This article was first published in 2017. For updates, please see our new article on Kendall and Faith Wallis.
Few can say they’ve spent their entire adulthood studying and working in one place. At yet, here at McGill, we have Kendall and Faith Wallis – both multiple McGill alumni – who have called the University home for more than half a century.
“We met at McGill, and it’s been our life since the mid ’60s,” says Faith, BA’71, MA’74, MLS’76, who has been a professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies since 1986.
Faith’s enthusiasm for McGill and her chosen career is palpable. Sitting in the stark History and Classical studies faculty lounge, she describes her and Kendall’s life trajectory, bubbling with laughter as she recounts their interactions with students over the years.
Kendall, BA’69, MLS’71, speaks quietly, and carefully, but with a twinkle in his eye. He is a retired reference librarian whose soft-spoken manner and sparkling eyes indicate a man who has spent much of his life in quiet spaces, searching for knowledge and spreading it to cohort after cohort of students.
“He was Google before Google, basically,” says Faith, laughing, when Kendall speaks of his job at the McLennan Library. Kendall made a major impact on the structure of McGill’s Library, fighting for the introduction of the very first liaison librarian during his time as acting McLennan Librarian, a term which lasted three years before he “went back into the trenches.”
The Wallises created a fund to support of graduate students in the History and Classical Studies department. With no children of their own, they wanted to put their money towards a cause they both care about before they pass on.
“We [in the Department of History and Classical Studies] are poised now, I firmly believe, to become a major venue for postgraduate training in history, on a continental scale,” says Faith. “We’ve got an amazing diversity and depth of expertise here. Plus, we’ve got the Islamic Institute, and other things like it which allow us to play a bigger game than most history departments do. And having classics and history together is an advantage as well.”
Despite this good positioning, Faith sees a major hurdle facing graduate students, especially those from abroad, as they are not eligible for Quebec, provincial, or federal funding. “If you’re going to build a graduate program, you really have to think about deep structural commitments to funding, and being able to see students through without their accumulating crippling debt for the rest of their lives.”
The History and Classical Studies Graduate Excellence Fund is the Wallises’ effort to address this problem, and they want to encourage their colleagues, alumni and any other supporters of the department to contribute. The aim is to give students extra funds to complete their degrees, should they need more than three years, or to gain support for field research or other training, such as learning a language.
“Part of this is mortar, instead of blocks,” says Kendall. “Filling in the cracks, stabilizing the structure so that students are able to go that little bit further.”
“It’s so frustrating when we get applications from great students, but we can’t match the offer they got from another school because of funding. Hopefully in the future we can make a stronger case for excellent students to be able to come here,” Faith adds.
“We do have really good undergraduates at McGill. The graduate program is good too, we certainly have the teaching expertise and brains here to make it better, if we only had the funds,” Faith concludes.
What will your legacy be? Learn more about legacy giving.