Over the course of a year, I typically attend a few meetings of Deans from various universities – each with its own geographical “catchment” and each related to a different decanal portfolio. For example, in March, I went to Salt Lake City to attend a conference of the Deans of Arts and Sciences in the Pac 12 + 3 (the Pac 12 “football” conference universities plus UBC, Hawai’i and Alaska-Fairbanks).  And recently in April, I attended the meeting of the Canadian Deans of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CDAHSS) in Victoria. These are great opportunities to discuss the issues confronting deans these days (diversity, general education requirements, distance education, budget challenges, interdisciplinarity, and so on) but I also find it particularly encouraging to encounter people struggling with the same kinds of issues.

At the latter meeting, I participated on a panel called “Strategies for promoting and advocating for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences”.  The following are my remarks followed by a brief note about the presentation by my co-panelist and the discussion amongst the deans.  (full disclosure: For anyone who has read my previous posts, they will likely encounter a few repeated themes!)

THE PROBLEM.  Imagine that we’re the Oldsmobile Company in the late 1980s.  The world is changing and our brand is tired and in decline.  I’d be up here saying that, sure we have a branding problem, and I have a great new idea for a campaign slogan.  Here it is: “This is NOT your father’s Oldsmobile”.  Clever, huh?  But we have another problem – the car still looks and feels like your father’s Oldsmoble.  So we have to change the advertising, sure, but first we have to start changing the design of car.

We’re in a similar situation with postsecondary Liberal Arts education in North America.  It still looks a lot like your father’s Liberal Arts education.  In the early 20^th century, Liberal Arts was the alternative to professional training – it was the gentleman’s education, and it aspired to the enoblement of character and of mind.  But we have no more “gentleman” in the old sense, and yet we’re left a residual version of this distinction.  How often does a professor say something to a student akin to: “Hey, it’s NOT practical – don’t worry about getting a job, don’t decide soon, explore the curriculum, become a critical thinker.”  Do we really think that this appeal has a heartfelt resonance for the bulk of today’s students or their families?  Too often we sound cartoonishly academic.

The audience for postsecondary education in North America (and this is perhaps even more true in nations with emerging economies) has become much more instrumental in their interests in education, especially as postsecondary education becomes more expensive, exacerbating the tension over value for investment.  When I face thousands of new students at our Imagine Day Meet the Dean event – on the first day of school – I’ve asked “Now how many of you have had your parents say something to the effect of ‘An arts degree – what are you going do with that?’” and laughter ensues and hands go up all around the room.  The parents and their children are full of anxieties about the future and they want security – most want recruiters standing at the door at career day.  And they are seeing the Arts degree as not particularly well calibrated to the needs of the market.  So my first suggestion today is to recognize and not dismiss that anxiety.  It is played out in the steady decrease in the proportion of Arts majors in universities from the 1970s to today.  Students and their parents are voting with their feet and their pocketbook.

I know this is a panel of promoting and advocating for Arts education, not on reforming it, but my second point is this: that we can’t change the brand unless we change the product.  There is a persistent and intergenerational concern about the value of an Arts education and for the value of Arts research, and although out-of-date and exaggerated, some of it is based in fact.

What are the concerns of critics of Liberal Arts education, however mis (or partially)-informed?

• They see an education delivered almost exclusively in bricks-and-mortar environments and using an outmoded delivery system (the lecture), failing to capture and apply advances in technology and the understanding of learning.  This is a university-wide problem, but it sticks to the Social Sciences and the Humanities in the public imagination.
• They see some faculty and departments being dismissive of students going on to professions and careers, focusing primarily on the minority who will attend graduate school.  They’ll point to a lack of career preparation that leaves students wondering what to do with their lives in the months or even years following graduation.
• They view our research as narrow, too-specialized, and not productive of social and economic value, and they become especially worried if they think that these narrow specializations are being translated into curriculum to produce a host of boutique courses that aren’t well-integrated into an intentional curriculum.
• They see a lack of focus on teaching, and a system oriented to doing less of it and producing buy-outs and releases for the best research faculty members.
• There are of course a myriad of criticisms about Arts education out there in secotrs of the public consciousness, but most will cluster around the notion that what we do is trivial and useless.  Instead, the public views the STEM disciplines and business education as the engines of value and innovation – what we need more of if we are to grow GNP and become a world-leading economy.

Of course my Faculty — and I assume almost all of yours — is working hard to address the problems that do help to encourage these views, and in fact much of what I’ve just enumerated is at best a minor echo from the past.  But there’s still work to do.

We’ve all seen the cataclysmic changes roll through the music industry and then the publishing industry in the wake of the digital revolution.  This level of change is coming to postsecondary education.  We have, I would argue, a small window within which to both change the product and change the brand.  We are still viewed as conferring enormous advantage to our graduates as a globally respected postsecondary system.  We’ve also been lucky to have provincial governments that still see themselves involved in the provision of postsecondary education, so the proportion of government funding is still often around 40% as opposed to, say, the 5% it has become at some American so-called-public universities.  Will this last forever?  One cannot be sure, but it will be sure to decline or to decline more quickly if we’re not seen as delivering high-quality and relevant liberal arts education in a reasonably efficient manner.

In my Faculty, we’re refocusing on undergraduate education, enhancing the method of delivery, incorporating educational outcomes and renewing the curriculum on an ongoing basis.  UBC stresses Enhanced Educational Experiences, which include global travel for research and education, small-class and one-on-one research experiences from the first-year on, community learning initiatives, co-op, internships, and career training, all of which, when applied to an ever-changing Arts education, can help to produce students ready to engage with the world on graduation, more quickly able to navigate a global, competitive environment, or, as I often put it, “life ready.”

THE MESSAGE.  As we renovate the education we provide, we need to develop a much more focused message about what it is we do.  Of course one of the benefits of an Arts education is that it is an education in thinking that is not tied to specific career or profession.  With the global economic landscape and the “ideascape” changing so rapidly, narrow training becomes obsolete.  So we’re caught in a paradox that, just as we need more than ever a flexible education geared to critical thinking, problem solving, and communicating, this kind of education should receive such a bad rap.

My spiel is simple, and this is my third point – it’s that an Arts degree is the degree for the 21^st century.  There was a pretty good distillation in Globe and Mail op-ed from October 2011, an article critical of contemporary university education, and it encouraged universities to “spell out what an undergraduate education is good for.  Here’s one definition:  It ought to produce critical thinkers, scientifically and culturally literate people who can assess evidence, connect the dots and communicate with clarity – the key skills that, in a fast-changing economy, prepare people for the jobs that haven’t been invented yet.”  Not bad, but I think we would add that the same training should help to produce people who will be curious throughout their lives and for whom learning doesn’t stop at graduation.

If you think of it one way, we’re training lifelong children – people whose brains are stimulated for lifelong neuroplasticity – people who wonder, explore, play, create and innovate.  Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of consumer products said last year “We’re going through a period of unbelievable growth and will be hiring about 6,000 people this year – and probably 4000-5000 from the Humanities or liberal arts.”  Why?  Because Google is looking for “people who are smart and get things done.”  As another article recently pointed out, it was no accident that the founders of Google, Amazon.com, and other innovative engines of technological and economic growth were trained in Montessori schools where play and creativity and the arts were emphasized.

