Random Access

There are only three of them left now, of the dozen people who sat around the table November 18, 1965 at the first-ever meeting of the Erindale College council.
E. A. “Peter” Robinson recalled Saturday morning, at the kickoff for the 40th celebration of what is now called the University of Toronto Mississauga, that he had barely arrived at the downtown campus from his native England when he was asked if he would like to be the first associate dean of a new school starting to the west.
“I thought about it for 45 minutes and then decided I was being a pioneer, which was only appropriate as a new Canadian.”
My, how things have changed since then.
John Switzer, who acted as master of ceremonies Saturday, was on campus the first year classes were held there. There was the “preliminary” north building, two tennis courts, 185 students, 40 faculty and an intimate education you just wouldn’t believe. “They were small classes of six or seven students that were like graduate seminars with all of these professors who were wonderful characters.”
There are a lot of anomalies about UTM, not the least of which is that students study there for four or five years, then go downtown at the end of the process to pick up their sheepskins at Convocation Hall. In some cases, it might be their first trip down there.
This year, in conjunction with the 40th anniversary, the school decided to do things differently.
That’s how 1,100 graduating students and their parents were invited to piggy-back on the kickoff of the 40th anniversary celebrations Saturday on a wickedly warm day.
There was an academic procession from the CCT building (There’s no I for Information available in it anymore apparently)‚ to the Recreation, Athletic and Wellness Centre, better known as the RAWC, as in Rock.
There were several formulaic speeches, but none, unfortunately, from former Premier Bill Davis, (and a great student of the area’s great founding political father, T.L. Kennedy) who is a master of the form. Instead of having someone reflect on the great history of the campus and its special people, (Principal J. Tuzo Wilson’s breakthrough work on plate tectonics, the battle led by Mike Lavelle to get Erindale and its basketball team into the OUAA in the 1970s, the late Archie French’s famous “den” in the gym basement, former grad student Roberta Bondar’s trip into space with the campus crest or the burgeoning forensics program and the green initiatives on campus) we got grad Rob Follows and his wife Katrina giving an inspirational travelogue on climbing the highest peaks on seven continents. Interesting, but inappropriate.
The best speech of the day may have come from the youngest speaker. Valedictorian Emmanuel Tolias reflected on the huge changes too: the ones that have come since this 37th grad class arrived on campus. The bulge of the double cohort helped pry capital funds – finally — out of Queen’s Park. When these students began class at UTM, there was no CCT building, there was no underground parking on campus and there was no Hazel.
Well, there was Hazel in the municipal sense but there was no “Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre,” the building that bears such a pretentious name to honour such an unpretentious person. The students have taken matters into their own hands, as is their wont, and shortened it.
Tolias, a product of the local Dufferin-Peel system and one of the winners of this year’s Gordon Cressy Awards for outstanding extracurricular service, asked his fellow graduates to recall how different the landscape looked four years ago, let alone 40.
“And don’t worry, you are not alone. That big screen in the CCT building seems peculiar to a lot of us,” said Tolia, drawing knowing laughs from his peers. “We know that things have really grown because even the hot dog guy, Mike, had to expand his business.”
Representing the interactive generation, Tolias good-naturedly goaded the parents into yelling at their children, “You Are Ready” to face the world. The grads gave the same message to their peers and then had to yell at their parents — “I Am Ready.” To which most probably replied, “Not for grad school at these prices, we hope.”
Leave the last sane word to Peter Robinson, who lives overseas once again but still makes the sojourn back to Canada each June to hand out the E.A. Robinson Medal for academic excellence at the UTM convocation downtown. He will do that again a week from now.
“After all these years, I have not lost my enthusiasm for this place,” he said. “That probably means it is still on the right path.”
Sometimes the right path is more than a little off the beaten track, but it’s worth the journey to get there.