Arriving the Year before UB went State

by Oliver Gibson

I grew up in Annapolis Valley, in Nova Scotia. That's just six miles outside of Annapolis Royal, which was first settled by the French in 1604, well before Plymouth Rock. I recall geography lessons telling about the Niagara Peninsula. It was a fruit-growing area. Annapolis Valley was a fruit-growing area also. I recall as a very young person thinking that the Niagara area must be interesting.

As a young person, I would go to the local courthouse and sit in the back, and I listened to the judges and to the lawyers arguing their cases. I was rather interested in that. But I never seriously thought about going into law. I spent a lot of time talking with teachers and thinking about what it would be like to be a teacher. That was the only thing that had any economic feasibility.

The superintendent of schools for the province of Nova Scotia said, "Anybody who is going to be certified to be an administrator in Nova Scotia has to take his education outside the province." I took a look at Columbia, Toronto University, and Harvard. I settled on Harvard. They seemed to have more a sense of what they were up to. I didn't realize at that time that the School of Education at Harvard was trying to get an image of being something more than backyard Boston, as an institution. They wanted to get international visibility.

I finished my master's degree and the doctorate, and then I stayed on at Harvard and taught for six or seven years in the Education Administration department.

My mentor heard that they were talking about making UB a graduate center in the New York State system. He alerted me to it. I wound up here, arriving the year before UB went state.

At that time, the institution here had what people refer to as the "Avis Complex." Avis is supposedly second-class. If you called someone on the phone, the secretary would answer, and you'd say, "This is . . . ." The secretary would say, "And do I say 'Dr.' or 'Mr.'?" It was next door to criminal to fail to mention a person's doctorate.