I had a wonderful sociology professor by the name of Immanuel Wallerstein whose course convinced me to transfer into history; this is no knock on Professor Wallerstein; he really was a wonderful professor, but his focus was so historical that I decided history was the place for me to be, or to be precise historical theory, or one particular grand theory about historical development in England and France during the era of revolutions.
Speaking of revolutions, I was on the McGill Daily in one of its eras of revolution, and pushed the radical message of the time, and thought for a while that through journalism I would help transform society. Then I developed my historical theory and thought through my work in history I would help transform society. McGill kept directing my revolutionary impulses and at the same time planted the seeds of moving in a different direction altogether. My days at the Daily led me to a summer job at the Montreal Star, where I learned that there are two sides to every question, a heretical notion for Daily radicals, but one that stayed with me.
What I certainly think I retain from my McGill days is a delight in intellectual engagement and a devotion to good writing, allowing me to produce five books on everything from Sherlock Holmes to William Makepeace Thackeray to a murder mystery.”
My revolutionary days are long past, but some aspects of them remain with me, though turned almost inside out. My historical theory about the economic forces driving the English Civil War of Cromwell’s era turned out not to be true at all, but the devotion to scholarship that I in part learned at McGill is what helped me discover that; and this very year, ironically, I returned to the Civil War to write a biographical article on Cromwell. Biography! My radical McGill self would have scoffed at the notion: what did biography have to do with the sweep of history? Well, perhaps quite a lot, and in any case what I’ve come to love is writing about individuals in history, which I now find much more interesting than historical forces.
Or I write a book full of historical tidbits, like my history of student life at the University of British Columbia (The Hundred-Year Trek) which focuses on the sort of human interest stories I would have scorned as a McGill radical – and yet, and yet ... It is only one and the same thing that can be turned into its dialectical opposite, as a McGill radical of the day used to say rather cryptically, and maybe I have just moved through the dialectical looking glass to become the very thing I thought I was fighting against, the opposite of what I thought I was fighting for. And yet an opposite still retains its original image, and what I certainly think I retain from my McGill days is a delight in intellectual engagement and a devotion to good writing, allowing me to produce five books on everything from Sherlock Holmes to William Makepeace Thackeray to a murder mystery.
And was it my time on the McGill Daily attacking the student society that led me to end up working for the student society at UBC? The times change, and we change with them, as someone once said, but we don’t change all that much. Our ideas change, but the issues that engage us remain the same.
And perhaps that is what I take away from my McGill experience. McGill was a time to hone my intellectual skills and to send me on a journey that led to history and English literature, then back to history again. I was there for the sesquicentennial and I salute you on your bicentennial, and hope you are still helping students sharpen their skills, teaching them how to think.