Ed MacDonald

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices Ed MacDonald 00:00
I’m Edward MacDonald and I teach history here at the university have
since the year 2000. I’m a professor but I was a student at UPEI from
1974 to ‘78 and I have been hanging around the campus it seems almost
ever since because I did some of my work here as a Grad student and was on
committees and now I’m still here nearly 50 years later.


Slide - Grade 12’s Campus Tour - 0:30
One of the memories one of the first ones that sticks in my mind is
actually before I was a student our high school came in from Montague,
students in grade 12 came in to get a tour of the University and the tour
guide was a beautiful and I say that advisedly young woman Barb Stevenson
was her name, still around town as a lawyer, we didn’t know her of course
and one of my classmates was going to be playing on the football team the
next year, you know he had been a recruit on the football team and he hit
on our guide all during our tour of campus and she fended him off with the
greatest of grace and aplomb and finally he said you know, he said I’m
going to be playing on the football team and she said yeah my boyfriend’s
the quarterback and he deflated just like that and actually her boyfriend
was the quarterback and he became her husband so she wasn’t lying but it
was a wonderful sort of a put down and I was impressed by the
sophistication of the university students you know compared to the high
school student.


Slide - Undergraduates - 1:47
One of the things that strikes me now in retrospect about the undergraduate
experience, it was a small school I couldn’t tell you the enrollment at
the time but most of the students were from Prince Edward Island the ones
who weren’t stood out you know there was a student from the Yukon and she
was know because she was from the Yukon and there were a handful of
students from Hong Kong, a handful of students from Africa but it was
overwhelmingly Island based and we were very unsophisticated compared to
the students of 2019 with their interconnections with the internet and the
wider world of culture and so our professors had a profound influence on us
mostly for good sometimes not for good depending on the experience of the
student I was blessed with some really great profs and something that I
hope we still do well at UPEI is something that I think we did really well
in the 70’s and that was be a mentor to students and to provide a
personal relationship in learning so yes there are some things we didn’t
know when we went to grad school historiography was still kind of forgien
land for us but we had learned and we had learned who we were and we had
learned the capacities and potentials we had and for that I credit you know
all of our profs.


Slide - Calculus and Dr. Robert Suen - 3:27
I didn’t know what I would major in I liked History l liked English but I
never thought I would get a job with those a question people still ask
today so I set myself up in my first year as if I might be a science major
even a business major so that meant taking a calculus course, I’m not
skilled at math and the best I can say is that when I got something, when I
understood, it I grasped it and the calculus prof thus had an uphill
challenge and his name was Bob Suen he was originally from Hong Kong I
think or Taiwan, his english was fractured but he had a gift for teaching,
he had a gift for explaining and he had unlimited amounts of time for any
student that needed help and I needed help every single week, in class he
was excited and passionate about something I thought was boring at best and
that impressed me but what really impressed me was the amount of time he
was willing to invest in any student who wanted help and that was a lesson
that I learned that I use still you know as a professor today.


Slide - Pig and Whistle - Student Social Lives - 4:45
Well in the time that I was a student here, it was the heyday of the Pig
and Whistle on Thursday nights at the Barn which actually was a barn, it
had been the dairy barn on the Catholic school campus and it was converted
into this Student Union building, every Thursday night there was a dance
and for much of my time at UPEI, it was the hottest thing in town on
Thursday night and there’d be huge crowds of people would come to see
live bands even actually danced and not just students but the other big
social events with things like Winter Carnival and they would have a major
musical act come in Winter Carnival, there was a ball, there was a Sadie
Hawkins dance it seemed every time you turned around there was some kind of
a semi formal ball that you could go to and of course the other big thing
and not everybody did this but certainly the crowd I got around with was
there was a lot of going out to the clubs, this was only within the decade
of the drinking age being lowered to 18, ten years earlier you couldn’t
get a drink in a restaurant unless you bought food so the idea of having
night clubs was pretty novel and there was a slew of them around town,
Gentleman Jim’s which was approximately where the Indigo is now it was
was the campus haunt but there was the Grenada, there was the Trade Winds
there was Silverado and there was the Prince Edward Room those were just
the places with you know dance floors and my first two years at UPEI we
spent a lot of time hanging out in smoky dance clubs trying to get the
courage up to ask a girl to dance. 


