As the granddaughter of Scottish and Irish immigrants to Canada, both sides of my family were closely connected to McGill. My paternal grandfather studied Theology at McGill in the 1930s, and the Scottish side of my family grew up on Prince Arthur Street – tobogganing on the McGill campus in the winter, picnicking there in the summer.
A passionate learner, my mother earned two academic degrees from McGill (BA’39, MEd’73) and was always proud of her McGill and Montreal roots. It therefore seemed natural that I would continue in those footsteps, and at the tender age of 16, I enrolled as a BA student at McGill. Little did anyone know then what lay ahead! “For the times they were a’changin.”
McGill of the late ’60s was the turbulent centre of just that change. Sit-ins, draft dodgers, women’s libbers, demonstrations, drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll were the order to the day, and Woodstock was only a three-hour drive from Montreal. Richard Nixon was the enemy. Che Guevara, the new hero. The Admin building was occupied by long-haired hippies. Professors were ridiculed, insulted, and chucked out of lecture halls, and LSD was “dropped” in the McLennan Library.
Ours was an education which provided us with tools we would need in a new world moving into the 21st century, a world that we would not only be part of, but also help create.”
At the same time, Québec was discovering its own identity. In 1970, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act for the first time in Canadian history during peacetime, after the newly formed Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped and assassinated two public figures. The National Guard patrolled the streets of Montreal with loaded machine guns and staying out after curfew could be life-threatening.
Everything had been turned upside down. There were no boundaries. No rules. In all this confusion, how were we to prepare ourselves for life ahead? What would that life be? Ours was certainly an education of a very different kind. At the same time, we felt – no, we knew! – we could do and be anything we wanted to be. After all, this was the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. Ours was an education which provided us with tools we would need in a new world moving into the 21st century, a world that we would not only be part of, but also help create.
In 1974, I left Montreal and moved to Germany. (Not to say that things were any calmer there, but that’s a story for another day.) And since the early 1990s, I have represented the McGill Alumni Association in Germany.
Today, on the other side of our shrinking globe and six time zones away from Montreal, McGill continues to enrich my life in ways that would have been inconceivable for my grandfather or my mother. But as much as the world has changed since the 1930s, like them – I am proud to be a McGillian.