Making a lasting difference

ANTIGONISH, N.S. — By Phil Milner
SPECIAL TO THE CASKET
ANTIGONISH, N.S.
You enter through thick glass doors 10 feet high, and step onto a marble floor. 
Far above your head is the name of the building, BRIAN MULRONEY INSTITUTE OF GOVERNMENT. 
The institute is four storeys high, 93,000 square feet in area. It has thick glass-walls inside and out, with panels of lights and large, slowly-revolving fans far overhead. 
St. FX, and Brian Mulroney himself, spent seven years raising money for the institute. Sixty-five million dollars came from private donors. Thirty million more came from the federal government, and the province of Nova Scotia kicked in $5 million. 
And they insisted on something great builders too often overlook. They raised another $16 million for student scholarships and bursaries. 
St. FX has a noble history of being particularly close to eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton constituents. I spent half my life teaching at X, and had senior colleagues whose fathers worked the Cape Breton mines. The $16 million might go a ways toward reviving a St. FX tradition of working people making it through St. FX, with help from family, church, and town fathers. 
Though he came from Baie Comeau, Mulroney benefited from this tradition. There’s a picture on the second floor that quotes his father’s sentiment in sending his son to university. 
“‘I know, Brian, that times are tough and we could sure use the extra money you would bring in,’” Mulroney quotes his father on one of the illustrated posters that adorn the walls of the institute. “‘But I have learned one thing: the only way out of a paper mill town is through a university door – and you are going to university.’”  
There’s another second-floor photograph of Mulroney, this time with former American president George Bush, taken at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. 
 Mulroney wears a Blue Jays shirt, and Bush, a Texas Rangers one. Both have wide smiles on their faces. Two happy men, doing their countries bidding, enjoying the moment.  
Actually, the fans were booing Mulroney. The Tories had, the day before, pushed the Goods and Services Tax through Parliament. 
“Memo to all future prime ministers,” the institute wall quotes Mulroney. “Don’t attend a Blue Jays game the day after you bring forth a new tax.” 
Mulroney possessed the stereotypical Irish gifts of blarney and charm, with a splendid sense of humour, all of which were on full display on a night I was in the room with him. He’d successfully raised millions of dollars for the St. FX endowment and had come to campus to thank the St.nFX faculty for its more-than-meager donation to the fundraising drive he headed. 
I quote the anecdote from his speech that made me understand why so many cherish him memory. 
“As you may know, I received an honorary doctorate from St. FX at the May convocation. I marched out of the Oland Centre behind two senior professors. One turned to the other, and said, ‘You know, this is the second time St. FX has awarded a degree to Brian Mulroney that he didn’t earn.’” 
He told other funny stories that night, most of them about how he convinced the fat cats to throw money at the small Maritime university they’d barely heard of. 
The Mulroney Institute will be St. FX’s crown jewel. The technology embedded in every classroom will enable learning. 
For a generation plus, it was my job — as the English Department’s Americanist — to teach Henry David Thoreau to American literature students. 
Thoreau paid $5 for an abandoned shack on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He spent another $30 renovating it. Then he lived in it for two years while he wrote Walden, or Life in the Woods, a small masterpiece about living and learning. 
I felt a similar anxiety when St. FX raised money and built the Keating Millennium Centre (“KMC,” students call it) a decade ago— two hockey rinks, a pool, dance studios, exercise rooms, treadmills, and a dozen other mechanized pieces of exercise equipment.  
The KMC, too, is splendid, loved by those who use it. It has made our community healthier, maybe, but has it made us wiser or better? 
Some professor somewhere else said that his or her elegant university feels like it has become an elaborate retirement home for 20-year-olds. I think of that sometimes. 
A professor is a person who has taken an approach to knowledge and followed it to the end. A classroom is a place where students get to witness the way a professor confronts ideas, finds meaning, separates wheat from chaff.  
I loved nothing more in my half-a-lifetime-plus on the St. FX faculty than the too-rare times I actually engaged students this way.  
I am writing this in the long second floor hallway of the Mulroney Institute of Government. I look down at the white marble floor, and up at the ceiling with its muted lights and slowly rotating fans 20 meters above. A bearded young man with X on his ball cap and decals covering his laptop, sits across from me. He nods. Friendly, distant, an appealing, serious face. He carries the tools of the university student trade — laptop, backpack, and water bottle — as do I. 
I open my laptop. It is a relief to begin writing, after two days of wondering and asking questions. The Mulroney Institute of Government, it turns out, is a good place to work with what you’ve learned. Whether learning takes place here anymore than in the junky windowless Nicholson Hall that was torn down to make way for the Mulroney Institute, is a question for other minds and other generations.