Ron Collins

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Ron Collins - 00:00
My name is Ronald Collins and I was a professor here from 1975 through 2010
and I went through the ranks, academic ranks, and I was Dean in the early
90’s, ‘90 through ‘96 and served on numerous boards and committees
over that thirty-five year period.


Slide - Deans of Business - 0:30
In 1968 when I first came to campus Joe Revell was chair of the department
of Business at St. Dunstan’s University and then he came in at UPEI and
then when the School of Business, he was the director and then when the
position during his term it became a deanship and then he started a
deanship and the he was, reached the maximum period and Walt Eisner then
came in and after Walt Eisner, Bob O’Rourke and I succeeded Bob
O’Rourke in 1990 so it was a fairly mature program but during the period
of time I had been serving on Senate and I’d also been elected to the
Board of Governors so I’d, on the Faculty wide basis so that I’d gotten
to see administration from both the academic and the administrative as well
as being Dean.


Slide - Creating the School of Business - 1:40
Joe Revell who was the Chair of the Department of Business Administration
in the Faculty of Arts when I came here 1975 he was the prime developer of
the program and as it evolved I was in Senate as a matter of fact when the
School of Business was created and it was created on a provisional basis
for a three year period and it was quite interesting it was created as a
School of Business as I said the others were Faculties and there was some
hesitation on behalf of people what’s going to happen and the School of
Business started with a Director of the School of Business now mind you
there was Arts, Science, Education and they they had Deans but we had a
Director and then over a period of time they finally got tired of all the
duplication in all the print material and eventually the School of Business
did revert to becoming a Faculty with, some call it School but we do have a
Dean, the original trial was a very close vote as I recall, I can’t
remember specifically what it was but when it finally was reapproved three
years later it went through with no objection and I think one or two
abstentions and the Senate that time had about twenty-five, twenty-six
people so it proved to be at least from I think from that total perspective
of the institution a good move and over a period of time you know I went
through all the you know the three things you have to do teach, serve and
publish as the three criteria for promotion and at the time when I became a
full professor the, all full professors prior to that had been in Arts and
Science with the exception of Roger Black and Doris Anderson who took their
professorships with them when the institution was formed in ‘69, so I was
the first one from the professional studies area to achieve the rank of
full professor.


Slide - Faculty Association - 4:13
And then I joined the Board of the Faculty Association but that was in the
early, the late 70’s early 80’s and as it was developing, I would have
to look up when I was actually President of the Faculty Association but it
is during the growth period and I was appointed from there to serve on the
Pension Committee and I served on the Pension Committee for a decade as
Faulty rep and then later as a representative of the retirees.


Slide - Network for International Business Schools - 5:00
I became active in the learned society for Business Professors which was
called ASAC Administrative Science Association of Canada and there I met a
Dean, a guy that was at Laurentian and he was from Great Britain and what
had happened is while he was finishing up his doctoral work at Bradford a
guy said to him, one of his fellow students what are you doing next year,
he said well I really don’t know and he said why don’t you come to
Laurentian and teach there because I’m taking a sabbatical or a leave
rather and going to UT long story short Dave Gillingham, David Gillingham,
went to Laurentian and later went on to become Dean and we followed each
other not only through ASAC but through the Dean’s Association and he
married a women from Menton, France and eventually he had to the
opportunity to start the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Rennes, France so
he went there go it going and it was doing very well and he said everyone
should go on an exchange semester so it became a requirement for that
created a problem where am I going to send the students so we hopped on the
phone, we called a couple of his Dean friends and we started an exchange
with Rennes and the organization he formed was called NIBS Network for
International Business Schools and it was through that association that we
then at UPEI expanded our exchange programs into other places in France,
Finland, we were in Japan so it grew and I think what was the best part was
the fact that the students had the opportunity, to the Business courses
were the same, the idea was to meet kids from, fellow students from other
countries and that was the education that they received. One of the first
students involved in the exchange was a young woman who works here and her,
she’s in development and Jane Vessey is her name and she went to Rennes,
France as a matter of fact.


