Leo Cheverie

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Leo Cheverie - 0:00
My name is Leo Cheverie. I started at UPEI as an undergraduate in 1980 and
I graduated in 1984. During that time I participated in lots of various
activities on campus, but I started working at the UPEI library as a
student and after that when I graduated I was actually hired as a library
staff member, as a library technician, starting in January 1985, and I’m
still working here up until the present time, which is November 2019. 


Slide - From Souris High to UPEI - 0:36
I came here from, after graduating from Souris Highschool in 1980 and when
I came to campus, I just felt that, in terms of the academic atmosphere and
the social atmosphere, it was a very positive one. So I remember going to
my very first political science class in the fall of 1980 and to this day I
have close friends that I met from that class whom I’ve been friends with
to this day, but part of that was thinking, wow I really -  what’s being
taught, how it’s being taught, and the amount of dialogue and
communication and discussion I had with my other people who i took classes
with, because from that very early period of time I had made some very
life-long friends but also at the same time as well I also enjoyed classes
with a - knowing all my professors, and also knowing that learning was a
journey. My nickname in highschool was called “Professor” so I guess it
wasn’t surprising that I went to university, but part of it was, I just
felt this was a home here in terms of meeting people with like-minded
interests and also that the very exploration and interest in learning was
there, and I was really encouraged by all the various teachers or
professors I had, but I felt it was a place for learning, but it was also a
place for exploring and becoming more true to yourself.


Slide - Life Long Learning - 2:02
Later when I became a staff member, I also could take courses part-time,
and so I took advantage of taking quite a few courses when I first started
working here, because I always felt was -  life-long learning was something
that was really important, and also there were people who were noted to be
professors or people in certain departments or areas who I felt I could
learn a great deal from. So, probably from that early period onward I
enjoyed small class sizes. I enjoyed dialogue, communication with my
students. I enjoyed things - even in the 1980s, we even had a centennial
scholarship program where seniors over the age of sixty could take courses
for free and having them in your classes and being able to participate was
really important because [unintelligible] a lot of history courses and
political science and philosophy and that sort of thing, and they always
added a great deal to what you were learning and we also had a great deal
of professors who were very interested in the wellbeing of students. One of
the majors that I did - was involved with was Canadian Studies. It was
created so that we were the very first class of people with a Canadian
Studies major and we had people like Andy Rob or Bob Campbell or the people
in that program who actually got us to study, in an interdisciplinary way,
various aspects of Canada.


Slide - Working at the Library - 3:19
It was quite funny, I started working here in January 1985. My original
goal was working evenings and weekends, so basically I worked at times when
most, lots of other staff weren’t around because I worked probably around
4 PM to 11 three days a week and I worked fully on Saturday and Sunday, but
at that time it also gave me an opportunity to get to know the students who
were studying at UPEI because we had very familiar people who came and
studied and worked at the library or out of the library so basically it was
a very positive environment in terms of interacting with them and many more
things were done at that time, which was all done -  right now, students
today wouldn't understand, in terms of doing research, what we would have
needed in order to carry out those tasks. Now you can look at a computer
and look up a database and search terms and things will pop up before you
that are even full text. So back in those days, even trying to instruct
students or other people doing research that this is what you need to do to
find articles, go through indexes, then look and see what journals we have,
find out where they’re located, to actually go and physically locate
them, to even get articles based on your subject. So it took some doing to
show people that, but there was a whole world of articles and information
or - before the world of databases even happened to show, at that point we
had a whole range of print periodicals. So we had print periodicals that
were rows and rows and rows of print periodicals so you actually - and now
a lot of those things are online. I remember as well one of my early jobs
was actually placing cards in our card catalogue, because we didn't even
have an electronic catalogue. We had actually huge card catalogues where
we’d file cards into, in those days, and so, when you look at where we
were and now how we can research and find things, it change - things have
changed quite considerably, the information revolution and being able to
access things. Even now, a number of things - people can go in their
offices or offline, go at home and search for things. In those cases,
people had to come into the library to actually physically look at actually
paper indexes or other sources of information in order to find out what
they needed. And you kind of had to walk through people with that and give
them a confidence level, in terms of finding what they needed, but I always
loved research so I also love showing people how to find things, how to
learn where things are located, but when I look at that time to now, I’m
really astounded by all the changes that have happened, and you know where
we might be going in the future in terms of being able to access
information and being able to find information right at hand. So it’s
been an amazing journey when, right now we’re even, the library itself
here, being able to digitize a large number of PEI resources or PEI-related
materials, whether that be oral interviews or things, and put them online.
So, right now we have an Island Voices collection of Dutch Thompson
stories, and one of the people, subjects he interviewed was my grandfather,
who lived to be a hundred, and so, my grandfather, who lived from 1902 to
2002, his voice is online.


Slide - A Community Library - 6:35
I love the fact that the UPEI library doesn’t just serve faculty and
students as well as staff members here, but it also serves the public at
large. So I think it’s a really, advantage of Robertson Library is that
we’ve got a lot of people from the public, and they see this as their
university and their library, that they otherwise wouldn’t see because
they see it as part of, as part of their community, and we have so many
people who come here to do research in the PEI collections, special
collections, where I work, sometimes dealing with topics related to Prince
Edward Island, where we only have resources themselves that are available
here and are really not available to the same degree anywhere else. So
we’ve had people like Frank Figgett and Simon Lloyd and other people
who’ve helped collect those things, but also at the same time as well,
build it, so that we have a resource that people can be proud of, and that
we are truly a library not just for UPEI people and the UPEI community, but
for the Island community at large. 