It is more likely that the chief contributors to social, cultural, economic and even technological innovation will come from those with a powerful Arts education than it will from those with a limited, technical, and careerist education.  This is a great message and one that resonates with Canada’s focus on innovation.  In Business schools around the country and in the US and Europe, programs are emerging to put commerce and business students together with philosophers and visual artists and historians, videographers, and geographers to help stimulate creativity and innovative thinking amongst the business students and to ground the creative thinkers in the means of applying their work, being entrepreneurial, and in developing (dare we say it?) business plans.

These are powerful messages about arts education, but how to get them out – how do we tell the story?

STORYTELLING. It is certainly a useful strategy to attempt to capture the economic impact on the economy and on regional economies from the creative industries, but it is immensely difficult to quantify all of the activity of social science, humanities and creative arts graduates, and it is certainly not enough to use this kind of rather reductionist approach.  We need to show productive, successful arts graduates in their careers.  If you were going to promote one image, my recommendation would be that this be that image: graduates of Arts programs serving as leaders changing the world and living rich, full lives.  And everywhere we communicate, we can tell this story:  in discussions with students and their parents, on the web in your deans’ messages, in your blogs and in op-ed pieces, and in encounters with government ministries.  Find your own way to express the power of an arts degree for the 21^st century and for its capacity to stimulate creativity, change, citizenship, and innovation.

Presentation from the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciencs.  My fellow-panelist, Jean-Marc Magnin of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, noted that while Government is interested in jobs and innovations, most faculty are allergic to the terms.  But the facts work for us.  He pointed out that 50% of Fortune 500 employees have Arts degrees and that 60% of influential people identified in a survey in the UK also had Arts degrees.  Studies have also shown that after five years from graduation, the income of Arts grads is equivalent to those with professional degrees (there is a differential in the years in between, however).

Mr. Magnin also noted that all of the major issues before the public  that require public policy and decision-making as a society, are informed by Arts scholarship.

Most of the deans who spoke up saw that updating and enhancing Arts education goes hand-in-hand with the need to aggressively promote the enduring value of a Liberal Arts education.  It’s encouraging to note that there are lots of great ideas out there in the front trenches of Liberal Arts on how to do both.  I look forward to a day when proponents of the Arts no longer have to argue defensively but instead can simply point to the myriad ways in which the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences influence, transform, and improve lives and society.

Last summer I was contacted by someone working on a website about what people at UBC were reading over the break, and so I shared my then-current reading list. Someone asked me recently what I read, and then she followed up with, “Well, if you have time to read.” But I do. And so here is my winter-spring reading, an update on last summer’s list. I have to admit that I don’t read a lot that has obvious relevance to my job as Dean, in part because reading provides me with a chance to exercise other mental muscles. And I’ll preface this list by noting that I’m notoriously undisciplined in my reading, picking up books at airports or in Indigo just because something speaks to me.

I’m just wrapping up an extraordinarily good book, historian Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010, W.W. Norton & Co.). Although Foner has written extensively about the period, this is his first solo-authored book to focus on Lincoln (although he edited a book recently on Lincoln and his world). Of course Lincoln is one of the most written-about figures in history, but Foner takes as his core narrative a single issue: how Lincoln thought about and responded to the issue of slavery. A cautious constitutionalist, a compromiser by nature, and with a political history devoted primarily to extending free markets, Lincoln made a most reticent revolutionary. But Foner’s great gift is to show the steady growth in Lincoln’s political thinking as he grappled with what became the dominant issue of the day. In the end, both Foner and his readers are struck by the remarkable capacity for political and philosophical growth on the part of Lincoln, a Lincoln much more pleasingly complex and elusive than the one handed down through history as the Great Emancipator.

Last summer, I savored Keith Richards’ Life, and followed it up in late Fall with Bob Dylan’s 2004 autobiography entitled Chronicles: Volume One (2004, Simon & Schuster). This was a lavishly praised book when it appeared, and indeed it has some lovely accounts of Dylan’s early years in New York City. His recounting of his recovery from his motorcycle accident leading to the recording sessions in New Orleans with producer Daniel Lanois is detailed and intimate. Still, his chapter on his battle with fame, fan expectations and the music industry comes off a bit juvenile. Throughout the book, there are startling scenes and revelatory moments, but even in his memoirs, Dylan has a capacity to evade. Sometimes infuriating, sometimes charming and humble, Dylan can still somehow slip right out of focus, and for this reason found the book a bit unsatisfying in the end.

Continuing in the music vein (and after all, occasionally I still delude myself that I’m a music scholar), I picked up Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap Stories. I’m a huge fan of Randy’s radio program on the CBC where he sits with his guitar and spins both records and stories about rock musicians and the industry. Drawing on his experiences with the Guess Who and the Bachman Turner Overdrive, Randy has a brilliant ability to bring the listener into a recording gig at the end of the ‘60s or into the variations on a bass pattern played by a range of artists, or even his favourite “mondegreens” (mis-heard song lyrics). This book is a set of expanded stories from the show, woven with some autobiography and descriptive-historical portraits of musicians and events. It’s not great literature, but it’s a good read if you love rock ‘n’ roll.

My winter fiction reading started out with Jennifer Egan’s a visit from the goon squad, a complex novel that moves around in time exploring a network of relationships that are tied in various fashions to the music industry. It’s a book about aging (the goon squad in the title), loss, memory, and the silences in recordings but also in relationships. There’s a great commitment to the power and the freedom of music that drifts through this book. Egan’s characters make terrible choices and show their wounds in distasteful ways, but one understands their motivations and occasionally, and often by accident, they create wonderful things. The chapter made up of Powerpoint slides is unlike anything I’ve encountered in a novel before. Perhaps if Melville lived in a Powerpoint era, he would have done something like this about whale anatomy. This is a book that had me wondering throughout if I was reading a cleverly crafted bit of pop fiction or an unassuming great novel. I’m still not sure where I land on this question.

Then I picked up (in an airport) Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which, surprisingly, is over 10 years old now (2001, now published by Vintage Canada). As anyone who has heard anything of this book knows, it follows an extraordinary young boy from Pondicherry, India, named Pi (Piscine) whose family owns a zoo. The bulk of the story takes place after they leave for Canada, only to be shipwrecked. Pi’s subsequent life adrift in a lifeboat at sea with various zoo animals (including a tiger) appears like a work of magical realism until the story fractures in two under the clumsy interrogation of two Japanese insurance investigators in the final chapter and the reader is left with a terrible choice of interpretation. This is a rich thrilling book about the imagination and about storytelling, and about God, humans, and animals, fate and choice.

I have now waded a few chapters into Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 (2011 translation, The Bond Street Books), at least enough to encounter the characters whose stories will, or so I am led to believe, intersect and intertwine throughout the book. I haven’t read Murakami’s previous novels, which have been celebrated in recent years, and so decided to start with the most recent and work backwards in time if inspired by this one.

