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Today's Featured Biography
Geoffrey Underhill
Dear PW Grad Class,
I have been absent from Vancouver since I was 17 years old, when I went away to University at Queen's. Although I have been back regularly to visit my family, I have lost touch with all of you. Other than Anne Boyle (chance meeting on Gambier, also in Toronto in the late 1980s) I do not believe I have seen any of you since I left university (a couple of you came to visit in Kingston) and went off to the UK and Europe (NOT the same thing), where I have made most of my career. At the time of the 30th grad reunion I was already curious and wanted to come, but family stuff and work just did not allow me to do so given the timing. But I swore, "next time for sure!" I am keeping my word. What follows is a short history of my foolishness for those who either do not remember me well or did not know me well (they knew all about my big mouth no doubt ��;|.), none of whom could have predicted my future were it up to them in the first place.
My first school, grade one, was In Dar-es-Salaam. The (colonial) British system started at five years old. My Dad was assisting the newly independent Tanzanian government, training the first members of the Bench, drafting the legal system, and writing the country's first constitution. I arrived at Shaughnessy Elementary in grade two - we lived for all my school years on Angus above Quilchena Park. Man that park could be swampy in the winter rains on the way to school. Snow was great, slide-to-school. After graduating from PW I went to Queen's, with a year in Paris in between and several more thereafter for various reasons (fluent in French as a result, Mme Lowy/Colonel Schenkel, your language classes really were good!)), and then on to Oxford for my MA and PhD. I studied public policy and economics, specialising in industrial adjustment and trade issues. Don't ask what possessed me. I planned to come back to Vancouver and do law school after an MA, but somehow "go east young man" became the rule of thumb. So I abandoned paradise and have never been able to find a way back since.
In Oxford I met my wife and we were together as much as my research in Paris and her doctorate in Oxford (on Russian literature) allowed. We married immediately after my thesis was handed in and we both had a job, the ceremony taking place in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin (we were all virgins, right??) on the High Street should any of you know it. When the bells in the great gothic tower rang for us in Radcliffe Square it was quite a moment. My first stop after Oxford was a 3-year dead-end teaching job in Scotland: the 1980s were terrible for young academics. I was paid �6,000 per year, and eventually more on appeal. If I stuck out both arms, I could touch the walls of the place in which we lived., My wife could not find a job in Scotland and retreated to London where she found work. There were no jobs in the UK for both of us in the same place so I quit and landed in Canada and got two offers: York University in Toronto and McMaster in Hamilton, 45 minutes away. York U was and still is a civil war zone so I took McMaster and was very happy. My escape route back to paradise even became available - a tenure track post in my specialisation at UBC. I know who got it (had n to yet even finished his doctorate, and was in our department at McMaster) and I was a much stronger candidate so would have won the appointment. The lad did not get tenure and was fired. But my wife did not like Canada for some reason so I had previously pledged to her to go back to the UK. I did not apply to the UBC job in the end. By this time we already had one 6-month old daughter upon leaving, and during the transition we had my son on arrival in the UK (boy, that hospitable sure was a (negative) contrast to Mount Sinai obstetrics in Toronto; septicaemia was rampant and patients were advised not to use the showers or baths or to sit on the toilets ...). All went well, most likely we left the place after less than 24 hours.
That move was hard. Returning to the UK was a return to economic misery that denizens of the PW neighbourhood find it tough to take. At least this time I was at one of the UK's top five universities - Warwick - and we did all right except for the tiny houses that euphemistically rejoiced in the appellation "terraced cottages" (the "urinal houses" I called them because the ground floor was the same size as our downstairs bathroom in our old family home; admittedly no one can afford these things in Vancouver any more either, noooooo ��;|.). We call them 'row houses' and they were not anything like the rural idyll of a 'cottage'; but at least ours had a beautiful rose garden in the back. I set up a new MA programme that generated serious revenue for the university, and managed to make a scholarly reputation for myself. At age 37, after we drew the conclusion that in combination with the general misery of England, "it was my turn to move." I answered an advertisement for a professorial post at the University of Amsterdam. A year later I was appointed Professor of International Governance in the department of political science there, with the assignment of bringing the place into the late 20th century. By this time I had specialised in the supervision and regulation of banks and financial markets at the global level, and needless to say this freak choice became rather important as crisis after crisis struck our financial system(s). I remember (pre-crisis) being asked by a senior colleague: "why would you want to study THAT?? It is so obscure!" For about 6-8 years, if you typed "financial governance" into Google you got 25 pages of me. Not any more. Everyone wants to be an expert on finance now. If you want to know why I am not on social media, not on Linked-In, it is because so many wanted me to lecture, teach, talk to the press, do something, that hiding was the only solution I could come up with. I thought I would expire with the pressure. I now travel a lot less than I used to immediately post-crisis and it feels better.
