And for the next 100 years...

Mark Reynolds | In 1904, Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier claimed that the Twentieth Century would belong to Canada. We suspect he came to this conclusion not from any deep analysis of geopolitical realities, but by keeping his finger on the pulse of his alma mater. The year Laurier made his famous prediction, McGill was booming. New programs in Librarianship, Music and Dentistry were founded, the first intercollegiate basketball game was played between McGill and Queen's, and Lord Strathcona founded the campus YMCA, which evolved into the Montreal institution, the Yellow Door. In the spirit of Laurier, we asked the deans and director of Dentistry, Music and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science to discuss the next hundred years.

Faculty of music

Music has been taught to women at McGill since 1884, but it took twenty years before the Conservatorium was made open to both the sexes, largely due to the energies and popular classes of Hungarian-born pianist Clara Lichtenstein. In 16 short years the school was a significant enough presence at McGill to become a faculty — right at the dawn of the jazz age and mass-produced recorded music. Change is the only constant in music, and the next hundred years — starting with a new building, home to the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology — should prove to be interesting, according to Dean Don McLean.

Dean of Music Don McLean
Kathleen Hutchinson

"To be a futurist is an invitation to folly. But there are really interesting questions for a Faculty of Music. There are larger issues — what is going to be the role of music, as created and performed, in the near future and in the next century. No one knows the answer, but it seems pretty evident that musical expression and reception will continue to be fairly fundamental elements in human experience. The more narrow debate in the musical profession is on how much of it will rest on so-called popular music, and how much on 'unpopular' music, which is what we do for the most part.

"We do classical music and jazz music, but we have increasing connection to the popular music industry, and those links are technological as well as economic. You can make money in popular music, and the technology is often pushed in popular music. But one of the more interesting questions is how the conservatory aspects of our training skirt popular music, and what would it really mean to develop training, not only of the technological support type, but of the musical substance of popular music. That's a question we have, in a way intentionally, not come up with definitive answers for.

"Our role will be to try to develop technology that does not diminish the musical experience. I see that as one of the big challenges for the faculty in the future. At the present time most people are singularly uninformed about sound quality. We're in the business of training the top people in music creation and performance, but we're also in the business of technology through which it is captured and received. We have a double role — we have to push the technological envelope, but we also have to educate people, to bring them out of the darkness of fuzzy sound.

"The way in which people engage with music will change greatly. People always talk about how recorded sound is changing, and will that become the chief method of disseminating sound. Well duh! The argument's been over for thirty years. Live concerts, in popular music, have become the promotional tool for the recording industry — some successful classical musicians have adopted the same procedure.

"The question is what's the role of live performance — will it continue to exist as historical pockets? Now we have the baroque orchestra — one can envision classical string quartets becoming a historical entity. More music will become specialized, and there will be interest-group pockets on all of these different fronts. One of the key reasons behind the building project is to openly acknowledge that shift towards recorded sound has already taken place. We as universities have to catch up first before we can drive into the future.

"Much more of the music we receive in the future will be accompanied by visual imagery. This is, for many people, an attractive and motivating way to receive music. As musicians we hope that people will still have the opportunity to listen to the sound environment separated from visual information. This creates a lot of creative opportunities, but one of the challenges is how are we going to evolve our expertise in the visual end? It's being planned on the technology front — what needs to be done in the recording studio or the editing suite to incorporate audio and video.

"The crux of the matter is a kind of advocacy for music and its role in the world that has as its end goal the need to no longer proselytize because people understand. The fact is, they only understand through emotional impact. We want more people to have that powerful emotional relationship to music, and it's our job to give it to them."

The Faculty of Music will be celebrating its centenary throughout the year with a number of concerts, including an October 2 performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 by the McGill Symphony Orchestra. There will be performances by the McGill Chamber Singers; Repertoire and Symphonic Choirs and an Opera McGill presentation of Harry Somers' Louis Riel in Place des Arts, January 26-29, 2005. See events at www.mcgill.ca/music/events/concerts.

Faculty of Dentistry

Imagine, if you will, a dentist's examining room in the year 2104. Chances are the Maclean's magazine in the waiting room is still from 1992, but everything else is completely changed. Instead of metal probes and whining drills, there are merely rows of machines humming away — some examining your saliva for evidence of dental disease, others generating new tissue to replace lost teeth or damaged gum. This could be the world of tomorrow, according to Dean Jim Lund, and McGill's Faculty of Dentistry is poised to lead the way.

Dean of Dentistry Jim Lund
Claudio Calligaris

"In this next year we're going to be signing a compact with the administration which will allow for the first significant expansion of the Faculty of Dentistry in its history. We've have been promised a number of new positions, so we will be actively recruiting over the next three or four years to bring in some new professors. The faculty is committed to expanding to develop new programs and expanding its current programs.

"We've started discussions with the administration over the idea of creating a university health sciences building on the Glen Yards site that, hopefully, would accommodate dentistry, and also all the allied health sciences, which also need space.

"We have developed four focus areas for research: pain research, oral health and society, biomaterials and nanotechnology, and bone and periodontal disease. The bone and periodontal, nanotechnology and pain research are all McGill research centres.