I also read through some free historical fiction on my iPhone as I drift off to sleep. Having read a few of Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, some of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries, and re-read Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels in this fashion, I’m now plowing through Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. And before I put my daughter to sleep (age 9), I read her novels as well. We’re currently on Book 3 (This Isn’t What It Looks Like) of The Secret Series by the nom-de-plume’d Pseudonymous Bosch. Although they’re basically children’s mysteries, I love this series for its extraordinary use of complex vocabulary, its clever footnotes, and that each book is devoted to a different medium of sensory perception (in order; smell, hearing, taste, sight, and touch). On her own, my daughter is deeply into the second series by Rick Riordan about Percy Jackson and the Olympic gods. And I suppose I shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that I’m also reading through Scott Tipton’s Star Trek Vault: 40 Years from the Archives, a present from my wife to this lifelong Star Trek enthusiast.

This is what I read when I’m not reading the reports and dossiers that I consume for my day job. Feel free to send me suggestions for books!

I was having lunch the other day with a former dean, and once again the conversation veered into the motivations for doing this job. My colleague missed being at the table and in charge. Why does someone become a dean? I do get asked this a lot, especially by colleagues in my own discipline who wonder why I would want to do less of everything that they’re trying to do more of? It is an oft-stated truism about deanship that no one starts out in academia wanting to be a dean, and essentially no one is trained to be one!

For my part, I think it’s related in the first instance to my background. In high school I directed plays and managed my town’s nature centre. By the time I went to graduate school, I had already run a tenant union and large music festivals. And from 1976 onward, I’m a little embarrassed to say, I’ve crafted six-month goals and objectives for work and all aspects of my life. So what we in academia call academic administration came more naturally to me than to some colleagues, for whom it’s akin to wearing a rough wool garment and flogging oneself. And let me be very honest: I like the responsibility of running things. I’ve said on a few occasions that if I’m going to have to put up with living inside a bureaucratic institution, I’d at least like to have a say in how it’s run.

I recall one particular interaction that crystallized my dissatisfaction with having no say. When I was an Assistant Professor, I was working with another professor to develop a long-range and encompassing fundraising plan for my Music Department, but it was scuttled when the Chair decided instead to approach our major donor for a piano. A major opportunity lost, I regretted that I was on the periphery of decision-making and had no effect on strategy. So a few weeks later, when another university came calling for a future Chair of a Music Department, I was primed to want to try my hand. I wanted to be in the conversation, not screaming from the periphery.

As a chair, I discovered an interesting thing about administration: when it works it can create the same kind of magic I used to think I could help to create as a musician, festival director, or teacher. At my own festivals, for example, I would go from stage to stage to sample how my programming was working with the audiences. After months of scheduling artists on particular stages and linking performance thematically, I could see if my imagination had been effective, and I would get a thrill if the audience was reacting as I had imagined, or even if moving and unpredictable interactions were occurring. My guiding principle was to create an event so well run that its architecture was invisible, and to all the world it looked like a great, spontaneous party.

Let’s extrapolate that to university administration! What if the machinery of recruitment, admissions, orientation, advising and course registration worked seamlessly for students, and they didn’t have to spend their lives standing in line and being bounced around from office to office? What if the process or recruiting faculty, mentoring them, assisting their teaching, enabling their research, and facilitating great interactions with colleagues were friction-free in terms of guidelines and approvals? What if we could achieve a truly diverse, intellectually challenging, collegial atmosphere for debate and the free flow of ideas? What results when some of this is in place can also be like magic. Students can be turned on by ideas and experiences, people innovate and work with others to solve intractable problems. This is idealist thinking, I recognize, but when we’re effective in solving the everyday problems and overcoming the irritants and frustrations of academic life, we get a little closer to the functioning of an ideal collegium. This part of the job I love, and it thrills me to every once in a while to see a bit of magic take place.

Speaking after I was given a toilet plunger by a department, a metaphor for the job of dean.

Let me raise another aspect of the job that’s immensely appealing to me. I had a particularly difficult time in coming to know what I wanted to “do with my life”, at least on a long-term basis, because I’m by nature an insatiably curious person. I was lucky growing up on a game farm where my parents indulged my curiosity with Time-Life Books and National Geographic Magazines and whatever they could get on astronomy, archeology, calligraphy, or, to cite my favorite: animal tracks and spore! As I’ve written previously, my early adult life was characterized by a string of very different jobs. In fact, one could describe my current job as “therapy for the insatiably curious”. On a given day, I might read cases or have conversations about tourism in the USSR, Shakespeare’s innovations with vengeance plays, Coast Salish language revitalization, sustainability in China, Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, the relationship between political parties and development in a village in Rajasthan, or the use of drone bombs in contemporary American warfare. And in a small way I get to contribute to sustaining the foundation for all of this great research and teaching to happen.

I’ve realized over the years that I’m a visual thinker and a systems thinker, and that I’ve always been attracted to the challenges of solving problems. In fact, I’m a sucker for challenges. As my wife is fond of reminding me, every academic job I’ve taken has been at a smaller effective salary than my last job, but they’ve always resulted in bigger challenges. And a deanship might be viewed as a succession of challenges, generally scores of them every day: structure a spousal hiring for retention of a faculty member; review and respond to an external review; figure out how to fund a construction project for a department; seek out donors for an endowed professorship; cancel a professorial search to reinforce the importance of diversity; determine the routing of a difficult tenure and promotion case; try to solve the long-term insolvency of a unit; consider a major new program with another Faculty; review appointment letters; review proposals to Senate; convince candidates to serve as Heads; see if we can assist in a retirement … that’s just culled from a portion of the docket on one day this week.

Every once in a while, I even get to teach a class, and thankfully I get to interact with students much the time. And if I’m ridiculously disciplined, or maybe selfish, I can eke out a little time to work on research and publication – I’m setting up a research lab/office, and I escape there whenever I can. In the most enjoyable moments of the job, I’m surrounded by and interacting with smart and creative people, I get to explore ideas and solutions and plan, maybe even laugh at some of the absurdities of institutional life, and I even get to help a little magic to happen. Being a part of the decision making, indulging my curiosity, helping some good things to happen that affect student’s lives and that can have a beneficial impact on society – these are the core attractions of the deanship for me. This is what makes putting up with the pace of the job and the stresses of having to make hard decisions and the constant strains on Faculty finances all tolerable. My lunch partner the other day talked about how much fun it had been to be a dean, and mentioned that in her current work she was having to find out how to influence the course of academic life and programs without having the authority to make it happen. I can relate — it is fun! It can also be incredibly stressful and consuming, and to use a word beloved of deans these days: relentless. But it is never boring.

I remember an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education many years ago that looked at what people do after serving as a dean. Less that a quarter of them went back into the classroom as full-time professors. Most have been too far removed from the literature and the changes in classroom technology and pedagogy to feel that they are the still the kinds of effective instructors that they looked for in their faculty. Most either retire or go onto other academic administrative positions. I have no idea what I will want to do when the time comes around, but it looks like I will once again have to ask myself the question: “What do I want to do when I grow up?”

Do I care about university rankings? Hmm.  As I wrote the first draft of the Faculty of Arts Strategic Plan, (“A Place and Promise for Arts” – more about this soon), I included a page on our various rankings and how to understand them. I encountered some understandable criticism: rankings are imperfect, based on suspect weightings of criteria, and they vary quite a bit from list to list. They can be viewed as superficial and competitive. But I argued that people (prospective students and their families, faculty hires, the public and government) read these and they make an impression. So I’ve always thought it was better to engage with the rankings, try to improve them, and live with the consequences.  I just don’t think it’s the right strategy to ignore them.

