By Glen Ess (The Cascade) – Email
Prof Talk is The Cascade’s oral history series, featuring the people best qualified to talk about what UFV has been like over the course of its first few decades: its professors. Each week we’ll interview a professor from a different department, asking them what UFV was like before it was UFV, and how they expect things will continue to change here.
Robin Anderson is a history professor who teaches a variety of courses focusing on Canadian history, the history of British Columbia, as well as the history of sport.
What brought you to UFV?
I arrived here in 1993 when it was the University College of the Fraser Valley. I had just finished my MA at SFU and they were looking for sessional instructors, so I arrived here. A colleague of mine, Chris Leach, who is now the chair of our department, was in the same group as I was. We got hired on as sessional instructors.
I also worked in the Writing Centre for about eight years. For a time there, I had a split appointment between the history department and the Writing Centre, which was exhausting — two slightly different worlds; certainly different work conditions. But working in the Writing Centre was wonderful, because I got to see things from all departments. You really got a strong sense of all the disciplinary areas that existed, and different writing habits and different research genres.
What kind of changes have you noticed in the culture at UFV?
I think most of the changes are good. I never came in when it was still Fraser Valley College but I knew at that time there was a significant college mentality, and then there were a lot of younger hires that came in at the university-college level. At that time there was this split developing between those two visions of what this institution was, but the administration did a very good job of trying to create a sense of community in order to contain all of those kinds of visions.
I think that’s always been one of UFV’s strongest traits: its sense of a combined collective purpose. I do think in the last six or seven years we’ve had a deterioration of that. I think there’s been more conflict between parts of the institution than in those early years, but I think that’s had everything to do with outside forces, limitations on the budget, and a shift away from adequately funded post-secondary. It’s not just at UFV, it’s across the institution. I think it’s had a negative affect on education, and I don’t think there’s anyone who works, or even goes to school, in post-secondary education that wouldn’t agree with that. It has not been good.
How do the courses you teach now differ from the courses you taught at first?
History changes. When I finished my education I was kind of a labour historian. I was also kind of a local historian because I researched and wrote on the history of Vancouver. But I was also incorporating social history into my work, and that’s changed over time; the focus has changed. Towards the middle to the end of the 1990s there was a shift towards cultural history, and so a lot of my own research and writing shifted over to the cultural side. I started to research sports, and now I’m involved in writing a lot of stuff on cartoons and political cartoons.
The one thing that’s always been constant in my work — this is outside of this institution — has always been my focus on B.C. and the history of the Lower Mainland. That’s always been a constant there. Our department exploded in growth. When I first arrived in 1993, there were four people in the department. We started to build from there. At our height, if you want to call it that, in about 2008, we had 14 people in our department, which is a large to medium-size department. Now we have shrunk back down to 10 or 11 and I think that probably suits the program a bit better. I think we may have grown a little too fast.
Have there been any colleagues or students who have been particularly helpful or influential on what you do as a teacher?
There are lots of students that have been influential, but my memory is so poor at this old age I can’t remember a lot of names. There’s been lots of very important students — one in particular, Jason Beck. These are students who go on to do interesting or notorious things. [Jason] was in my sport history class and I had secured for him a practicum in History 401, which is our applied studies practicum program, which I have run. I got him a practicum at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. He worked as a volunteer there in this course, and then he got hired on as a part-time worker, and now he’s the curator of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. Jason and I are pretty good friends, so we talk back and forth. He’s publishing a book on an aspect of Vancouver’s sporting history, and you hear him on the radio.
That’s kind of exciting, when you see students doing that, and that’s a handful of people that are like that. In terms of people, Jack Aston was always a very important mentor of mine. Eric Davis was a mentor of mine here. I’ve always had good colleagues. Our department has always gotten along really well. We enjoy spending time together. There are some departments here who have conflicts within them and our department is really fairly collegial.
What kinds of projects are you involved with at UFV?
I’m doing a few. I just came off a sabbatical year. I’m writing a book, it’s almost completed — I just have a conclusion and a bit of the introduction to finish — on a First World War-era cartoonist who worked for the Vancouver Province, by the name of James Fitzmaurice. He was an all-purpose cartoonist, and he provided political cartoons for the front page of the newspaper, but he also drew illustrations all over the paper. He’s been a project of mine for a few years now. I’ve published a number of articles in academic journals on him, and a couple in popular journals as well. This was a book that I sort of had to write, and this project specifically is on his First World War cartoons. Once I’m finished that, I’ll be looking for a publisher.
I’m also writing a piece on sports during World War One, and that’s a larger project. I’m hoping to talk to Jason Beck about doing some collaboration on this, and we’ve also applied for SSHRC [Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funding]. My colleague Scott Sheffield and I, and a handful of other academics in other institutions in Canada, we have an application in to do a digitizing project on World War II. The hope is to digitize a bunch of British Columbian newspapers during World War II, and everyone has a different project that would be associated with that larger digitization project. Mine is about doing a comparison of sport experience in the two World Wars. I always have my fingers in different pies.
How would you describe what you’ve gotten out of your time at UFV?
I love it here, I really do; I’m not trying to be patronizing. I feel very fortunate, because my life as an older teenager and a young adult was not destined for what I do now. I feel very blessed in a way, that I have been able to become a teacher at the university level. I had a rough teenage and young adult life and I ended up going back to school in my late 20s. It was a good time to go back to school. I kind of see everything that happens from now on as extra stuff.
But I really am committed to UFV. I think it’s had its problems in the last few years. There have been lots of conflicts between administration and faculty, and a lot of it is based on scarce resources and everyone trying to walk tenderly around scarcity. I just hope that we’re able to get through all that and maintain some kind of sense of collectiveness. I was part of that group of faculty who were not particularly happy with the shutting down of the Writing Centre. I, along with about 30 to 40 faculty and probably many more who were just not able to support by showing up to things, were trying to make sure that the Writing Centre didn’t disappear, and we kind of lost that battle. In a way, that whole episode symbolized, I think for many of us, the underlying conflict that’s developed here.
But I would not have wanted to be anywhere else. This is a wonderful institution. Good teachers, and a really strong sense of a culture of improvement. There’s a real level of cynicism that exists in other universities. I think here, the norm is to be always wanting to do better and wanting students to succeed, and that’s not necessarily the case in other institutions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