Slide - WUSC - 7:42
WUSC is World University Service of Canada. One of the most interesting
things being at a university or an academic environment, and I’ve always
loved this, is the amount of energy that’s on campus in terms of people
coming here to learn and to explore and having a new world open to
themselves, and there are many pathways to that. So one of the things where
I’ve been privileged is back, just when my later undergraduate days, we
had a professor here, an economics professor, who just came back from
Africa, called Ralph Hazleton. He was a noted economist and one of my
favourite quotes from him is that “the economy is too important to be
left to economists.” So his interests weren’t just strictly about
economics but he went and worked in Africa through WUSC, World University
Service of Canada, and they were really just starting this program where
there were so many refugee students around the world who were in refugee
camps who had no way to further their education, but they wanted to find a
way to make linkages between them and to universities in Canada that were
where a World University Service of Canada organization began. And the
origins of World University Service of Canada, it started after World War
II, and basically one of the things that dealt with were displaced peoples
in Europe and finding a place to study in Canada. So they kind of revived
it in the very early ‘80s to that, so students who are refugees in
refugee camps in various places around the world could apply and be
accepted at universities or colleges in Canada and UPEI was one of the very
first universities that actually took this on and it was Ralph Hazleton
spearheaded it and it was two students who came from Uganda, John and Emmy
who came here to study at UPEI, and all these various students came
together to either fundraise and find ways to support them, getting
donations in kind, trying to ask the University to support them by
providing tuition or residence in order to make it possible for these
students to be able to come here and succeed and be successful. So, from
that time forward, up till now, UPEI is one of the leaders across the
country in terms of the sponsoring a fair number of students from all over
the world who are refugees and they came from, you know, the Congo, from
Ethiopia, from Afghanistan, all sorts of places where they would not have
had an opportunity to study unless WUSC opened the door for them - but what
I think is really important about it is that it transformed, students who
were involved with that program felt empowered and able to do something or
change something in the world and so they were able, when taking this on,
they were also doing lots of work regarding development education, about
issues regarding global issues, and there were also educational
opportunities, we sponsored conferences here at UPEI through WUSC where we
had people from - some international speakers from around the world who
came here to put on a conference with all the people throughout Atlantic
Canada who came here to that conference about education being a right.
We’ve had a number of UPEI students who applied for an international
seminar through WUSC, and every year they offered a seminar either in
French or in English, to go to a developing country but study issues there
and travel with other university students from across Canada, and UPEI was
really successful in sending a whole number of students who applied for
that opportunity and, to go and do that. So, I think overall, we were
punching a bit above our weight, but we were also showing what we can do to
change things.


Slide - CUPE - 11:28
I always felt that working on campus has been a privilege and being in the
university community is a privilege, and I’ve always felt that staff and
faculty and students and being part of the community is really important
and in order to support that community, then being engaged in broader
campus-wide initiatives is really important. CUPE community represents the
largest union on campus at that time with the support staff from all over,
but I remember the very earliest days of even when the Atlantic Veterinary
College was, before it opened, I was involved, that we thought we need to
have this organization represent all the workers on campus, not just on
main campus but including all the workers who are going to be working at
the AVC and that it was really important to bring, actually bring people
together under one umbrella. It was also really important as well to ensure
that, not only the rights of workers, but that people felt that they were
truly consulted and engaged with building a stronger campus. And there’s
always challenges to that, because not always that you see eye-to-eye with
the university as an institution, but I think we’re always strongest as a
campus when all people feel included, being involved with decision-making,
being engaged in knowing that they’re part of a larger whole, and I think
part of my work within CUPE was to see where are the places where we can
work together and solve problems and move forward, and here’s where
things are very challenging when resources are tight and where there are
different dynamics in place, but what I found is we were always most
successful if there were issues regarding, you know, sustainability of
healthcare plan, or having a pension that serves the interest of everybody
on campus, that the best solutions are ones where everybody came to the
table and tried to work together.


Slide - UPEI Health and Wellness - 13:38
And one of the things that I’m proud of having to work on was starting a
campus-wide wellness committee with Rosemary Herbert, because I felt it was
really important that wellness was an issue for all of us, and investing in
health and wellness would all make us more cohesive but also realize that
there’s, that that’s really important for individuals but it’s also
important as an institution. Another thing was the development of the - we
didn't have EAP program, which is the Employee Assistance Program, we
needed to have a program like that on campus so I remember that there was a
way that we worked together to see what we could do, and ultimately it was
a co-funded program with different employee groups as well as the
university coming together to fund an EAP program or EFAP program, because
it included resources not just for employees but for their family members,
but I see that as a very positive thing, because without that, some people
might fall through the cracks. So, if you’re really believing in a
workforce, or in people, that’s the best way to build a very healthy and
cohesive workforce that actually can keep moving forward and serve the
needs of everybody on campus, so I felt really strongly and passionately
that we need to find things like that in order to move forward. I’ve
always found a great number of people here on campus who are always willing
to help and support in ways that they can, and I think that we just need to
continue on developing more of that spirit.


Slide - Final Thoughts - 15:12
I’ve been at UPEI probably from 1980 to the present time and I’ve known
all the presidents of UPEI, and certainly all the various vice presidents
and various other people, as well as knowing many staff members who work in
all sorts of roles all across campus. Seeing what a role is, and seeing how
a role is embedded, in terms of seeking knowledge for good, but also trying
to find the best way possible to make sure that the type of research that
gets done here, the type of scholarship that happens, the type of teaching
which is based on students happens, and that we have the best facility as
possible, then we’re bringing people together to say, this is an amazing
place, how can we make it better, and how can we work closely with all
levels of government to make sure that we’re building a university
that’s responsive not just to PEI but also to the world’s needs.