Back to School

Tell me you don't get a little frisson of excitement on a university campus.

I recently took the McGill campus tour and spent the entire time with this weird feeling of, well, something like 'excited nostalgia'.

First of all, it's a beautiful old campus - backed by the gently looming slope of Mont Royal 'mountain' - much like the one in my home town, and the one I went to in Belfast. In fact, they were founded around the same time, Queens University and NUI Galway in 1845 (though the former has roots in the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, from 1810) and McGill in 1821, before Canada was even really Canada.

It all started with a hardy fur merchant from Glasgow, James McGill, who left land and funds for the establishment of the uni. He's buried in a tomb at the front doors of the main building - along with half of his accountant. Seems that when his body was exhumed and moved from what is now the train station to what is now the entrance to the arts building, they couldn't tell exactly where one man's body ended and the other began. So whether you believe in the 'ghost in the law library' stories or not, there are actually 4.5 bodies on campus, fact!

Other cool things I learned were:

• that the McGill campus, which is now right downtown, was originally really far from the city's 12,000 inhabitants (who settled out by the St. Laurent river) and virtually inaccessible in winter
• that the Schulich library was where Rutherford (Nobel prize winner for chemistry, you'll remember) discovered the half-life of radioactive particles and other cool stuff, and so the building was constructed out of copper, instead of iron or steel to avoid interference with experiments into electricity and magnetism
• And, that there's a student-run ice-cream shop at McGill where, if you bring in a mid-term or final exam paper that you've failed, they'll give you a free ice-cream. Bless!

Anyway, the majority of people on this tour were (I'd like to say 'eager' but 'apathetic' is a little closer to the truth) high school kids who had either been accepted to or were considering coming to McGill. They didn't seem too different to my cohorts and I all those years ago (ok, 9!) except that they asked questions about bringing laptops to tutorials and whether lectures would be available to download. I felt both sorry for them and envious - part of me would love to be starting all over again. My three years (and after, the Masters) went by far too quickly - and I definitely didn't take advantage of all that was on offer. I wanted to address the little ones: "GO to the office hours - the profs will be delighted to see you" and "Do dress up as a chicken for the charity run mid-winter, start an extreme scrabble/pingpong/stir-fry club, be in a band, and be sure to look into opportunities for a semester abroad". As we entered the main lecture hall (sits 600) they were more concerned about "writing on those tiny tables attached to the seats"...

I don't know about them, but my favourite part was the library, though again, it was a strange feeling of clinging to the past and watching the future swoop in. Students on computers, i-pads, kindles and blackberries were nestled up to bookshelves weighted under hundreds of scholarly volumes, and you had to ask how long more the two worlds could peacefully co-exist.

It's hard not to imagine the tweets overtaking the tomes in the very near future, and I wonder whether Mr. McGill, and his accountant, will be turning in their communal grave.

I know I risk sounding a bit fossilised, but I will be a bit sad when screen time takes over altogether. So I suppose in the end I'm glad to have sat for a little while with a heavy textbook in a dusty, dim old library, with real stone walls and stained-glass windows, even if it was all over much too soon.