Ronald Baker

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Ronald Baker - 00:00
Yes, well I’m Ron Baker and I don’t use the title Dr. which people
insist on using for University Presidents because I was the first President
of the University of Prince Edward Island and so naturally people wanted to
call me Dr. Baker and as a result I’ve got four honorary degrees which I
don’t use in that way. I didn’t have a doctorate by the way, I was
offered a PhD fellowship in London as my wife had but I didn’t want to do
that, I wanted to switch from English Literature which is what I had taken
for most of my first degree and my MA, I wanted to switch to Linguistics
and I wanted to start studying and I went to London because I knew that
there in their school, I went to the school of Oreinetal and African
Studies, which is a College, the University of London and if I went there I
would be able to study the British Linguistics School, the Prague
Linguistics School, the French Linguistics School whereas if I went to the
very good places in the States like Michigan, I would get nothing but the
Modern American and in fact that would have been a very good thing to do
because they really dominate Modern Linguistics, I mean that’s where
Chompsky was and so on. I, actually a student of UPEI who wanted to go on
in Linguistics and wanted some variety from the American, I advised some
years later to go and in fact he did go and he did a Master’s at Montreal
but decided then he really wanted to get into Modern Linguistics and he
went to Michigan and got a PhD and became the Head of Linguistics at
University of Hawaii and he’s the son of Brendon O’Grady. Brendon
O’Grady was the Head of English and the Dean of Arts at St. Dunstan’s
and became the Head of English at UPEI at the beginning. 


Slide - Aspirations: Field Linguist - 02:31
I wanted to do a years work on an Indian Language in BC, in northern BC, so
I wanted to spend the year working on it and I’d done Linguistics in
London and I wanted to find out if I could be a field linguist so I took a
year and Jeff Andrew, who was my mentor very much then, wangled it through
an early summer meeting of Senate when there was no there, that I would
teach a couple of course in Prince George while I did my research and they
would be for credit, they were the first credit courses UBC taught off
campus.   


Slide - Changing the Academic Landscape in B.C. - 03:16
I was at UBC and I was on a President’s Commission to study the needs of
Higher Education in BC. Then we got a new President, Jack MacDonald and he
inherited what we were doing at UBC and he had about five of us and each of
us did a separate thing, one did Finance, he was a mathematician he did
Finances but I did the future of institutions in BC and at that time we had
no community colleges at all so I recommended that we have two, four year
colleges, Victoria and a new one east of Vancouver because of the
tremendous increase in enrollments and then a community college system and
the Government accepted that report completely except that they changed the
recommendation for four year college in Victoria to a university because
they just had to politically and then that meant they couldn’t really set
up a new university in Victoria and not one in Vancouver so those were the
two changes and then as a result of that, I was the first Faculty member at
Simon Fraser and the Director of Planning, Academic Planning not physical
planning, and that lead me in to all sorts of service, there were fifty
senior universities in Canada roughly about that time and they were all
different patterns so I spent a lot of time really looking at traditional
patterns and new ones and so on.


Slide - Becoming UPEI’s First President - 05:15
I was offered all sorts of jobs but nearly all in Administration, where’s
I’ve always wanted to teach at least a course or two and in fact except
for one year UPEI when we were teaching- when we were fundraising for the
Library, I’ve taught, I taught all through my Admin career. And so, a lot
of the office, approaches, I shouldn’t say offices, where for bigger
places or I wouldn’t be able to do that, so I wasn’t interested in any
of those at all but the AUCC you know is the body of the Universities and
Colleges of Canada and the Executor Director of it was a mentor of mine,
very much so, a Newbrunswicker who’d gone from New Brunswick to UBC with
the new President, MacKenzie who’d been President at UNB and then became
President at UBC and he brought his assistant Jeff Andrew. Jeff Andrew then
became the Vice-President of UBC and when I was a student, he was very much
a mentor of mine and then later he became Director of the AUCC and he had
been a great friend of Alan Holman of the Holman’s store on the Island
and together they’d worked when they were young men at a bank in
Summerside and Jeff always visited the Island, nearly every year, so he
called me from Ottawa and he said “UPEI is looking for a President, what
would you think of my suggesting you?” and I said I don’t know anything
about the Maritimes, I spent a month in Moncton during the War when I was
in the RAF and Moncton acted as a kind of base for RAF coming in from
Britain until they were shipped off somewhere else and so I don’t know
anything about that and anyway when UPEI approached me, I was quite
interested to learn more about it and I heard very good things about the
Island and I’d known some people etcetera, so I went for an interview and
then it’s in the history of what happened, they finished up with two
candidates Pauline Jewett, Pauline Jewett was an academic but she was also
head of the NDP in Britain and very active in many ways, a very bright
woman and it finished up after two years that the vote came, it was six for
Pauline and four for me and they decided that wasn’t close- that wasn’t
a big enough spread and what’s amusing is that according to the history
the voting was entirely by Institution and St. Dunstan’s voted for me and
PWC voted for Pauline Jewett, which was crazy you know in terms of politics
and because I’m not Catholic. I didn’t know this until the history came
out two years ago and so then when it got to that, they decided that six
wasn’t enough so they reconvened and they argued for three days I think
and in the end I got it nine to one. Pauline then became President of Simon
Fraser which was very interesting because I’d essentially been
Vice-President when we were building.


