Alan MacEachern
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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Alan MacEachern - 0:00 I'm Alan MacEachern, I'm a professor in the History Department at Western University and I was a graduate of UPEI History department, I was here from 1984 to '88 and came back and did an honors, '88 to '89. Slide - Close Relationships - 00:19 One of the things I really appreciated about UPEI in retrospect was, I think I got really close relationships with professors, I think by virtue of the classes being so small—In history at least, in upper year history program—I think my- the ultimate story of that for me was that I took a fourth year history course here at UPEI with Andy Rob—it was an honor's course—and when I showed up, it turned out I was the only student in the course. Andy knew that I played squash, and he played squash, so we decided that we were going to meet once a week, on the squash court, and then after, we would have the actual class. So we had this kind of—in retrospect—kind of comical thing you know where our class would start off in the locker room—at the spa-if I remember—and then we would continue on and talk about Canadian history. Not all my classes were so small, or so half-dressed, but I really felt when I ended up coming to graduate school in Ontario that I realized in retrospect that the fact that I've been so close to a number of professors here, really helped me in terms of my teaching, in terms of my writing, in terms of research, in terms of everything. Slide - Student Experience - 01:45 My experience of UPEI in the 80’s as a student; I think one of the things that was really important to me—I'm not sure how individual this was—but that by virtue of the fact that I started while being...I was living at home, I was living at home in the country, so I would get driven in because my brother went work so I would get driven in every morning, when he went to work, and I would be here until he left at the end of the day, so I was a real 9 to 5 student, and I never got bored with that; I loved being here; I spent days working at the library; wander over and coffee or whatever with friends; at the gym half the time, it was a real community, and it was a real 9 to 5 place for me so it wasn't somewhere that I just—and this could be the case in larger universities—where you zoom in for a couple hours a week and then you zoom out—it was really 9 to 5 sort of place for me, and to be honest it was really a 5 to 9 place for me as well, that I would come back in the evening or be there in the evening and be at the Barn or go to a place downtown. Slide - Becoming an Historian - 02:59 I think I credit, or blame Ronald Reagan for my becoming an historian and this sounds kind of ridiculous I hope it sounds ridiculous, but there was a real sense in the early 80’s that there were gonna drop the big one; that we were all gonna get nuked anyway, so as ridiculous as it sounds I thought "Well, I guess I might as well do what I want to do" and so I wanted to be a history student; I wanted to read about history and I guess ultimately I want to write about history and teach about history that took a little bit longer but I thought I might as well do whatever I wanna do. So I didn't feel any pressure to become an engineer or get a business degree or anything like that so right from the beginning when I arrived at UPEI, I was a history student; and, I guess one of the things that I really remember about the History department and not just history but English and Psychology, and other programs at UPEI is that I felt all the...professors were individuals and I'm gonna be this sounds a little euphemistic and it is a little euphemistic, but they are all extraordinary some of them were extraordinarily intelligent, extraordinarily kind; some of them were extraordinarily weird, but there was- they were all extraordinary they were very individual people and I think of that now actually, when I'm a professor and I think of myself as very ordinary, and I think students must think of me as very ordinary, and occasionally you have to be reminded that they come at you from a very different point of view. One of the assignments that really changed- probably that made- turned me into becoming a historian was; I remember in Andy Rob's on Canadian History, and I did I researched into Canadians understanding of Americans not joining the First World War during the First World War so how Canadians reacted to the Americans not joining the war from 1914, 1915, 1916 all the way into 1917 and this of course is a pre-internet day so I'm reading 'The Globe and Mail' and microfilm for days at a time, to understand exactly what Canadians were thinking, or at least what the newspapers were thinking and their growing impatience with the US, and I thought that this was like a lot of other papers that I did in university where you read what some other stuff what other people thought, and you put it together and you figure out what they thought and that becomes an essay and Rob pointed out to me that this was really, my first essay as a historian; this is what historians do, they go back to the original primary sources and from that they figure out what happened in the past. And that was kind of a shock to me; something that was so relatively doable, retrievable, that I could make an individual contribution to history in a way that I hadn’t really thought of before, and I think that I really valued from that time on working with primary sources and really digging back into the past into the original documents; and that helped me in my entire career and it's still helping me. Slide - Researching and Writing UPEI 1970 - 06:08 In 2005, UPEI president Wade McLauchlan asked me I'm not sure how he heard about me; probably through Ed McDonald in the history department, he asked me if I would write I research and write a little piece a booklet really on the creation of UPEI in 1970, and that turned out to be a really fun project to do in 2005, because I was given access to a lot of the archival material some which hadn’t been viewed for the first time and to watch how Saint Dunstan's and Prince of Wales were integrated together to become PEI- UPEI in 1969. It was, it was just a wonderful experience to write something like that, and the way I wrote it I mean, I think there's a lot of graduates and later graduates who were more interested in 'Saint Dunstan's, was it better than Prince of Wales? Prince of Wales is better than Saint Dunstan's?' But, I had no interest in that, I was interested in how they came together and to watch that they came together pretty smoothly was a nice story I think, about PEI. Slide - Creation of UPEI - 07:20 I think that there were a lot of events around 1970, I know that David Wheale has called this 'The Break'; that there was like, one world was over and a new world was starting up on PEI and a lot of other places I think the creation of UPEI in and 1969 is another example of that transformation that was going on in Prince Edward Island in this era, and I say that because everyone expected that there was gonna be more trouble than there was, and I really believe that the creation of UPEI relatively smoothly in 1969 was a sign that Islanders were ready for that, that there wasn't, for example; there was no kind of denominational skirmishes between protestants and Catholics or anything like that, and that Islanders were ready for a secular institution, I think that that really says something about what was going on in Prince Edward Island at the time. The worry that Islanders weren't ready and the discovery that they were ready. Slide - Final Thoughts - 08:21 UPEI is quite a bit of a larger institution than when I went here in the 1980’s and I think one of the things that really helped me develop was that it was small, and I’ve you know, I have to admit that I hope that UPEI keeps that small character, for the next 50 years and beyond; I think that that would be a bad thing to lose, that I think that was one of the things that really helped set UPEI apart.