The recent ascent for UBC to #22 in the Times Higher Education (T.H.E.) World University Rankings constitutes an impressive recognition for UBC. Having become the most research-intensive university in Canada (measured by the amount of Tri-Council grants per research faculty member), UBC has also emerged as the one major Canadian research university making considerable gains over time in the T.H.E. rankings. This reflects a dynamism and a restless spirit of self-improvement that I’ve encountered in my one year here at UBC, and so I think T.H.E. has gotten it about right.

I’ve always advocated for institutions like ours to stay hungry – there’s no more dangerous attitude for a university to adopt in the contemporary world than self-satisfaction and complacency. Following the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University was widely circulated and read. To conclude, he cited the final two sentences from the seminal Whole Earth Catalogue by Stewart Brand: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” (see the entire text and a video of the speech at http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html). This is just as great advice for a university as it is for an individual. It might be redundant, but we could add: “Stay nimble.”

There are lots of ways to slice and dice these numbers. The T.H.E. rankings make it clear that there are three great Canadian universities that stand in a class by themselves: University of Toronto (18), UBC (22), and McGill (28).  Other very strong universities (McMaster [65], Alberta [100], and Montréal [104]) constitute a second tier, with Queens (173), Victoria (177) and Ottawa (185) rounding out Canada’s entries in the top 200 global universities, according to T.H.E.. In Canada, west of Ontario, UBC is the main game in town.

Another way of looking at the rankings is to consider how UBC stacks up against its principal “competitor” universities,  the top tier of North American public research universities. And here we look even more impressive, coming up at # 5, following UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, and Toronto. So here’s an upstart Canadian university outpacing the venerable American state flagship universities such as Wisconsin, Washington, Virginia, and Texas. Interestingly enough, UBC finds itself on a major upward trajectory despite historically meager funding. Speaking of which, I tried to explain our funding model last spring to an American professor who was visiting as part of an external review team. After I described our tuition and provincial grant, he asked, “So where do you get your funding?” “That is our funding,” I replied.

In the end, what does a number like 22 it mean for us? First of all it means that our students and their families can expect that an investment in a UBC education and degree will be recognized and valued worldwide. Second, it means that any faculty member looking for a great home to teach, pursue their research, and have an effect on the world can be additionally reassured that she or he will find it here. These kinds of rankings, sustained over time, produce subtle, positive shifts in applications, faculty recruitment, and in confidence.  I’ve been in other institutions that were obsessed with being “world class”.  What I like about UBC is that we focus on what we do best and just do it, and that we don’t obsess about it.  Now that we’ve looked at the numbers, we can get back to the task at hand – making this a great place to learn, teach, research, and produce positive change in the world.

And after all, a number like 22 gives a lot of room to grow and stretch – it allows elbow room for aspirations and support for staying hungry — and that’s a good thing. 

Given my job at this university, you might be forgiven for thinking that I have had an intentional and a planned life and career, although in reality, it was far from this. In thinking about the paths that our students will take into their unknown futures, I considered my own path from undergraduate student to becoming their dean. This is supposed to be a blog, and not the great Canadian novel, so I’m going to have to serve up the abridged version about how a former tenant organizer, tractor driver, and musician finds himself as dean of a leading Arts faculty.
This story should probably start when I dropped out of college. I was a forestry major at the University of Wisconsin, but had transferred into landscape architecture. Increasingly I found myself too energized to sit in class, too concerned about the state of the world to put off my interventions in it, and more and more in love with music and its ability to move people. And so I dropped out of school, determined to travel, devote myself to community organizing (I became the director of a statewide tenant’s union), kayaking, and most of all, music, which was now clearly an overriding passion. I joined a traditional and Irish rebel music with a band, launched a world music radio show on community radio, and started to organize festivals. After the unexpected death of my sister, I felt the need to regroup, I found myself working as a tractor driver and foreman of an apple orchard in New England. But a life of apple harvests wasn’t in my future either, because in tipping an apple bin one day, my back exploded in pain and I found myself incapable of physical labor or even of sitting for any length of time for some years until back surgery corrected the problem.
What was I to do as an ex tractor driver and tenant organizer with a bad back? First I tried selling Time Life Books. Let me describe the scene: I sat in a room full of telesales people with a call list and a script for selling, say, “The Wild, Wild West” series; and like others, I hoped to be called in front of the room to win a salesman of the week award. Instead my supervisor called me in to say that my verification callbacks had produced the lowest rate of confirmed sales in the history of the Seattle office. Fired from even this lowly job at the age of 28, I was already a failed Time Life Books salesman, which was a sobering proposition.