"The faculty is very small — it's one of the smallest in North America — but because of the changes we've made over the last five or six years, it's the most research-intensive dental faculty in the world. Our professors now bring in as many research dollars per full-time position as do [those in] the Faculty of Medicine. This is far higher than any other Faculty of Dentistry in North America, as far as I know.

"I am sure in a short period of time, you will no longer have to diagnose periodontal disease using probes and mirrors. You will have a biological test for presence or absence of abnormality using saliva and some sort of biosensor.

"There are people who are working on biological ways of repairing teeth. It may be possible to reconstitute dental enamel, so it may be possible to replace it with a natural material.

"We will need to develop new strategies to replace lost tissue. We've just recruited a new professor who is working on using a patient's own stem cells to develop mucosa, particularly to develop new salivary glands. A lot of people who suffer from head and neck cancer get radiation treatment, and some of the tissues that are destroyed are the salivary glands. These sorts of people will be healed in the future, perhaps even grow new teeth.

"There's going to be a huge residual problem in the population for one or two generations in our country (and several generations in the third world), and that is in people who have lost all or most of their teeth. Around 6 million or more Canadians have no teeth at all. In India, 11 percent have no teeth (that's more than 100 million people) and we know that the consequences of losing all your teeth include decreased longevity and poor nutrition. We've really not done enough epidemiology to understand all of the consequences. If you put two metallic implants in the lower mandible to support the lower denture, you have a huge improvement in the patient's satisfaction with their overall condition and in their quality of life. They can eat better, the pain goes down, they can speak and smile with more confidence — they can even kiss better. This has big consequences for them.

"I think in the medium term we can improve the satisfaction and quality of life, using this rather simple technology."

The Faculty of Dentistry is celebrating its centenary with a number of events. A two-day joint research symposium on September 17 and 18 with the Université de Montreal (whose dental faculty is also celebrating its 100th year) called "New Oral Health Knowledge for the 21st Century." An honorary degree will be conferred on Dr. Ron Dubner, a renowned pain researcher from the University of Maryland.

For more information see www.mcgill.ca/dentistry

Graduate School of Library and Information Studies

The highest level of fame is reached when you are known to the world by just one name: like a Hepburn, Madonna or Getzky. The world of librarianship is not a ripe field to produce such stars, but there is at least one and, for a while, he taught at McGill.

Director of the GSLIS France Bouthillier
Owen Egan

When McGill Librarian Charles Gould started a small librarian training summer school in 1904, he asked his good friend Melvyl Dewey to teach and establish the curriculum for the program — Dewey, of course, is immortalized in libraries the world over as the designer of his eponymous decimal system. The program he and Gould founded here went on to become the first librarian training school in Canada to be accredited by the American Library Association. Acting Director France Bouthillier shared her thoughts on where the school, and her profession are headed.

"I would say technology has changed the way work is done in libraries, and the needs of organizations in terms of organizing information. That's why we changed our name — now we say Library and Information Studies, and have since the 1980s. It illustrates that libraries are part of an information world and we train people now to manage information resources whatever they are. Of course we think in terms of the broad definition of what is an information resource and also what is a cultural resource, because our students end up working in museums. They can manage many kinds of things, but what has not changed is the nature of the task — the task is always to acquire resources, to organize them, and make them available to various kinds of clients.

"The focus now is less on libraries only. We developed courses recently in the area of knowledge management and digital archives. Knowledge management looks at how you organize resources so that the knowledge people gain over the years is not lost, and that it percolates. You make sure that what is known is codified and made available to people who may need it. It has human resources management aspects, but it also involves information technology and information resources. You find these courses not only in management schools, but also library schools.

"It's getting more multidisciplinary. Our PhD students are using more theories and methodologies from other fields. We hired someone recently that specializes in bioinformatics. But this is true for other disciplines -- if you want to study social problems you need to approach them from various disciplines. You cannot manage information without taking into the account the nature of the organization, so you need management. You also need to take into account individuals, so psychology is important, from a cognitive point of view. And of course we have technology, which is also all over the place, so we need to look at what is done in the field of computer science.

"There's a need to inform people of information sources and the need to remain critical of that source. The value of information has never been greater, but for the first time in history, there has never been so much false information."

"In our field, the sky is the limit as far as variation. Our students come here with a Bachelors degree, and some come here with another Master's or even PhDs. Each one is a special mixture of knowledge and skills, and if they want they can apply to very traditional positions, or they can try to shape their position.

"It's a growing field, it integrates more and more other disciplines, and that is why, from my point of view, it is becoming more fascinating."

Because the Library School started as a summer program, the GSLIS held its celebration on May 15. Over 100 people showed up for a dinner and reunion, and to hear talks from Lise Bissonette, CEO of the Bibliotheque Nationale du Quebec, McGill Deputy Provost Anthony Masi and Joanne Marshall, Dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina.

"It was an important event to celebrate, because we are the first school in Canada in this field. We were happy to see people to come who had graduated in the fifties. People made a special effort to come," said Bouthillier.

The school has graduated a number of prominent librarians, including former National Librarian of Canada Marianne Scott. GSLIS administrative assistant Dorothy Carruthers said the affection McGill trained librarians — some of whom traveled from the U.S. to attend the event — have for the school amazed her.

"We sent off a questionnaire to our alumni from the 1940s onwards. We tabulated the results and they were absolutely fascinating. I was astounded by the loyalty."