A Final Farewell From Bill Swan

A FINAL Farewell By Bill Swan

Bill Swan was a contributing editor for College Administrator magazine for 26 years. We owe him a huge thank you for all his work and wish him all the best!

Somewhere, on the grounds of Durham College in Oshawa, a two-metre-long slide rule lies buried.

In concrete. (A slide rule was a mechanical calculator based on logarithms, developed by Scottish mathematician John Napier in the 17th century. It required no batteries, no recharging, and a lot of training to be useful.)

Learning to use a slide rule became a rite of passage for first year tech and engineering students. Thus, the six-foot version for classroom demonstration.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, along came the pocket calculator. For a couple of hundred bucks (in 1970s dollars, a week’s pay for a faculty member) you could buy this hand-held device, and it even gave accurate answers instead of fairly good approximations.

The slide rule was dead.

At Durham College, the giant version was buried in a mock funeral ceremony.

But not quite.

The next year, a raiding party from Mohawk College exhumed Napier in the dark of night and carried it off to Hamilton for reburial.

Again, not quite.

A counter-raiding party from Durham found Napier, and (in the dark of night) carried it back to Oshawa, where it was once again buried – this time encased in concrete. RIP, Napier.

I cite this story as one sample of a rich history in danger of being lost.

It is one tale touching two colleges: every college undoubtedly has a treasure of history that is vaguely documented and in danger of being lost in the memory of seniors like me.

The story of Napier was chronicled in the Durham College Chronicle (full disclosure: I was the founding supervising editor).

Another tale from those long-ago days is that of the microchip. A front-page photo of Durham’s then-Technology Chair Jack Davidson holding an electronic circuit the size of a thumbnail, boasting that this little chip would change the world in which we live.

We sure chuckled over that. Sure, Jack, dream on. Little did we know.

Sadly, to my knowledge that particular edition of The Chronicle did not survive. Back then, libraries and administrators and faculty could not fully appreciate the value of the history they were creating.

My Spidey sense suggests that similar lost history is replicated across all colleges.

The colleges have become an important cog in the economic engine of Ontario. It didn’t start out that way. Those present at the beginning had no idea. As faculty, many of us plugged along, pushing for space, equipment, and methods that in retrospect we should have been fired for not doing.

I started out in education some 63 years ago. This included a stint in a two-room rural school, complete with a wood-burning stove and a woodshed. Returning from recess, kids fetched blocks of wood.

At Durham, as a union steward in the ‘80s, I was twice out on strike (1984 and 1989). From this latter, a cautionary note: I walked the picket line advocating for a workload formula. One year later I became a division chair and found myself responsible for applying the damned thing. The first iterations of those calculations were done by hand. Be careful what you ask for.

I write this column as final farewell: Earlier this year I stepped down as a member of the editorial board of College Administrator, confident that the magazine that I helped pioneer in retirement is in good hands with OCASA executive and the editorial board, and production and editorial services at Craig Kelman & Associates.

From my many long years in education and journalism there are a number of things I would have done differently.

As a faculty member, I would have become more active earlier; if rank and file faculty do not step forward, the minority of radicals will, and everyone ends up where no one wants to be.

I wish that OCASA had existed much earlier. The networking, the conference, the webinars – all would have changed the direction of my limited academic career. (A final plug: If you are not an OCASA member, become one; if you are not active in OCASA, get moving.)

Finally, I dip my hand into the fantasy bowl and pull out radical wishes: that OCASA include presidents in the membership eligibility; and a special class of membership be created for faculty, perhaps in an informal linkage, to brainstorm the future.

Colleges came into their own when graduates became professors, professors became directors, and directors and vice presidents became college presidents. Only then did colleges fully understand themselves.

They’ve growed up real good. 