As a tractor driver and apple orchard foreman, age 27

I stumbled on another job possibility. A coffee shop in downtown Seattle, called Starbucks, was going to open a second branch – imagine that, a second branch of Starbucks – What were they thinking? — and they needed an assistant manager. Now, I had worked for a year in Wisconsin in a coffee house, so I brushed up on my knowledge of coffee and tea, but failed to be interviewed for the job.
But here, my chaotic narrative begins to take shape, because on the very next day in August, the Seattle Times newspaper carried a story about a shortfall in University of Washington admissions, noting that they would take applicants off the street for the semester that was going to start in two weeks. I headed down to admissions and signed up. As my finger ran down the list of possible majors to declare, it stopped at “ethnomusicologist”. Here was a term that seemed to resonate with my interests in world music, Irish and Caribbean music performance, and maybe even progressive internationalism. My finger kept coming back to this major, like a compass needle finding magnetic north. I had stumbled on my calling in life.
You have to understand that every conversation with my mom for the last ten years had come around to the question: “When are you going to go back to school?” So the first person I called was my mom to tell her that I was now enrolled to get a BA in ethnomusicology. After asking what that was, and what in the world I would do with a BA in it, she got around to the crux of her concern, “Aren’t you a little old to be in school?
Okay, perhaps I was. But I had committed just to the two years that it would take for me to finish a BA. However, my professors had other plans for me and nominated me for a Mellon Fellowship for graduate school. I hadn’t planned on graduate school, but the Mellon was a powerfully persuasive tool. And Mellon required a 5-year commitment to teaching. Five years of study and 5 years of teaching add up to a ten-year plan! I had never planned more than 6 months ahead in my life, so this kind of timeline was something new to me.
I wish I could say I planned any of it, but back injuries, university admissions cycles, and the failure to earn my fortune with Starbucks had led me to something about which I was passionate and to which I could devote myself fully and for the remainder of my life– this was a clear case of serendipity at work.
Allow me to take a quick digression concerning serendipity. It was in 1754 that Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford and cousin of celebrated Lord Nelson, wrote a letter in which he coined the term “serendipity”, from the Persian name (Serendip) for the island nation now called Sri Lanka. He wrote, “It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” The term has come into popular usage especially because so many revolutionary products, inventions, new pharmaceuticals, and scientific discoveries have occurred as a result of serendipity. Viagra, for instance, was being tested for the heart condition known as angina – it showed little efficacy in treating angina but had an odd and unanticipated side effect on male users that became the basis of an immensely profitable new industry.
My own dissertation topic? Well, again, accident and serendipity. I hoped to work on Cuban music, but couldn’t get a permit from the U.S. to study in Cuba. I designed a project to work on a processional music from Haiti called rara, learned Haitian Creole, and got a Fulbright grant, but then came a revolution in Haiti, which made the political and security situation unstable and Fulbright pulled back all of their grants to the country. I cast about and landed on another topic: a form of popular music in the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe called zouk with an interesting relationship to the question of Afro-Caribbean vs. French identity. But a week before I left for Guadeloupe, I called a French Canadian colleague for travel tips, and she said, “I can’t believe this, but SSHRC has just given me a grant to pursue the same research project!” Catastrophe turned into serendipity when my colleague suggested I turn my attention back to Haiti and to collaborate with her on a book about popular music in the Francophone Caribbean, and I found myself embarked on a research project that was far more interesting and productive than any I had conceived of before.
Did I intend on becoming a music journalist on the side? No, but I complained once to the Miami New Times that they ignored Haitian music in Miami and they asked me to do a story. That story caught the eye of The Beat magazine, which asked for a single article and then, without consulting me, assigned me to be a regular columnist, writing a column called “Haitian Fascination”. And these columns caught the attention of record company executives, film directors like Jonathan Demme, and festival producers, and I found myself producing record compilations, writing liner notes, running festivals of Haitian music, and so on such that I developed a sideline career to my academic work. I later found out that this kind of work was being called applied and public ethnomusicology. I teach this now, and write on it, but it was, like most aspects of my career, something onto which I stumbled while I was pursuing something else.
My second major research project was perhaps more accidental than the first. As I visited my mother on the west coast of Florida before my first trip to Haiti, I was lugging a trunk full of research equipment with which I needed practice. So I set about trying to find a music group to record, but the pickings in the retirement villages on the west coast of Florida were slim. However, the Fort Myers Sun, a local paper, had an announcement for the opening the Thomas Edison Shopping Mall at which a local men’s barbershop chorus, the Caloosahatchee Chorus, was going to sing. They invited me afterwards to a party called an “afterglow” and that encounter with a barbershop group morphed into a 12-year research project on the social history of American barbershop harmony!
So, if any of our students are reading this blog, and thinking about the possibilities in your lives and careers, please don’t think that the Dean is telling you not to prepare well or to plan ahead, because luck and serendipity strike much more frequently for those who are prepared and who work hard. But also please recognize that many of the transformative moments in your lives, many of the opportunities that open up for you and paths that you travel down will be the ones not planned for; the serendipitous products of, as Horace Walpole said, “accidents and sagacity” while you are searching for something else.
When I was driving my tractor around the apple orchards 30 years ago, I didn’t have my current life in mind. Nevertheless, here I am, and I count myself immensely fortunate to serve as dean. So whether you call it luck, happenstance, accident, serendipity, fate, or the will of God, I hope that you too will be able to recognize and be open to taking advantage of the opportunities and chance encounters – that your life too will be the beneficiary of productive accidents and unexpected discoveries. (first conceived for a convocation speech, 2008, revised)

This was a banner week for Arts – on Monday we welcomed over 2000 new students from over 100 countries, with the largest number of international students in our history. We also admitted nearly 900 transfer students. We are now using broad-based admissions (a holistic approach to looking at the qualifications of our applicants) on more of our students and will move in the years ahead to a fully broad-based approach to admissions. In a future blog, I’ll explain why this is a great thing for Arts.

On Imagine Day, our new and transferring students joined me, our Arts Undergraduate Society Executive, and Associate Dean-Students Professor Janet Giltrow at the Chan Centre for an enthusiastic Meet the Dean gathering, followed by the always-incredible Pep Rally at the Thunderbird Arena, where the dignitaries on stage and all of the students broke the record in the Guinness Book of World Records for most simultaneous high fives.

I snapped a shot of some of the students at Meet the Dean and said that I’d include the shot in my blog, so here it is! I’m also including a shot of our students relaxing in the new Buchanan Courtyards after Meet the Dean.

Arts Students at Meet the Dean

Students relaxing after Meet the Dean

I wanted to include as much of my Meet the Dean talk in this blog, but of course a lot of what I do on stage is improvised in the moment. So I’ve gone back and tried to capture what I said, and it came out like this:

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Why Arts Kicks A__

You’ll have to pardon me while I take this shot with my camera — I wish you could see you as I do now; what a great shot. I’ll try to put it up on my blog tonight, so maybe you’ll see yourself out there is a sea of excited faces. I expect I look pretty excited today too. This starts my second year, my sophomore year, as Dean of Arts at UBC and I can tell you that nothing in this job rivals the feeling of being with our first-year students on Imagine Day. So it’s really a treat to say to you all: Welcome to the Faculty of Arts at UBC!

Now, as you were filing into the Chan Centre the stage manager was playing some funk and disco, and I found myself wondering which of the various tunes you were relating to the most: was it “Staying Alive”? “That’s the Way (un-huh, un-huh) I like it”? Or was it, “Freat Out! (Le Freak)”? Yeah, I know, it was freak out!

You’ve chosen UBC’s largest—and I dare say best – faculty, with almost all of our departments rated in the top 20 or 30 in the world. Arts is an incredibly lively and diverse Faculty with 16 departments in the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Creative and Performing Arts. We also have four schools: Social Work, Journalism, Music and Library, Archival and Information Studies; one of the world’s great museums of world arts and cultures at MOA; the Chan Centre; the Belkin Gallery; the Freddy Wood Theatre, the Old Auditorium and the Barnett Recital Hall in Music. And look at where we’re located – on the edge of the Pacific amidst ocean, forests, and mountains in one of the world’s most livable cities.

As I was walking here across Main Mall, I heard one of our group leaders telling her group: “If you remember nothing else from the chant, remember “Arts kicks ass!” Maybe that will be a theme in my talk today – just why “Arts kicks ass”.

Last year at this time, I knew I was in the right job when I was told that our opening day event was called “Imagine Day”! I remember giving a welcoming speech to students in a previous job, and one of them came up to me and asked, “Do you realize that you used the word “imagine” seven times in your speech?” I suppose I did use it a lot, but that’s because our ability to imagine is the necessary first step to change and innovation – our imagination is our bridge to the future. So if we’re going to meet the challenges that lie ahead over the next four years, to say nothing about the rest of your lives, then we better fire up the old imagination.

Speaking personally, I’m most inspired when I imagine the contributions that our students will one day make to their communities, to Canada or their nation, and to the world, and it’s heartening to know that UBC Arts will play a role in helping you to do that. That, in fact, is what I love most about my job: that we might help you to imagine a new future and create or do something amazing.  I imagine a great ripple effect passing out of this hall and into the future, making a difference in the world for the better, and it’s a great feeling to be a part of that.