Slide - International Experience - 7:29
We originally, the student body you know it was Island when we take out the
MacDonald’s, the Arsenault’s and the Arsenault- ault and eau you knew
the student body and where it came from and I had to think of Father Bolger
who was a History professor here, fantastic individual and unfortunately I
never took his Island History course but he had the habit of taking his
students in the class and would do their genealogy he could do that you
know God Rest His Soul but he couldn’t do that today because of the wide
variety and as you point out, it’s not only the number of international
students, it’s the diversity of the countries they come from because of
the cultural orientation you have to have an understanding and a respect, I
think that one of the things I haven’t brought up to date is my own
international experience, I had the I guess [unintelligible] in 1988
Dalhousie University asked me to put my name to CIDA Canadian International
Development Agency what had happened in the mid 80’s our ambassador to
China asked what he could do and the Chinese Government said that they
needed, they recognized they were going to go into the competitive world
and that they needed business education so they asked if we could mass some
MBA programs, well anyways they did in ‘88 they took applications and
there were eight institutions here in Canada and the one from the Atlantic
was Dal and there was McGill, Western, the big schools, anyway they matched
up with eight institutions in China and they had the first group selected
to go in 1989 and as you may recall Tiananmen Square occured in June of
‘89 and what happened was that CIDA then gave all the profs, there were
eighteen that were chosen to go to the eight institutions, back to the
universities, no one has to go, on one’s going period but in August they
turned the program back on, they said that it’s okay, what I’m very
happy to say is all eighteen of the Faculty members went and I went for one
semester one shot deal going to Shangmin China and what that turned into
was running a program for CIDA in China for five years, and I then made
eight trips to Peoples Republic of China in the next ten years and I guess
the odd part about that was as I said earlier I was active in the Learned
Society for Business what happened was that the eight institutions
weren’t going to allow someone from the other seven run the program so
quote on quote they were looking for an honest broker and that’s me and
that started, that was supposed to be a one semester one shot deal which
then turned into five years managing the project all the time being fully,
full time here I was just making trips back and forth that then turned into
ten years in Warsaw, Poland and six years in Prague, the Czech Republic so
it was a very interesting personal development in working with Faculty
around the world and getting the opportunity to have Faculty members from
there from different institutions to come here as visiting professors.


Slide - Big Planet Small World - 11:39
My mother and father in law dated on the Island but then emigrated to
Boston independently and my mother-in-law told me when she left Summerside
to go to the United States originally as a governess it took her 24 hours
to go by train in the 1930’s she went to PWC and had her teaching license
but that was in the1930’s 24 hours, since I have retired the last ten to
twelve years we’ve spent in Bangkok, Thailand my wife and I and our
daughter’s a university prof in [unknown] Tokyo and she comes down at
Christmas and New Years but just a story, one day my wife and daughter went
to visit a tourist facility in Bangkok and when they got there the English
tour just left but they had a French tour so anyways they said let’s go
on the French tour so they did and afterwards they sat down and they where
having a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and a gentleman sat down and
started a talk with them and he said well you know where are you from and
of course Canada, Prince Edward Island he said you’re not going to
believe this he said but my son went to Rennes ESC Ecole Supérieure de
Commerce Rennes and went on exchange to Prince Edward Island and my wife
said that’s my husband so he, and so he said he picked my son up at the
airport which I did, I live in Sherwood so I used to pick the kids up but
it turned out that the gentleman was a senator in the French government
today and when I got home, when they got home and told me the story and
said I don’t believe it until later we got some email from both him and
the son and then we got pictures of the grandchildren but that’s one
interesting story about you know how small shall we say the world is. Today
I would say our daughter is running exchange programs with Japanese
students here at UPEI following through we have pizza parties at our house
in the summer so it’s a good thing, it’s good for us, my wife and I to
keep active with the kids and it’s all part I think of making the world a
better place.


Slide - We All Have a Job - 14:20  
My doctorate’s OB Organizational Behaviour and I always say if you love
what you do you will never work another day in your life and it’s true
but you also get an idea through leadership which is another major topic in
the area the higher you go in an organization it’s not the more people
work for you it’s you work for more people so my attitude on campus has
always been you know that I’m here, we all have a job mine’s different
from yours but we’re all equally as important and you’d be surprised
that attitude because I could go across campus and call anyone and everyone
by their first name and vice versa that’s the way it should be because we
all had our jobs to do and you could see how you could get things done
cooperatively if you had that positive attitude some people say would look
at my title or you know and think they could demand things, people,
organizations work through cooperation and consensus and that’s the only
way to go.    


Slide - Final Thoughts - 15:42
We have talked a lot about the exchange aspect and I enjoyed that, I
enjoyed the international work but I enjoyed every second of teaching the
kids here, teaching is what I wanted to do and I fell into the
Administration. I guess I was kind of good at it. In my first year here, I
had, we used to have policy projects where the kids did feasibility studies
of starting a business and that first group consisted of Doug Smith who was
with ACOA for a career, Barb Stevenson who was a lawyer who still is a
lawyer and then there was a woman by the name of Debra Goode, Debbie Goode
who just retired this past spring after bring a prof here in Accounting and
the other guy in the group was a person you don’t know of, his name is
Wade MacLauchlan so I have to go back and say you know that whole group if
you’ll pardon the colloquial expression “dun good” and I would always
say this, I don’t take credit for anyone’s success they did it I just
hope that I could help them by giving them some tools to make their careers
better and in mentioning that group if I, we had more time you know I look
back at thirty-five years of teaching, it’s a very rewarding experience.