On Tue, 2 Feb 2021 at 21:35, Marc Raboy, Dr. 

      Sixty seconds? You've got to be kidding.


      There are so many thoughts and tales I want to share and I'm sure most
      of them won't translate well in a 20/30-person Zoom event. You don't
      have to read what follows, but here's some stuff I couldn't possibly get
      in to my minute unmuted.


      I've been thinking a lot the last few days about what I 'got' out of high
      school. Most important was probably the socialization, learning to
      be part of a 'gang' and realizing that I could do that and be myself ' or
      really, discover myself through doing that.


      I had an epiphany earlier today reading Gabe's comments about the
      sublime beauty of math. I'm glad that our high school experience was
      so directly formative for some of my classmates. For me, it was not
      so much the subject matter but the ethos of trying to do the best I
      could. I think the school overdid it, though. Some individual
      teachers aside, it felt like the idea was not really to teach us
      anything but to squeeze every last point out of us and ratchet up
      the score as high as possible; the journey, or how you played the
      game, counted for absolutely nothing. I think I got 799 out of 800
      in my math SAT, and 399 on 400 in my math matrics and I KNEW I was
      not as good in the eyes of the school as those who got perfect.
      Whatever interests I was able to develop came from extracurricular
      activities and social contacts with my wonderful comrades.


      By the time I got to McGill I understood that I wasn't interested in
      math (so much so that I failed introductory calculus ' a true act of
      rebellion!). By then I knew I wanted to be a journalist. In my
      fourth year I was managing editor of the McGill Daily, a real job in
      every respect except that it didn't pay. It was the only college
      newspaper in Canada that published five days a week, and the oldest
      in the British Commonwealth. I could squeak by with minimal effort
      in my classes, but there was no way I could get the paper out
      without being there every day and putting the task ahead of
      everything else. I also had to learn to create an environment where
      everyone could feel their work meant something and do their best.


      In college I also discovered that I was passionately interested in
      all the struggles for social justice that were then going on ('The
      Sixties'), around the world and right under my nose. That was
      certainly why I never left Quebec. I couldn't imagine a more exciting
      place to be! OHS had not at all prepared me for that. For the next
      ten years or so (except for a year travelling in Europe) I knocked
      around Montreal doing various things, from working in journalism
      when I could to driving a cab when I couldn't, and somehow managing to
      stay out of serious trouble. In the mid-70s I became involved in the
      municipal reform movement that was organizing to try to get rid of
      Montreal's authoritarian mayor Jean Drapeau. (OHS did help indirectly
      for that, as I got to apply some of the skills I'd learned working in
      Gerry Mazin's campaign for students' council president ' hahaha.)


      In 1978 I ran for city council in the Mile End district just east of
      Outremont (where I now live). It was a three-way race because the
      opposition split a few weeks before the election (old story) and so
      the Drapeau candidate won in our first-past-the-post system. (I came
      second with 37% to the winner's 44%.) But losing that election set my
      table for the next 40 years. I decided to go back to school to do a
      Masters degree in Communication (to help me understand how we might
      have made better use, or less bad use, of media in the campaign),
      and I found that I loved academic work and the life that came with
      it. So I stayed on to do a PhD, started teaching journalism, then
      media studies, first at Concordia, then Laval, UdeM, and finally
      McGill until I retired in 2017.


      Along the way I married-divorced and married-divorced and I'm now in a
      lovely loving relationship with an age-appropriate retired Quebec
      civil servant with whom I share interests in food, travel (Covid be
      damned), ideas, good friends, and our various children,
      stepchildren, grandchildren, and no pets. Fortunately for Lucie my
      previous partners paved the way. I am grateful to them for that and
      much else.


      And that's all I have to say.


      Dr. Marc Raboy

      Beaverbrook Professor Emeritus in Ethics, Media and Communications

      Department of Art History and Communication Studies

      McGill University

      Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 0G5