Right now, in fact just last night, I’ve been involved in a big act of imagination— crafting a 5 year plan for the Faculty of Arts. And guess what? I’m going to give you a little taste of what’s in it. And let me start with the ripple effect I just mentioned. We have a new reflecting pool in the Buchanan Courtyard, and in it are etched great sayings from the history of humankind in a ripple-like pattern, and we’ve taken that pattern and made it our logo to signify the effect that we hope all of you will have on the world. Along with our new look, we hope we will communicate better with you through our new website, our blogs and social media, the new digital signage and wayfinding. You should be able to access all the information you need when and where you need it. And if you have to search for it, we want you to be able to quickly access it online rather than having to wait in line.

I spend the first section of the plan talking about the kind of transformative education we hope you will experience here. What do I mean by transformative? The principal reason you’re here is to learn and discover, and it’s my deep hope that you’ll be inspired by discoveries in and outside the classroom, that you’ll open up to new ideas, that you’ll interact with committed professors who will help you to grow and to find your unique path in the world, that you’ll have profound encounters working or studying in the community or abroad, and that you’ll discover new things about yourselves as well as about the world.
I mentioned travel and work in the community. These are two of the many kinds of experiences we’re calling Enriched Educational Experiences, and these include experiences in community, global travel, student governance, small-class experiences, and directed research, all of which we think can enhance leadership, interpersonal skills, teamwork, real-world problem-solving experience, career preparation and responsible global citizenship, helping to make you just the kinds of people that graduate schools and employers are looking for. Of course, an Arts education at UBC still helps to foster critical thinking, communication, reasoning, and intellectual curiosity – we want you to be aware individuals, capable of making sense of the world and ready for a lifetime of learning — but we also want to provide you with additional experiences to help you emerge from here “life-ready”. In our strategic plan, I make it clear that we start with the students and plan from there to create a great student experience.
Did anyone perk up when I mentioned employers? Unlike vocational diplomas or even something like chemical engineering which has an obvious career track, the Arts degree can generate some anxiety among students and especially their parents. Okay, level with me – can I see hands of anyone who has had a discussion with his or her parents that started with a question like “What will you ever do with an Arts degree?? “

Yeah, I know – you’re wondering that too! You just won’t let-on your parents. ! In my experience, an Arts degree is the degree for the new economy. Let me tell you a family anecdote – my Cousin Bobby, who lives in Pennsylvania in the U.S., came back from service in the Army and landed an office job with a manufacturer and has worked his entire life in that job and for the same employer. This must sound quaint these days – statistics show that you’re likely to change jobs an average of 7-10 times over your careers and that many of you will change careers as well. The information age and the economy that accompanies it render ideas, knowledge, practices and methods obsolete at a frightening rate. If you are trained for a specific skill, there’s a high likelihood that your skill will no longer be useful or relevant in 10 years or that if you memorize enough information to land a certain job, that that information too will be obsolete in a decade or less.

Increasingly, employers are saying in the media – and I hear this directly from them all the time – that they want smart, flexible workers who will continually evolve with the times. They want good and literate communicators, people who can read reports, write and speak persuasively in public. They want inquisitive and critical employees who can analyze problems come up with new and creative solutions. And they want people who can work in teams, cope with cultural diversity, and deal with the extraordinary flow of new information that informs every field in the world today. The people they describe are Arts students – they’re you in four or five years.

To give you an example, Damon Horowirtz, Director of Engineering for Google, the leading tech company in the world, recently spoke about why Google hires mostly humanities and other Liberal Arts students. Out of the 6,000 that they hire this year, 4-5000 of them will be Arts students. As he said, they’re looking for people who are “smart and get things done.” It will still be important to avail yourself of the career counseling that we provide, and to try to make use of tools such as our Co-op program, internships, community research courses and other means by which you can expand your horizons in AND OUT of the classroom.

I met recently with a group of recent Arts grads who were from an amazing variety of professions – some were entrepreneurs, one was an actress (working actress), one was a publicist, one helped run a Creative arts organization and so on. All were very successful, however, and all of them stressed the importance of the co-op experience.

I talk to our graduates as they cross the stage to get their degree, and I often ask them a quick question, sometimes “What’s up next for you?” or “What are your plans now.” Of course I do get the occasional answer of “dude, unemployment” or “I don’t know – take a year off I guess and travel,” – not a bad thing to do after university if you can afford it — but a stunning number are off fascinating careers. Some are starting businesses, some go off to graduate school, some are going into Law school or Medical School; some, especially the economics students, are going into banking, finance, or accounting; the film and theatre students are often headed into careers as actors, directors, cinematographers; many go into communications; some go to work in the government at places like StatsCan, and many go into education. Along with those more obvious choices, a few last year were training for the Olympics, one was becoming an air traffic controller, and one was going into politics, working for a party. It’s incredibly varied, but the most impressive part is that they have choices and that they’re headed off into careers in which they can progress and meet new challenges.

So I think you’ve made a great choice and you’re in the right place– I’m very optimistic about the success of our graduates.

Let me get on my soapbox: The Arts are essential to human survival. Take any of the headlines from the media on a given day, and it is likely that our arts professors are involved in some related angle. If you’re concerned about poverty, the water supply, national elections or the civil war in Somalia, it’s likely you can find scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates who are researching the topic and applying the knowledge gained—often through cutting edge interdisciplinary teamwork. In Arts at UBC, we provide a foundation for responsible global citizenship that let’s our students make a difference in the world.
I’m not going to give you a lot of advice on your first day. You’re overwhelmed, maybe a little scared, and probably not processing half of what you’re hearing! But I will say this about your time at UBC: Make the most of it – attend concerts and plays, visit MOA, stroll the Nitobe Japanese Garden and hike the canopy walk in the Botanical Gardens. Get involved in sports, clubs, or societies. One of our new international students asked last week how he might stand out at UBC. I said: meet your professors, attend office hours and ask questions in class; join in activities that you enjoy and you may find yourself called upon to lead; make the most of our advisors in CASS to make sure you’re being smart about your choices for study. Take advantage of those enriched opportunities for study and make sure you get a small class and some research experience, community experiences and if possible, study abroad. Learn good time management skills so that you can plan your reading and assignments and not find yourself scrambling. Seek out advising, yes, but take charge of your program here at UBC. You are the authors of the rest of your lives, and I want you to start writing a very interesting story for yourselves.

And most of all follow your interests and passions. If you’ve chosen something you love and for which you have a real passion, your chances of excelling are that much greater, as are your chances for finding a meaningful career and life path. I’m not telling you to avoid practicalities, but I am saying that this is a good time to explore and to follow your curiousity. You’re life will be immeasurably richer for not having been afraid to do so.

Thanks for choosing Arts at UBC – we’re honoured to have you here and we’ll do our best to make this an extraordinary academic experience for you. I encourage all of our students to stop by at the Meet the Dean sessions I’ll schedule throughout the year with the Arts Undergraduate Society, and feel free to let me know how it’s going. And remember: Arts kicks ass!

Perhaps the best part of being Dean is standing on the stage to congratulate our graduates as they wrap up their most recent educational journey. Someone who doesn’t understand the meaning of these events might imagine that shaking two thousand hands in eight different congregations (what some schools call “commencements”, “convocations” or simply “graduations”) might be some form of advanced drudgery. But for each of our congregations, I find it hard to wipe the smile off my face. This is a day that brings families together to mark a significant life cycle passage and to honour the transformations that have taken place in students lives and outlooks. It’s a day to thank the families for their sacrifices and also to celebrate the extraordinary fact of postsecondary education in the modern world, to be grateful for this mission and the opportunity to touch students’ lives. It’s a day of medieval pomp and ceremonial seriousness but also of improvisation and delightful accidents.