In my time at the UvA (U Amsterdam) I proceeded to build the place we now have wherein our social sciences complex is in the top 30 or so in the global rankings, and believe me we started nowhere. That is a long story with many frustrations along the way. But Europe did not suit my wife any more than Canada, though our children grew up speaking three languages and we lived a prosperous five-bedroom house existence 10 minutes from some of the most beautiful beach on the North Sea (in the summer, the water averages 20-22 degrees). So the old issue raised its head and in 2009 we divorced after 26 years together. As far as I can see that was a pretty stupid outcome. Meanwhile my children graduated and then went to university (entirely at my expense) in the UK, my daughter doing law at Durham (now a corporate lawyer between Birmingham and London) and my son went into pre-meds and subsequently switched to Physics at Edinburgh (the Higgs-bosun department, he was so lucky!). From there he went on to do his MA (Advanced Studies) in applied mathematics at Cambridge (don't ask me, I can't add ��;|.). He is now on scholarship doing his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Florida. Yikes.
After our divorce I thought that commuting into work sucked and so moved to central Amsterdam. This is one of the most liveable and wonderful cities in the world. It has everything you can find in London or Paris or New York, but higher in quality, much lower in price, and all is within 30-40 minutes from my flat by bicycle. The most liberating part of it is that I do not even own a car. Rain gear for cycling comes in handy, but someone from Vancouver shares genes with several species of ducks so one does not mind. Still, the remarks of a taxi driver years ago, when I was going for my interview for the Amsterdam job, remain engraved in my greying matter: "this is a great country, but it needs to be roofed or moved." HOw about in the direction of the Canary Islands?? It does rain and the greyness can get to you. That said, it is one of the few cities where there is just is no traffic noise and when I travel the roar of machines is the first (unpleasant) thing I notice. I still would not mind coming home some day. All of my family live on Bowen Island bar my brother, and the roar of traffic is not something one hears much there. Vomiting outside the Bowen Pub is more likely. The annual Dock Dance in August is the most amazing party ever. A guy died at the last one I attended. Really. Drowned trying to get back on his boat. The locals were not surprised,
But my phrase of the month is: "if I am run over by a bus tomorrow (the way I cycle in Amsterdam in 'unobservance' of traffic lights in Amsterdam, this eventuality remains as likely as not), I will have had the most amazing life." I have been places I never dreamt of, have met and advised presidents, prime ministers, and parliaments all over the place, and was a pioneer in thinking and campaigning about how and why our system of financial governance might go wrong, and it did. We have together fought the good fight on governance in the Euro area, with few positive results. Not everything is linked to intelligence. Well, in Canada financial governance worked for reasons that were understandable, but we too paid a price for the indiscretions and rapaciousness of others (and I am not referring to the 'greed' of bankers - if people in business were not greedy we would all be MUCH worse off).
I sincerely look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in May. I hope we find some of the vanished. I mean, a reunion without Norm Baldwin, what would that be? No one was better at Monty Python imitation than him (I know for sure, he sat behind be in old man Spence's Home Room class; I sat next to Isaac Tamir if I remember correctly, he had a mean line in Elvis Presley imitation). And to miss someone as lovely as Lee Lovering, "dat kan niet" as we would say in Dutch (yes, I teach in the language).
To find my professional homepage, just Google Geoffrey Underhill or GRD Underhill and you will get lots of hits, the first should be my webpage. This is the only 'social media' I have. This Classmates site will not allow us to have web addresses on it, which is just unbelievably stupid. uva.nl/contact/medewerkers/item/g.r.d.underhill.html?f=underhill
See you all soon. I love the proposed venue. My grandfather was a rower for the club. I rowed lightweights for Queen's inter-varsity. I was for two years the captain and stroke of the Oxford University Graduate Boat against Cambridge (we lost ��;|. twice; thank God for the number seven from Madras whose efforts meant we avoided embarrassment)). I founded the St. Antony's College Boat Club (now in first division in intercollegiate rowing) and served as Captain for two years. For our reunion, I promise to wear my "young Underhill has fallen off the Yacht Club balcony for the fourth time this evening" jacket. After twenty years it still looks great (Norm Baldwin is much needed to take this one away, I think he would devastate this particular assertion).
Geoffrey
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