03:31 
When I became a student I transferred most of my time to the Library. When
I started studying I felt a real sense of belatedness and I felt like I had
a lot of catching up to do, and there was so much to read and so, I was at
the Library from when it opened until when it closed and every time I
walked through the gates of the Library, I was greeted by Leo Cheverie and
got to know lots of people at the Library and spent lots of time there so,
Library was another fixture for me. I had a carrel on the second floor, my
brother Paul, who is now a computer programmer at the Library has his
office in almost the exact spot where my carrel was so that was really
neat. Another great memory I have is getting micro fiche and realizing that
I couldn't really use it because it made me motion sick I would get really
nauseous but when I was down in that part of the Library where they kept
the micro fiche, I noticed they had a listening room and I, with all kinds
of LPs and I don't think they had reel-to-reel but you could get those old
cavemen recordings of Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein,
and Ezra Pound, reading their poetry and that was amazing for me, so I went
I would go and sit in there and listen to T. S. Eliot read, "The Waste
Land" and stuff. Those moments of discovery, they really stand out because
you don't have those you only have them once, right? And they are very
site-specific and going up to the stacks, you know, getting a kind of a
like maybe one sort of street address the call number and then just
spending the next half an hour exploring the stacks and making most of your
discoveries that way, just through happen-stance. I was getting into
literate theory when I was an undergraduate and it was all just emerging
and most of my profs hadn't really read this material and so, I would get
the Library to order some of these books and... but that's such an
important thing in my experience since then it really testifies how
important libraries are; And now the whole student services part of it, the
infrastructure is kind of built into the Library too, and I think that's a
really good match; Most institutions have their student support services
and things like the Writing Centre and research workshop they're all kind
of housed in the Library, so the libraries evolved it's probably the most
dynamic part of a post-secondary institution, very obviously data-driven
now and computing at the vanguard of computing. So that's been a really
interesting thing to watch and that whole evolution is pretty fascinating.


Slide - Research: Now and Then - 06:28
It's hard to believe with how searchable things are now that, that you
know, we didn't always have that and the research process is just so
simplified compared to what it used to be like I'm not lamenting the you
know, the loss of that but it's just different, it's way more labor
intensive, it was way more labor intensive when we were younger now that
makes me sound old [laughter].


Slide - Campus Life - 07:05 
I got involved in the student newspaper and I was the photographer for the
yearbook so it was really cool to get involved with the Student Union and
to have access to all the facilities at the newspaper, the darkroom. I
really enjoyed that kind of fervor of the students who were working, I know
we got some articles published in the newspaper and it was just an exciting
scene to do that kind of stuff. There were a lot of opportunities through
the English department and through campus life in general to try new things
that I had never really had any exposure to, so photography, writing,
putting together the newspaper the old fashioned way.


Slide - The English Department - 07:53 
I had an amazing experience in the English department at UPEI. I
encountered a lot of kindness and a lot of generosity in my professors and
I was really in awe of my professors, they were to me towering figures I'd
never really met people like this and I was very much mesmerized by and
impressed by their learnedness and their accomplishments and so, I really
connected with my professors and on a personal level I wanted to be like
them and I would go and see them all the time outside of class and that
contact that I had was really important to me.


Slide - Professor John Smith 1927-2018 - 08:41 
In particular I became really good friends with John Smith and John had a
huge influence on my life. He was just this extraordinarily kind person, he
was so distinctive and accomplished as a poet, I was really impressed with
his gifts and he was just a phenomenal teacher. He would kind of mix
lecturing with performing so he taught poetry a lot, I took classes in
Shakespeare and the Romantics and Modern Poetry and if we were studying a
poem, we would read that poem and discuss it critically but John would
perform the poem in just an extraordinary way, you know, with incredible
intonation he had the natural gifts of an actor, I don't think he was
trained theatrically but he had a great capacity to perform and I just
couldn't believe that, it was just a way, a whole new way of accessing
literature that was incredible, and then, you know, John and I worked on an
honor's thesis "The romantic ode" and that entailed many meetings and so I
really got to know John well and after I left UPEI we stayed in touch, we
were friends for 30 years until he passed away 2 years ago, and after he
died, his daughter Julia gave me some possessions of John's that he had set
aside for me and one of them was the copy of my dissertation that I had
given him, my PhD dissertation which I didn't want to do and I was flipping
through it after I got it back from Julia after she gave it to me and he
had read every word and annotated it, and corrected it all the typos that
were in it, I was very moved by that because I don't think too many people
have read my dissertation beyond my committee and so that was the kind of
guy John was, he was just very generous, very kind and very supportive.


Slide - Faculty Support - 10:50 
There was a student conference at Acadia when I was an undergraduate and
this kind of stands out too as the way the English department would support
it's students so; I was gonna give a paper on Chaucer and they set up this
little rehearsal and I remember giving the paper in front of a bunch of
most of the members of the English department and I was really butchering
the pronunciation of the middle English, Chaucer's middle English and Mike
Foley who was the Medievalist in the English department was there. He
didn't bring anything to write on but I was there delivering my paper and
really doing a bad job of reading the middle English and he was writing on
a Styrofoam cup all the words I had mispronounced and so afterwards he was
reading off the Styrofoam cup and correcting my pronunciation. But, it was
that level of granularity that you got from your teachers and that close
contact, small class sizes, things that university tote all the time that I
would single out and that I would really benefited from as an undergrad.


Slide - Proud Alumnus - 11:55 
I would say that I'm very proud that I went to UPEI. After leaving, after
finishing my undergrad degree, I did graduate work; I thought I had an
amazing experience as an undergrad, I studied in the department, a very
small department where there was 4 poets, a lexicographer, a very gifted
medievalist, just people of a lot of knowledge and learning and when I went
away I didn't know any different and the faculty at UPEI stands up to any
English department that I’ve been to in terms of just the level of
commitment and the kindness and generosity of the faculty. So I got a very
good education here and it put me in good stead in my future endeavors.


Slide - The Future of UPEI - 12:55 
I think my biggest hope for the future for UPEI is that it maintains its
commitment to humanities based learning and that it continues to integrate
the humanities into the other forms of instruction that happens here in
research. There's a real polarizing of the humanities and the sciences in
general, in society and in some universities, I think that's a big mistake,
I think this is not a zero sum game, I think the humanities based learning
and the kinds of research and inquiry that happen in STEM fields are very
compatible and I hope that UPEI continue to integrate these two forms of
learning and text-based learning and scientific learning and research, I
think that's a way this University could distinguish itself in the future.