I take the few seconds afforded me with each student as they cross the stage to ask them a question or two. This is my chance not only to remind them that we appreciate the work and commitment of each and every one of them but also to take stock of the meaning of UBC and Arts to their lives and to sample the plans they have ahead, if any. And so I’ll commonly as about what’s next for them, or how they saw their years at UBC, or where they’re off to next, or really whatever I’m inspired to ask.

Let me share just a little very unscientific sample of their responses to “what’s next?” And what an amazing variety of responses there are to this. Some will put the question into the immediate present and respond with something like “a nap, and then rooting for the Canucks!” Many shrug their shoulders with a look of contentment and say, “Dunno” or “Whatever life holds” or even “unemployment”. Many have jobs already: accountant, bank receptionist and account reps, counselor, publicist, intern with an NGO, telecommunications in Afghanistan [!], work for StatsCan (I promised to get my census finished soon) and other government service and even the Liberal Party, and one will run a restaurant. Two that I talked to are preparing for the next Olympics (swimming and sailing) – good luck, we’re rooting for you! Some are starting businesses, such as one student opening up a yoga school, and others are looking for work. I talked to two that were going into flight school, two that were joining the RCMP, one who is training as a firefighter, and one becoming an air traffic controller (I asked him to go get some sleep and please stay awake).

A huge number of our students are off to travel, often for a whole year, with South America, Southeast Asia, China, India, and Europe (Switzerland, Italy, France, and Spain) as the most popular destinations. One student told me she’s off to sail around the Caribbean for a year. I have to say that I was often feeling equal amounts of pride and jealousy about these plans.

Perhaps a third of those I spoke with are looking at graduate school and second entry programs, either next year or the following year, and many are pursuing that abroad, although I think UBC seemed to be the favorite destination! A surprisingly large number of the Economics grads were headed to the London School of Economics). Law school was a favorite destination of the PoliSci grads, but also (surprising to me) of our Psychology grads. Students were determined to make films, to keep acting, to continue their social work, to be journalists, and as one put it, “do great things and travel the world.”

Honorary doctorate recipient Kenneth Lyotier, who founded the organization “United We Can” in Vancouver’s Lower East Side, shared lessons he had learned while searching bins for recyclable waste, including the importance of getting up early, digging deep, and sharing what you find. Singer, actor, and activist Leon Bibb, also an honorary doctorate, sang a lovely rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” in tribute to the graduates. I came out of each congregation more energized and inspired, and certainly renewed in my conviction of the importance of the work done here at UBC. My humble thanks to our students for this.

Addressing the attendees, string trio to my left, underneath the Pavilion.

Today, we got to celebrate the arrival of our newly designed Buchanan Courtyards, which will have a transformative effect on our use of the complex that’s at the centre of the Faculty of Arts. Below is a loose version of my speaking points on this occasion. It was great to see students, faculty, emeriti faculty, administrators, project personnel, our former Dean and so many others there to welcome the new spaces.  Check out the article about the Courtyards on the Arts webspace.  See: http://www.arts.ubc.ca/students/index.php?id=1231&home=casshomepage&index=1
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I want to extend a warm welcome to our alumni, students, faculty, staff, friends and family as we celebrate the opening of Buchanan Courtyards. And we must have properly propitiated the gods of constant drizzle to have obtained this rare glimpse of sunshine.

Plans for this project began several years ago when Buchanan Buildings A, B, C and D were selected to be completely renovated under UBC Renew Phase 1, a program jointly funded by UBC and the Province of British Columbia. I’ll speak more of the transformations underway in the buildings, but it became clear that as the vision for a renewed Buchanan block came to fruition, we would have, at the heart of the Buchanan Complex, two decrepit spaces, underutilized, uncared for, and having decayed significantly from the original architectural and landscape vision that produced them. It was at that point that interested students, emeriti faculty who had long advocated for courtyard renewal, and the former Dean and her team began to work with Campus Planning, the Campus Architect and others to radically transform the courtyards.

Early this year we inaugurated two new spaces for musical performance: the Roy Barnett Recital Hall and the New Old Aud. The opening of the Aud was a moment for many alumni and faculty and staff to reminisce about experiences in the building years ago, a building that was a central icon in the academic lives of many. These courtyards too will bring back memories, and we are delighted that the renovation of the space might provoke this interaction of the old and the new, new experiences and old memories, a vital intersection of past and present.

You may have also noticed some images cropping up around Buchanan and the Faculty of Arts buildings as we play with new ways of representing the faculty. Let me talk a bit about the genesis of the design you see on our shirts, our signs, banners, bookmarks and beyond. As part of the design of the courtyard, this reflecting pool and pavilion were conceived. And within the pond, it was envisioned that great thoughts of humankind could be inscribed in the bottom of the pool. All of the Departments, Schools and programs in Arts were polled, and each contributed a quote (all before 1922 for copyright issues) and these will be, in the weeks ahead, etched into stone on the bottom of the pool in patterns that look like ripples, extending out in broken and partial concentric circles. Public Design, which designed the pavilion, worked with us to extract this image as a mark and a part of the identity system for the Faculty of Arts. And all throughout the Buchanan Buildings, you’ll see new signage and wayfinding systems that use this image, a color pallet, a bold modernist a font, and the proportions of the white bricks that help to give this complex its identity. In everything we touched, we hoped to reinforce and clarify the elegant modernist lines, proportions, colors, and textures of the Buchanan architecture.

These are part of a wholescape transformation of academic spaces to create a seamless academic and social experience for our students. Our classrooms will connect to the world, our spaces will be universally accessible, they will be interactive and engaging spaces, and the spaces outside of classrooms will be open for students to eat, study, work, discuss, relax. Throughout the buildings, screens add information and news, and signage points the way and orients the visitor. Getting lost in the Buchanan Complex is no longer a participant sport.

Every great city has some kind of great public gathering spot at its core. My favorites of these kinds of squares and plazas and parks offer a range of experiences – from broad and open hardscapes for public gatherings to naturalscapes for contemplation and relaxation and renewal, from open and inspiring vistas to cozy and intimate spaces for reading and napping, and they incorporate water and light and various textures, details and surfaces. The two Buchanan courtyards incorporate this diverse set of options and experiences for our students and guests. They are connected by a waterway, which will capture storm run-off and direct it into the marsh section of the North courtyard. We have no idea yet how our students will use these spaces, but we offer them up for generations of students to bring to them their own creativity.