Slide - UPEI as a Community - 6:44
An interesting reminder for me last year I was asked to come in to the
Student Centre to tell some Ghost stories for Halloween night and what
struck me when I came in that evening to do it was that most of the
students who came to attend and there were probably twenty-five students
there were international students so are they more interested in Ghost
stories, no, their community is the campus because they are international
students their social lives and their out of class you know lives tend to
revolve around the campus, UPEI has always struggled with being a commuter
campus especially when the bulk of the student’s are Islanders who live
close enough to UPEI to travel you know back and forth, their social
networks their kinship ties tend to mean when they’re outside of class
their social life doesn’t revolve around campus and that’s been a
handicap for Prince Edward Island for UPEI compared to you know Acadia, St.
FX, you know perhaps like a Mt. A, schools in small towns where your social
life revolves around campus, we don’t have that advantage even though
we’re a small school and so it’s been difficult to inculcate a kind of
school spirit that you would have found when this was a Roman Catholic
college and university with a residential sort of a population, students
came and they lived on campus there were students who lived in
Charlottetown who wanted to live on campus because that’s where all the
fun was that’s where all the life and excitement was, that’s not so
much the case today.


Slide - School and Work - 8:36
During my time as a student there was a break between school and work in
the summer time you worked you made money to go to school and in the winter
time you went to school, a handful of our friends and classmates had part
time jobs during the school year, today virtually every student has a part
time job and some of those part time jobs are twenty plus hours a week and
so their schooling is intermingled now with their part time employment and
it makes it difficult for them to commit to doing their school work after
hours it makes it difficult for them to commit to the social life of campus
as well and so that sort of idea of university as being a kind of safe
refuge from the work world has completely eroded away, people work and the
go to school and that’s why if we look at the stats probably a majority
of our students don’t now graduate in four years by taking five per term
like a five course term, they take five years or six years or they go to
summer school to make up the courses that their not taking through the
regular school year, you know because they are working so that’s a change
school is no longer a separate little island that’s kind of isolated from
the work world. 


Slide - Class Sizes - 10:19
UPEI still qualifies as having small class sizes today but some of our
students coming in from high schools do remark if they get in a class where
there are three hundred students, they say “I thought you know class
sizes were supposed to be small at UPEI” and we have to say well if you
were taking the same course at the University of Toronto there would be
twelve hundred students and you wouldn’t actually meet the professor
you’d only meet you know the teaching assistants, well when I was a
student there were some big classes introductory courses in Chemistry and
one of my favourite classes which was you know a PEI History class in those
days historical awareness on Prince Edward Island kind of a heritage
awareness was a grassroots movement there was in the 70’s a demand for
Island History and Father Bolger who taught that course invented that
course he in my time had 130-140 students in that class he told me that he
had up to two hundred students or more today, the Island History students
do not feel the need to know the history of their Province and that’s
part of the social growth and development of PEI it’s a part of the sign
of the times so my Island History classes are quite small and intimate
compared to the rather impersonal lecture class taught by Father Bolger
because even though he reputedly knew everyone’s name and was able to
fake it if he didn’t actually know everyone’s name it was still a large
scale experience but class sizes today are comparably manageable in most
instances there are perhaps more courses there are certainly more programs
then there were but class sizes to my mind haven’t gotten appreciably
larger and that’s a good thing to be able to say. 


Slide - At A Crossroads - 12:38
UPEI is in some ways at a crossroads, we have been throughout our history
primarily an undergraduate university and gradually by a process of
fractionation we’ve been adding programs, schools, and faculties,
graduate studies and I think it’s important to keep touch with our roots
and now a quarter of our students are not from Canada the proportion of
Island students is smaller and that’s great there’s a diversity there
that I value but there are some lessons from the UPEI of 1974 that I think
we need to keep in mind and one is that we are still a small university
primarily undergraduate university whose primary goal is to teach, we live
in a world where all scholars are expected to publish, all scholar’s are
expected to have a profile nationally as well as locally that’s also
great but our mandate and mission is still to teach, the other thing that I
think is important and my opinion is skewed a little bit because the place
I study is the place where our university is located but that is the
importance of UPEI to the community on Prince Edward Island that much of
our budget comes from the taxes that we pay as Islanders and we have an
obligation a responsibility an opportunity to serve that community in
tangible and intangible ways so while all universities must be universal in
terms of their grasp of the subject and the connections that they make
particularly a Provincial university has to remember that it is serving a
province and so our expertise, our scholarship, our willingness to serve
should serve our university should serve our discipline but it should also
serve this Province and I think that’s a very important point to
remember.


Slide - Final Thoughts - 14:51
Well I grew up in a way with UPEI, I grew up with the Library this you know
Library opened about half way through my first year, we came back after the
Fall term and the Library opened and I developed quite a fondness for this
school that’s been so important in the making of me as a person, the
making of me as a scholar and then the opportunity to come back and to
teach here has been a gift and everyday I’m thankful for that gift and
hopefully I pay it forward to the students that you know we now encounter
each year, for me UPEI is an important aspect of my life and has been and
will be.