Slide - First Days as President: February-June 1969 - 09:18
I was on a research leave working in the British Museum actually and I
insisted I would do that and so I was appointed in February of 1969 but I
didn’t go until June and meanwhile they said you know well things have
got to be done because the other two universities are having to disappear
and so on and so forth and so they said we’ll appoint a secretary in PEI
for you and she’ll keep you in touch and so they appointed this secretary
for me Connie Cullen, “do you know Connie Cullen?” Well Connie Cullen I
assumed of course in England on the phone was an experienced university
secretary, she kept me informed brilliantly about what was happening and I
wrote back and told her what to do, at one point the Science Heads
couldn’t agree on a Dean so I said “Call a meeting and you Chair it of
the Heads and get them to appoint a Dean”, so Connie calls the meeting,
she Chairs it, the Heads of Science and they get a Dean, well I turn up in
June ‘69 and I meet Connie Cullen, she’s a nineteen year old student,
on top of that she’s the daughter of the Chairman of the Board of St.
Dunstan’s, a good Catholic you know and she’d been immaculate.


Slide - Early Days at UPEI - 10:57
When I got there, I simply spent time the first few days meeting everyone I
possibly could. I’m also a great believer, especially in small
universities, for the faculty all getting to know one another and so right
from the beginning, I started having receptions where I deliberately mixed
the people form PWC and SDU and in every way possible and made some quick
decisions about the location of students and most of the time I would have
a meeting of the Heads of the departments and the Deans and put
propositions to them and they would agree. It was only if there was a real
disagreement that something else had to be done so for example, one
department simply couldn’t agree on an Interim Chairman, I said
everything had to be interim because we didn’t have time between the
instigation of the legislation on the first of June and the opening of
classes in late August to settle everything so all decisions were interim,
this was agreed and most decisions were made fairly easily, some weren’t
and occasionally that was left up to me for example, they couldn’t agree
on the location of the students because we had to two campuses, PWC and SDU
and so they said I should make the decision and I decided to put all the
freshman, if possible, on the PWC campus but we couldn’t move Music and
Home Economics because there were no facilities on the St. Dunstan’s
campus for those. Also, they both really wanted to stay at PWC where they
had the facilities and so except for their freshman which weren’t very
many so we put all the freshman there so all the new ones could work
together from the beginning and we put everyone else except for Music and
Home Ec and Phys Ed, on the St. Dunstan’s campus and they could get- and
then from the beginning I tried in every way to mix people up.


Slide - Alcohol and House Parties - 13:37
In my time as President and I talked to the Government about this, to begin
with neither SDU or PWC had any alcohol on campus, except the priests did
at SDU but otherwise they didn’t and I wanted to be able to have
entertainment the way I had it in British Columbia with some alcohol at
things so I talked to the Premier and he agreed, gave me permission and I
used to go and buy the liquor myself and my other, I was married to someone
else then for a while and we put on receptions and we always mixed them up
and we did that so by the end of the first year, everyone, all he faculty
had been to at least two receptions where they were mixed up and the
Administrative people the top ones came to pretty well everything. So
whereas I had this big old house that the Board, the Board hadn’t even
consulted me, they just bought it but it was in pretty run down and I
didn’t do anything to change it because I was going to have all these
parties there and it was ideally suited, it was on Fitzroy Street and it
had a large room which I had a piano in and you could push the chairs
around and have dancing in it. It had a huge dining room, you could seat
twenty people there and then they had another large room downstairs and it
had a big open hall and great big stairs going up and people could sit on
the stairs, you know and you could get fifty or sixty people there for a
party and some of them could sit down and some of them could dance and PWC
especially, still had the tradition of bad pianists playing the piano for
dancing and I’m a bad pianist so I would join in that and if I’ve began
it all the bad pianists would come out, there was a man on the Board of
Governors Will McGuinness, he wasn’t much better than I was. Mary
Crockett, the Librarian was a good pianist for dance music and so on we
would have a succession on dancing and it was still the time then when
people stood around the piano and sang old songs, you know I remember the,
Connie Cullen’s father who was a good Catholic-Irish Catholic, Chairman
of the Board of St. Dunstan’s and Jean used to come to the parities and
always sing “I’ll take you home again Kathleen” you know on the, like
Brian Mulroney thinking it’s an old Irish folks song, you know where
it’s Tin Pan Alley actually and that really wasn’t possible after the
first year as things began and wasn’t so necessary either so Peter
Meincke took it as his role to cultivate the town which he did very, very
well and he redecorated the house so that instead of it being as it was in
my time, a party place you know, it became a very respectable place with
nice flowers around and so on and I used to go sometimes and he had all the
townspeople and he really did win over the town.


