By Dr. Sid Katz

I remember it like it was yesterday! My first day at UBC was October 10th, 1974. I had been invited to visit and give a seminar by John McNeill, the head of the Pharmacology division in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Earlier that year we had met at a scientific meeting in Hamilton, Ontario and he told me of a new position that the faculty was hoping to fill and invited me to apply which I did. The invitation to visit then ensued. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi there,

This post has been contributed by Dr. Sid Katz - Executive Director of Community Affairs and man about town!

I must confess, my first musical experience in Vancouver was not the Chan Centre or even the Orpheum, it was Rohan’s Rockpile on 4^th Avenue in Kittsilano. The featured performers that night were the Pied Pumpkin, still one of my favourite groups (and friends to boot) and learning the Kootney Bop was the beginning of my commitment to West Coast Culture. Sunday afternoon was spent with my children watching Bill Reid and his students carving at Totem Park-no way was I going back to the East. Not only was there no winter here, there was a lot of culture to keep me engaged. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi - this week Herbert kindly offered these reminiscences written by Dennis Duncan, a young seventeen year old who entered UBC as an undergrad back in 1946. Dennis graduated from UBC with a BA in 1949 and a BASc in Chemical Engineering in 1957. His interest in petrochemicals and the reactions of heavy hydrocarbons eventually took him to jobs in England, France, and the United States, including many years with an architect engineering company in Boston and Houston.

I went to UBC in September 1946, the year the majority of the vets returned from the war.  I was just 17, going into 2nd year Arts and Science (Pre-Med) having got a head-start by going as far as first year high school in Scotland.  I was therefore a kid surrounded by grown men, many with horrendous experiences behind them.

The university enrollment swelled from 1,500 to 10,000 in 1946, and President Norman MacKenzie was “Horatio at the Bridge,” finding ways and means to establish classrooms and living accommodation for the great influx.  Hundreds of old army huts appeared on campus and became the faculties of law, commerce, and much of virtually every other discipline.  Fort Camp for men and Arcadia Camp for both sexes were fashioned as living quarters from these same army huts, and it all worked and lasted for much longer than anyone would have expected.  Even today there are still one or two signs of the old huts about the campus.  It was really a great and necessary strategy and saved the day. Read the rest of this entry »

This post has been contributed by Dr. Sid Katz. Sid  is the Executive Director of Community Affairs, Managing Director of the The Chan Centre, Chair of UBC Centenary Committee, Professor of Pharmacology and Bon Vivant at large.

Hello,

Now that we are at the halfway point in the UBC Centenary celebrations, I think it is a good time to look back and reflect on what has been accomplished and what we have to look forward to in the next 6 months.

The year started off with a tremendous lecture by Zarqa Nawaz in the series on Islam organized by St. John’s College. Nawaz is the creator and writer of the ‘CBC Little Mosque on the Prairie Series’. This series is now syndicated in many countries around the world and has been renewed for a third season. Nawaz spoke about the reality of growing up as a Muslim woman in Canada and her thoughts on the double standards which exist in our communities-very sober thoughts for those of us who pride ourselves on how far Canada has come as a Canadian cultural mosaic and a model to the world. In April, this theme was continued with an excellent lecture by Will Kymlicka on the three ‘periods’ of multiculturalism in Canada as the UBC/Laurier Institution Multicultural Lecturer for 2008. Dr. Kymlicka is ‘Mr. Multiculturalism’ in Canada and in a one hour presentation, traced the history of the cultural mosaic in Canada, where we are and where we are going-the CBC’s ‘Ideas’ Executive Producer, Bernie Lucht, told me that it was one of THE best presentations on this subject he had ever heard. The national broadcast has stimulated a lot of discussion and we hope to follow this up with a major symposia in November featuring UBC faculty and students and a very special guest-STAY TUNED !… Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s blog post has been written by Eric Damer. Eric is a Research Associate on the UBC Centenary History Project, and co-author of No Ordinary Mike, a biography of Nobel Laureate Michael Smith.

School Spirit

I first attended UBC in the fall of 1983 after completing a year of general arts studies at a regional college. When I arrived, I was a bit overwhelmed: thanks to friends of friends, I found a decent basement suite about a twenty minute bus ride away, but Vancouver still seemed to me a big city. UBC was also big—I don’t think I had ever been to the campus before. Registration forced me to jostle with other students in line-ups to seize the proper computer card, dash between unfamiliar buildings, and grab snippets of information that might help me make sense of curriculum planning.

On several occasions supervising faculty told me “this isn’t what you want,” but offered no explanation or alternative. Registration was eventually a success; I enrolled in my chosen classes, and soon joined a couple of clubs that looked interesting, the French Club and the Fencing Club. Except for the fraternities, no one seemed to make much fuss over new students, so I felt a little like an intruder on someone else’s turf. I lasted one year at UBC before taking a year out from my studies and then completing my degree in Victoria. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last dozen years UBC has been going through an extensive phase of construction that seems to be filling in much of the green space on campus and destroying many of its older buildings, a process that has elicited the wrath of the preservationists (see the thunderous condemnation on the Heritage Vancouver web site, for example). The Administration is at fault, it would appear, for selling out to corporate interests, destroying UBC’s “rich architectural legacy,” paving over the natural beauties of Point Grey, and generally wreaking havoc on otherwise unspoilt Nature.

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It was good to see the Globe praising the quality of food at UBC’s Place Vanier residence recently (11 June 2008); as the writer of the article noted, undergraduate dining has “long [been] associated with lining up at a cafeteria trough.” That set me thinking about some of my own food experiences at UBC. I arrived here in 1965, and very quickly my favourite eating place became the Bus Stop Café, a cafeteria that sat on a site now occupied by Trek Express and 99 Chairs.

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