Cathy Gillan

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Slide - 50 years, 50 voices - Cathy Gillan - 00:00
I'm Cathy Gillan and I have been very fortunate to really spend most of my
life as an adult at UPEI. I came as a student, a mature student in 1974,
graduated in '79, graduated again several times and in 1989, I was hired as
the first Alumni Officer at UPEI.


Slide - Alumni Officer - 00:29
Dr. Elliot was President at the time and he had let 20 years go by before
he felt that it was appropriate to have an Alumni Officer to reach out to
the alumni of the founding institutions Prince of Wales, Saint Dunstan's
and of course, UPEI, so, did that for a while and that really led me into
the next two careers. My association with the alumni and learning about the
history and particularly the international students who came here in the
late 50’s and 60’s, made me think about the opportunity for
international students and so then I moved on to develop the, what is now
the English Language Center and more broadly, work in the area of
Experiential Education so it's been a great career.


Slide - Daycare Centre - 01:26 
Well, I was married and my son was 11 months old and I've been working for
about five years and you know, it was the early days of feminism on PEI and
I very quickly realized that even though I, there was a huge, I guess you'd
call it recruitment campaign by Holland College back then that the real
world wants people who are skill-trained and actually we are hearing a lot
of that again today and it's fascinating because I've come full circle
because I'm in that area of training but I didn't really know what I wanted
to do, I just knew that I wanted to wear a suit like my aunt Sophie, who
was in the head office at a bank at Toronto, one of the first women to
crack head office and do something important. So I went to work and I was
working at the school board and I very quickly realized that in order to do
anything important I needed to go back to school and I needed much better
education, I mean I had good skills and could do accounting, but... so I
came to UPEI, and I was probably one of very few mature students I think I
was the only one with a baby in my classes but we did have a daycare center
at UPEI, in the Barn, which is now gone, I mean the old Barn and it was
part, the Student Union gave space, but it was a volunteer parent
initiative really, so I helped out with that and then, times were changing
well, for one thing Student Union needed the space; the Barn was starting
to get pretty shaky so we asked the Board of Governors if we could have
some space on campus, and it's just a reflection of the era but the, a
senior person on the board said; "Women with children have no business
being at university", and they weren't going to give us the space however,
Jim Griffith, Ian McDonald, the President of the day felt differently and
so they gave us the basement of Marian Hall and the Health Center was there
as well, so we went in we painted it, we cleaned it up, we begged them for
our equipment and we set it up that was a just lovely because the people of
the Health Center, if one of the children got sick, they just took them
over and put them to bed and called you when you came and when you could
but one of the things I remember was the kids loved going in, it was like a
little half-door out the back and it was just so cute it wasn't so great
for parents, to bent down and get in but they thought it was special for
them and every fall, about this time, the maintenance crew would rake up
all the leaves and they'd leave them in a big pile in the quadrangle and
they let the daycare kids come over and jump on the leaves, so it was such
a, you know, when we talk about this being a community or family it really
was, it was a very ,very supportive environment and then of course as an
English major, as you can imagine I mean, Frank Ledwell, Mike Foley, all of
them were wonderful teachers, they were true teachers and they would, I was
lucky enough that they accommodated my schedule with children because I had
my second child when I was here and I was the only pregnant person on
campus and Mike Foley did, I think two special studies for me and he would
invite me into his office and he’d say, "here, you have the big chair"
and sometimes he'd make cocoa and we had such wonderful, challenging I
would even say intellectual experiences and it was just what I hoped
university would be.


Slide - International Student Support - 05:55 
When Betsy Epperly was here, before she was President when she was a
faculty member in English, she started a program connecting with Japan
because of the LM Montgomery relationship and bought groups of primarily
Japanese women to PEI, for short-term study, in English but using
Montgomery's writing and biography as the curriculum and I've always had a
really keen interest in linguistics and learning to read and write and I
envisioned this being bigger but of course, it was Vianne Timmons who
really saw the potential because she came from a very international mindset
and we were just beginning to see, for the first time in quite a while, a
number of international students wanting to come here and at first, Senate
allowed them to come and take 3 credit courses, but we quickly realized
they needed more support so, Vianne said "Why don't you figure out what
that looks like"– I had– we got a bit of funding from ACOA, to put
together a program and then we launched it I was it for the first couple of
years, we started with 12 students and then the next semester 24 and the
vision always was to create an English Language Center that would support
students broadly and you know, with the growth of international demand for
education abroad primarily China, first because there weren't enough places
in China for the students who wanted to attend and so, you know, that's how
it started and it grew and grew and we broadened the number of countries
that we recruit from. And when we looked at what the model should be I
visited UNBSJ because they got into this area early and we realized that
our program could not be off to the side with the students separate, for
one thing our community was too small, we didn't want to create a kind of,
segregation or, yeah, we wanted them to be totally integrated and so
that’s the program that we set up and it has worked extremely well
because it acknowledges strength and ability, so if a student comes in and
they need only one course, that's what they take, whereas some other
models, they see it as cash-cows so they set up a college over to the side
and they keep the students there for as long as they can and it's a private
operations they have the same, it's not that we are not about generating
revenue we are, but, that's not our mandate, our mandate is to prepare
UPEI's students to be successful and we are really proud of the record
because we do not we but Yuqin our institutional researcher, does an
in-depth analysis every 4 to 5 years and what we have seen is that our, the
students who come through our program are graduating within 3 to 3 and a
half percent of all other students, so we think that's pretty remarkable
and the university especially when Vianne set it up in the beginning
recognized that if we are going to admit these students we have to have
proper support for them.


Slide - Final Thoughts - 09:55 
With both Betsy and Vianne and Wade, I went there and they said, "That's a
great idea! Try it! See if you can make that work”, it was a time when
you were given so much, just, opportunity to grow things and that was such
a privilege I remember I don't know what it was I was trying to do but I
was meeting with the Comp Controller and they were, they said "Oh
nevermind, that's a Vianne thing yeah it will be fine" and then that's how
things worked, so it was you know, it really was a special time of
tremendous growth and then with Wade, I will never forget, I helped him set
something up a recruitment from UNB, for law school, before he came here as
president, he was Dean there and it was a Saturday and I said "You came
over to do that on a weekend" and he said "I would paddle to Newfoundland
and back if I thought I could bring a student with me" and I never forgot
that and then of course, he then became president here, nothing was too
much trouble for a student, and he, we had oh some special event that we
were doing and he had us create this image of the Island with lights on it
little mini lights from every place the students came from, so of course,
he was so smart about this kind of thing when you saw this map of the
Island, it was brilliant, bright, just bright and it was a beacon to the
world and he had a saying "this is the place you can get your arms around"
and so, all of those things that the various presidents, leaders brought to
us, I felt a very strong sense of vision and each one was special in his or
her own way. Working with Dr. Elliot, I mean, I was so young and I didn't
have experience with systems and I remember him telling me once about his
parents who worked under the Raj in India and I think I might've even
slipped and said "Well that explains a lot!" but he bought a sense of pride
to UPEI that I don't think we had before, I think we were very humble and
we were really small and brand new but in the symbol of that, was that he
developed a coat of arms and the idea that UPEI should have a coat of arms,
it just said a lot to people and he walked around, his leadership style was
to walk around and talk to people, particularly early in the morning, so
you better get there early and he would chat, he would throw out ideas and
I'd think "Why is he even asking me? ‘Cause I'm fairly junior here" and
it was just a way of getting feedback and staying in touch with not just
staff but students too and so all of those people were, you learned from
everyone of them about, about what's important and that's the students and
that's what you think of first.