Slide - Remembering Ron’s Wife, and UPEI Professor, Dr. Frances M. Frazer
- 17:35
My wife Fran Frazer got into Children’s Literature by accident, the
editor of the Canadian Literature the journal George Woodcock, was at UBC
and George was famous he’d been a friend of Spenders and everyone is in
England and then come to Canada, he was the Canadian and he was at UBC
Library but he used to use Fran as a reviewer, so he asked her to write, he
was doing a special edition on Maritime Literature which he’d do Prince
Edward Island’s and she laughed at him and said the only thing I know
about Prince Edward Island literature, children’s literature, is Anne of
Green Gables and I’d almost forgotten that so he said “oh, well who
else in the department or nearby specializes in children’s literature?”
So she named one or two we had and he asked what had they published but
they hadn’t, you know, so he persuaded her; she spent her whole summer
doing her chapter on Maritime- on Prince Edward Island literature and you
know it’s great it begins by saying Prince Edward Island literature has
three themes it’s a better word than that but that’s what it said three
themes: the Native Indian Tradition, Glooscap and the legends, Folklore,
and the cult singer like Tom, what’s his- Stompin’ Tom Collins and the
Victorianism sentimentalism of Anne of Green Gables and then she develops
each theme. No one had ever put Stompin’ Tom, poor Stompin’ Tom no one
would publish an article on him and he was being put up for an honorary
degree and I asked him, I said “Tom I haven’t got time to look really
I’m just going away, can you tell me anything on you in any of the
Libraries?” No, some of them had had articles and they’d all been
turned down not a Maritime library would print anything and so Fran did
this one and of course George published it because he wouldn’t take any
of her people because they hadn’t published and he knew she could publish
so he was delighted with it and but you know but these three themes no one
had done that before and it’s true and so she quoted all the things from
the nineteenth century, of the folksingers and so on and it [unclear] right
in that tradition.


Slide - The Importance of Academic Libraries - 20:53
Well for me the Library is the most important thing in the University and
particularly in the days before everything was on the web because in the
days before everything was on the web, most Libraries in Canada couldn’t
afford all the Scientific journals, you know that was just beyond, but you
couldn’t get them on the web you could sometimes get articles on
Interlibrary Loan. I mean when I was an undergraduate at UBC, UBC had a
very good Library but you can’t take all the journals in the world and
especially in the sciences you need things from these journals. So in those
days for the scientists the Library was just as important because that’s
where they had the journals and yet, so that held true I think completely
until the web made possible subscriptions to journals and access journals
as it is now so now, quite a small Library can give it’s Science faculty
access to certainly the most important scientific journals and to a lot of
others.


Slide -  History of Canadian Academic Libraries - 22:19
The religious universities especially in the Maritimes tended to focus
their beginnings on residences and athletic facilities. Libraries came way
down on the list, the western universities started with libraries. The
first decent academic building at UBC was a library, a beautiful library. I
came to UBC as a freshman in 1947 and it was still the only traditional
fully developed building on campus with masons brought in from Italy to do
the- and a marvelous collection. Well when I came to PEI and the Maritimes,
I was horrified by the libraries and even when they had an opportunity to
do something, they didn’t take it.


Slide - Fundraising for the UPEI Library - 23:21
There were some challenges in that not everyone, the new UPEI agreed that
the Library was the most important thing to do and there were arguments, I
think I was saying some speech that there were twenty things that were so
important and each one of them had to be done first, you know and that was
absolutely true, I mean the poor registrar Mike Hennessey is sitting there
trying to decide which courses will be given and so on and there are no
decisions made, you know and so and everything had to be interim because we
couldn’t have, UPEI had more students on the Senate and Board than any
university at all and- but we couldn’t elect the students because
students weren’t there in the summer so there was no year, no way that we
could come to certain decisions legally so we recruited students from the
Student Councils at PWC and SDU, theoretically as guests at the Senate and
Board but they always spoke up. I remember Connie Cullen especially who was
the student representative on the Board and you know there she was, her
father having been Chairman of the SDU Board and Connie jumped in on
anything. So anyway, I persuaded them that as an interim decision because
we had to have something to fundraise about to talk about, we would talk
about the Library so when I was off campus that’s what I did and it was
the only time that I didn’t teach that year because we had to fundraise
everywhere you know right across the country. 


Slide - Final Thoughts - 25:20
My two things academically where a the Library and that was the fundraising
thing, there was some business of merging the two existing libraries and
what we do about duplicates and so on but I wasn’t much involved at all,
Mary Crockett, the Librarian did a great job and then when we got the money
for the new library we hired an architect from Halifax and who had done
something similar at Dalhousie and Mary Crockett worked very much with him
and that’s how we got a new library but the other things is we got a lot
of money into books and UPEI has continued actually to do that and I’m
told now that it’s unquestionable about books to students, one of the
best small libraries in Canada but I still think even though the web has
made some difference especially for science, I still think the Library is
the most important thing particularly because it enables, that perhaps
relatively few students who are remarkably bright and have a remarkable
range of interest to go and just read anything.