All Our Yesterdays

Last week, a post about Carl Borgman’s 1965 commencement address, which informed students at the University of Tennessee about the threat of carbon dioxide build-up leading to climate change, went viral (by AOY standards).

“Climatic Change appears to be underway, in fact.” – the 1965 commencement speech that should have rocked the world.

A couple of days later I had a lovely email from someone who had read it and then set up a very comprehensive Wikipedia page for Carl Borgmann. This person suggested I contact his daughter to see if she would be happy to do an interview. I did, and she was! Here it is.

1. A little bit about who you are.

I did my bachelor’s degree at McGill University (1964-68). My Master’s degree was an applied degree in Speech-Language Pathologist.  After I completed it in 1970, I worked on a variety of special projects and was a lecturer in Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. Later with three children under the age of six, I did a PHD degree in that same department. It concerned language socialization practices with young Inuit children in the homes and schools of Northern Quebec. This was followed by how children learn Inuktitut as well as other language-based studies in other Indigenous communities of Quebec. By the late 1990s I became the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at McGill, followed by becoming a Vice President International at the French language Universite de Montreal and then Vice President Research at Dalhousie University and subsequently the same position at McGill University.  I am presently on a reduced load pre-retirement Professor at McGill University working on Indigenous community engagement of a large biomedical grant and teaching a course I taught for 20 years and last taught 20 years ago. I have served on numerous scientific project and government Boards in Canada. I have three children and six grand children that give me much pleasure.

2. Any further light you can shed on the commencement address your dad gave – its motivation, its reception, whether it was the first commencement address he gave. 

The wonderful thing about your email was that I had never heard of that commencement address nor any of the other speeches he gave at that time that concerned the environment.  I also never knew he had honorary degrees. I was by then not living at home since I was an undergraduate student in Montreal at McGill by 1964.  I had only known about the commencement addresses he gave at the University of Vermont when I was a young girl in elementary school. I recently found the script for his inaugural address at UVM in some old papers and read it with interest.  It did not have a strong environmental flavor to it.

3. Was carbon dioxide buildup something that was mentioned in your house when you were growing up? If not, when and how did you hear about it, as best you remember.

I never remember overhearing any discussion of carbon dioxide and its effect on the atmosphere in my family’s house.  There was discussion of many things but not that or else I was not sufficiently interested to pick up on it at the time.  In general, my father expressed concern about the environment and on wasteful ways of living.  But he was a quiet person at home and rarely spoke of his accomplishments or his work. Most of what I know about his work life, I read in pieces written about him by his workplaces.

4. Did your father ever point back to his commencement address when “the greenhouse effect” was in the news in the 1980s? What was his “take” on the issue in later years?

Again, I do not remember this being a subject of conversation. I remember speaking to him about university administration and its evolution over time when I was a Dean and he was quite elderly.  We also discussed some of what he did at the Ford Foundation. When he moved back to Colorado and lived in the foothills outside of Boulder, he spent time trying to protect trees from a spruce beetle infestation in a kind of solo effort to deal with environmental devastation of a stand of trees near his home.

5. Any thoughts or feelings you had on reading the All Our Yesterdays article and/or the Wikipedia page that has been created.

I loved reading about his prescience about environmental issues.  This showed me a whole different side of his interests.  Once not long ago, I looked to see if he was on Wikipedia and did not find him.  Now I can and so can his grandchildren and great grand children who can now read about him.  That is a delight for us all and hopefully an inspiration to others.

One last thing about him – he came from a very poor and uneducated family who moved from place to place.  At one point he had a high school schoolteacher who realized he had a very spotty knowledge of math.  He willingly accepted to stay after school hours so she could give him extra teaching. She discovered he was a very bright boy and taught him, according to the story that he told us, “Everything she knew and more” since she borrowed a book from a library on more advanced math just to be able to teach it to him.  She also told him that he should attend a university.  He had never heard of such a place.  When he told me this story he always said, “I owe my career to that woman.” 

• 6. Anything else you’d like to say

I would just like to thank you a great deal for contacting me and providing me with this wonderful information about a man I emulated and loved.