We always see our president posing and smiling, but we never see him as a real person eating lunch, drinking coke or playing squash. It is no wonder that to many of us, our president just seems to be a name and a figurehead. With this in mind, I decided to pay a visit to our president here at U of T.
Standing at 6’3″ and wearing a blue shirt and white pants, the 61-year old president invited me into his office. Paintings and bookshelves decorated the wall on the right while panels of windows that overlook King’s College Circle were on the left. The sunlight was beaming through the windows creating a very welcoming environment. With his Diet Coke on his right side and my glass of bottled water on my left, I sat down with President Robert J. Birgeneau at the dining table and began our interview.
Born in Toronto and not leaving Ontario until the age of 21, President Birgeneau received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from U of T in 1963. He, like so many U of T students today, was a commuter or as he called it, a “day student”. During his undergraduate years at U of T, President Birgeneau was interested in mathematics. However, when a friend invited him to sit in on a course on quantum mechanics, he found it to be truly exciting, charming and mysterious. From then on, he knew that he liked physics. Interestingly, President Birgeneau told me that he was a very good exam taker when he was a student. “I was very good at figuring out the psychology of the professor. Therefore, I could figure out what the exams were going to be in advance quite well. I was strategic and I would always do the simpler questions first and leave the hard questions for the very end and worked my way though in order of difficulty on the exam.”
After studying at U of T, he pursued graduate school to study physics at Yale on a big scholarship, but his future was hardly set in stone. “I wasn’t really sure at all what I wanted do with my life. I liked to interact with people a lot so I wouldn’t have at that time imagined myself being a pure laboratory scientist. But I liked physics a lot and I thought the idea of going to Yale would be very exciting.” Despite the uncertainty, Birgeneau saw the freedom in academics rather than the pressure. “No, no, I think the most successful people I know are all the people who didn’t know what they wanted to do.”
In 1966, president Birgeneau received his Ph.D. from Yale and was an instructor there for a year. In 1967, he was at Oxford University and a year later, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Then in 1975, he became a professor of physics at MIT, where he would remain for the next 25 years.
“I wanted to teach and I’ve always been interested in some level of social issues. When I arrived at MIT, I taught freshman physics and I thought it was great because the students were so enthusiastic. I also taught graduate courses and it turned out that I really enjoyed working with graduate students.” I asked if president Birgeneau thought he was a good professor and he replied, “Yes, in modesty. I think I was a good classroom teacher although I was surprised how long it took me to learn how to teach really well. Teaching well doesn’t just happen and I really had to work hard at it for several years before I felt I was really effective in the classroom.”
In 1988, Birgeneau became the Head of the Department of Physics and later in 1991, he was promoted to Dean of School of Science at MIT. Then in 2000, he came back to Toronto and became the President and professor of physics at U of T. He admitted it was an unusual career for him because no one in his family had ever completed high school. He realized how much he owed to his high school and to U of T. He thought this was an opportunity to give back to the university.
So what does the President do every day? Well, his day starts when he steps into his office at eight in the morning. He checks his emails and gets organized (and yes, he checks emails everyday) until 8:30 when he usually has meetings until noon. He then has lunch in various places such as Hart House, Spaha or Peter Cheung, a Chinese restaurant at College and Spadina. He occasionally likes to eat from the trucks outside Sidney Smith as well. After lunch, there is usually some kind of crisis that he needs to resolve such as a strike or unhappy students. If he is lucky and gets a free hour, he hops over to the physics building and meets with his graduate students, or he heads over to the Athletic Centre and plays squash. By six in the evening, he finishes his paper work and replies to more emails until 7:30 when he leaves to go home. He then has dinner with his wife if he doesn’t have events to attend. At nine, he goes over his reading materials, but the president said he always stops working at 10 o’clock.
Despite his long hour days and hectic schedules, perhaps the one thing that Birgeneau can do without is the attention that he gets by being the president of U of T. He admitted that he does not like being a public figure and he finds it unattractive especially with the way newspapers treat public figures in Toronto. “I did not anticipate just how public this position is because I’m actually quite a private person.” He said when he goes out to dinner with his wife, people often come up to him and talk to him about various subjects.
Aside from being the president, Birgeneau is also a professor of physics here. He doesn’t actually teach a course but he works with several Ph.D. students and he enjoys it a lot. When I asked him whether he enjoys being a professor or a president better, he said at this stage in his life, he loves doing what he is doing now. However, he said when he is finished being president, he plans to teach and research again. In other words, he will always be a teacher at heart.
So what else does the president do besides work? President Birgeneau plays squash and loves to watch movies. He planned to start golf again this summer but was unable to do so because he fell off a ladder when he was trimming trees in the garden. He showed me the stitches and the scar was at least three inches long along his arm. One thing you may not know about the president is that not only was he two years younger than his peers but he was also a short kid when he was in high school. In fact, it was not until the end of grade 12 when he got a summer job at a factory that he started to grow. Within a couple months, he grew six inches and became the 6’3″ that he is today.
There was a knock on the door informing the president that his friend had arrived. I looked to my watch and it was noon, which meant that my interview with the president was coming to an end.
I had one final question to ask him before we ended our interview. I asked him why did the chicken cross the road? And President Birgeneau replied, “The chicken crossed the road because it was excited to learn what was on the other side.”