We will of course animate the spaces in Buchanan Courtyard. We are deeply grateful for an anonymous gift of $250,000 from two UBC alumni to support programming in the courtyards, and I’m happy to say that Professor Ira Nadel has been engaged to schedule events and to animate the space in its first year. I understand that Arts Wednesday presentations are already coming to the Stir It Up Café and the Courtyards. Speaking of Stir It Up, I had an interesting moment last week. I was being interviewed by Jian Gomeshi for Q on CBC about the 30th anniversary of Bob Marley’s death and the impression that his legacy has been commercialized and diluted. As they got ready for my interview, they played “Stir It Up”, and I confessed first off that I too had been guilty of using Bob’s legacy for branding as I had just helped name a café “Stir It Up”, after the great Marley anthem. But I have to say that I think it’s a great name: not only does it pay tribute to Marley and serve as a sly pun about stirring up coffee, but it suggests that this will be a place for lively, transformative, provocative exploration, a place to truly stir it up.

The programming funds will support transform this new public space where the diversity and the interdisciplinary conversations of the Faculty of Arts will come alive; this will be a space perfectly suited to the creative and performing arts: music, theatre, poetry, outdoor films and visual and video art; a place where economists and philosophers can hang out debate; an outdoor home to creative writers and for discussions in foreign languages; a place for protest and activism; a place where scholars and learners connect with friends, and find ways to make a difference, a place to stir it up.

And now I want to acknowledge some of the people who have made this possible.

Acknowledge contribution

Conceptual Planning and Design (in addition to above)
Space2place Landscape Architects (produced original concept plans)
School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA)
Co-Design (facilitated workshops)

Consultants and project management
Landscape Architects – Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg (Prime Consultant), especially Andrew Robertson and Chris Phillips
Architects – Public Design, including Brian Wakelin, John Wall and Susan Mavor
Project Management – UBC Project Services staff, including Diane Foldi, and Building Operations Staff, Jeff Nolte, and Chris Skipper.

Architects and original landscape architect for Buchanan Renew Building Upgrades
Busby Perkins and Will (Prime Consultant)
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander
And our campus architect, Gerry McGeough

Construction
Contractor – Scott Construction

Faculty of Arts
I’m grateful to the faculty and staff for enduring the transformation and for participating in the many committees and sessions that helped create this design. Anne Marie Fenger has seen this project through for the Dean’s Office and we also want to thank Guillaume Houle and Dominique Lopez.

And especially my predecessor and friend, former Dean Nancy Gallini, whose energetic dedication to students helped to propel this project along, and who, when it ran short of funding, made the commitments that kept this project alive and intact.

I want to conclude by inviting you all back in September in Imagine week as we welcome our students into these courtyards and celebrate again. Thank you for coming out today.

Although I have poked fun at the Entertainment Industry’s obsessively self-congratulatory award shows for years, I have to say that it was a thrill (even if a hypocritical one) to attend the Grammys!

First, we were able to bring together nearly the complete team that worked on my project (Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936-37, a 10-CD and DVD boxed set), from studio engineers to producers and even the fundraisers, along with family members; and some of us were meeting in person for the first time after years of phone and email collaboration. At our small luncheon at a Hollywood eatery, former California Governor Grey Davis surprised us with a visit to congratulate the team.

Second, it was a treat to bring my 7-year-old daughter and to have her as my guest nearly stageside for the evening awards show, which, with a cast from Jagger to Gaga and Eminem to Streisand and even Dylan, was an impressive smorgasbord of talent with lots of unpredictable moments. Among her favourites were the performance by the British band Muse and the colorful, Muppet-inspired Cee Lo Green duet with Gweneth Paltrow (F**** You). Not a fan of Bieber, she did enjoy the Eminem/Rihanna performance! My own favorite musical moment was Nora Jones’ rendition of the Dolly Parton classic, “Jolene”. Who knew? Of course there were lots of celebrity-sightings (a somewhat redundant concept when a good chunk of the audience have some claim on celebrity-hood): we were seated near to Elvis Costello and Dianna Krull, had Rihanna and Cyndi Lauper parading below us, and stood at the party with Esperanza Spaulding, the talented winner for Best New Artist. The Trustees Awards, presented at a ceremony the night before, allowed for more generous tributes for longer-term contributions to the industry (Julie Andrews, Dolly Parton, the Ramones, and even Roger Linn, the inventor of the drum machine).

Although it is an industry in its death throes, its professional organization, The Recording Academy, puts on a good show, and the Grammys remains one of the last award shows to cover the gamut of genres (from country western, to hip hop, to classical and world music). The Academy clearly wanted to link generations through tribute pieces and performances with mentors. And they keep the telecast highly performance-heavy and award-light, leaving most of the awards to the earlier, pre-telecast ceremony next door to the Staples Centre in the Los Angeles Convention Center (which is where my categories were announced).

Oh, and we lost in our two categories (!), but it was only about 5 minutes of disappointment, and then it was back to enjoying the show (and in one category we lost to The Beatles, so who’s going to complain?). So I came away with a medallion and not a statue, but glad that my project (and Haiti) got some recognition.

Sometimes my day job (being dean) and my commitment to Haiti come together nicely and unexpectedly. I heard the other day that the UBC alumni group in Toronto is gathering at the Drake Hotel on Friday November 26 from 6-9 for a Reception to Rebuild Haiti and a silent auction to build a school in Haiti. I was pretty inspired by this, and because I can’t go personally, I was asked to come up with a testimonial to be read. Here’s what I’m sending along:

“Honorary Consul General Dr. Pierre and Mme. Pierre; Alumni of UBC; and friends of Haiti – bonswa mesyedanm ak zanmi peyi dayiti yo [good evening ladies and gentlemen and friends of the country of Haiti].

I am honored to send this warm note of greetings and thanks to you tonight as you gather for a reception and auction to rebuild Haiti. I have only recently assumed the Deanship of the Faculty of Arts at UBC, having moved from Toronto to Vancouver in September. However, I am deeply gratified that alumni of this great university have dedicated themselves to raising funds for so essential and inspiring a cause.

As some of you may know, I have had the pleasure of working on Haitian music for the last twenty-five years as a scholar, a journalist, a festival director and activist. I am grateful to Haitian friends and colleagues for so much of what I hold dear and indeed for so much of who I am that it is impossible for me to imagine my life without this enduring engagement with Haiti and Haitians.

In the words of an old proverb found in religious songs in Haiti, “Jou-m tonbe se pa jou-m koulye” (The day I fall [as a leaf falls on the water] is not the day I sink). This phrase captures for me the enduring spirit to survive and to thrive in the most adverse of conditions. I urge you not just to be charitable toward Haiti, but to be inspired by the strength and beauty of Haiti; not just to help rebuild the country, but to learn from the ability of so many Haitians to face disaster with courage and tenacity.

Vreman, tremblemantè-a te kraze kay-yo men li pat kraze espri pep-Ayisyen-nan. Ansanm ansanm nou kab rebati peyi-a. Pran kouray; kenbe la pa lage’l. [Truly, this earthquake crushed buildings but it didn’t crush the spirit of the Haitian people. Together/united we can rebuild the country. Take courage, hold on (take care) and don’t give up.]

Onè – respè [Honor - respect]

Gage Averill,
Dean of the Faculty of Arts, UBC”

So, if you happen to be around Toronto on the 26th, please stop in and show your support. There will be a Mad Men themed silent auction (where among other things they’ll auction off two of my Alan Lomax in Haiti boxed cd sets and my book on Haitian popular music). Tickets are $23.00 — check it out at www.ubcto.com/events