Legacy Q&A with Bart Cunningham

Welcome to a new series that celebrates the legacy of HSD. In coming months, we will be featuring interviews and stories with past and present faculty members, instructors and staff, exploring the achievements and evolution of our faculty from its inception to present day. 

Our second interview is with Bart Cunningham, who retires from UVic at the end of the year after 50 years of teaching in the School of Public Administration (SPA). Cunningham joined SPA in 1974, the same year that Human and Social Development became a faculty. Known as an excellent and supportive supervisor, Cunningham has helped many students graduate with practical theses that address real-life problems in the public service. Here he talks about HSD’s evolution as a faculty, key moments of leadership and how he feels about the new Faculty of Health.  

How long have you been in Human and Social Development?

This is my fiftieth and final year. All my time at UVic has been at HSD. Before the School of Social Work started, before the School of Child and Youth Care started, the School of Public Administration was the first. Nursing became a school in 1976, then Health Information Science. There were debates about where we should go from there.

John Dewey served as the [first] dean of our faculty. People who served on the faculty council were in law and political science. The vision at the time was the faculty would be a combined school of various disciplines—economic, law and science.

The university was a fine arts university of the time and professional schools did not fit with the culture. The notion at the time was that a good education was a fine arts, liberal arts education. In the university, we were seen as kind of weird.

In 1974, HSD was formed. We couldn’t find a name for ourselves and we were a bunch of small schools with four or five faculty members each. The term HSD wasn’t even thought of. Faculty around the university were offering suggestions like the “Faculty of Small Schools,” or “Faculty of Professional Schools.”

How do you define this group? A lot of what people did was health-related and help-related but that did not seem to fit Public Administration. The term Human and Social Development (HSD) was a uniting term as it responded to all the schools in some way. While Nursing, Child Care, and Social Work had clients in specific ministries; our role was in responding to these and other ministries in a more general sense. 

 [The Faculty of] Law came about just after HSD. Shortly after, there was an engineering faculty. In my mind, the whole temperament of the university began to change from a fine arts orientation to recognizing the value of professional schools. 

Can you think of any exemplary leaders in HSD from that time?

Brian Wharf was so central to building our faculty. He was the building person. He was the first director of Social Work and a very good corporate figure in terms of building our faculty, convincing SPA to be part of this sphere of small schools. Other corporate citizens were Michael Prince. He met our needs in Public Administration as he was a political scientist and taught in our program. He was also instrumental as the Lansdowne Chair in Public Policy, which was a uniting influence. Another corporate citizen, in my mind, was Denis Protti, the first director or the School of Health Information Science. These were all important people, in terms of working with the directors. The first initial identity of different schools working together came from them.

How was teaching during that time different?

In the School of Public Administration, we taught classes from 4 pm to 7 pm, and 7 pm to 10 pm, and this attracted the fulltime provincial employee who worked downtown. We offered a Master’s in Public Administration to students, most of whom were in government. As a smaller school, we relied on downtown people, professionals to teach many of our classes. You can do a lot of good teaching when you have four or five downtown professionals teach. We later moved away from that model to an online model where we became a central program offering a distance MPA [Master’s of Public Administration]. Frankly, it was night work and we were getting older.

Some of our people (Jim Cutt and Mark Loken) were key in implementing then-President Petch’s vision of a co-op program for UVic, building on his previous experience at the University of Waterloo. In my mind, this put UVic on the map as an attractive university. In the School of Public Administration, the on-campus program became a MPA with a co-op program, which was very attractive to students.

At one time, we were one of the largest public administration schools in Canada. You’d come in for a MPA but you’d also get a job. By the time you were halfway through your co-op experience, they’d want to hire you.

What are you proudest of in your career? 

I wrote five or six books; they were pinnacle experiences for me. My area of specialization has been work-life balance issues, stress, job satisfaction, and attraction and retention. One area that became important to my demeanour as a person who tries to practice what I preach is managing workplace stress, and health and wellness. When former President Petch championed exercise and wellness, he encouraged faculty to use the facilities. I was one of the “die hards” when we had the [outdoor] pool at the Ian Stewart centre. We would come at 7am, swim 100 lengths. Rain or shine, we were there. We still see each other at McKinnon Pool and were distraught when we heard of the McKinnon pool closing.

I wrote a book, The Stress Management Sourcebook, partly because it’s an interesting area and partly because it was part of my dealing with stress, and coming to terms with meditation, yoga and all those types of things. I feel strongly about encouraging the importance of exercise and health in our wellness at the university. I still swim and mix it up with other things such as mountain biking. I often start the morning with a 15-20 kilometer bike ride and some exercises, and I do this by 8:30 am.

The other thing I’m proud of in my career is that I still very much enjoy my work with students. I have 10 thesis students in my final year. I try to encourage a practical project. Working with students on those projects has been a very motivating experience. Many of these students, I continue to work with after their degrees are completed, on career issues, workplace issues and creative problem solving.

How do you feel about the establishment of the Faculty of Health?

The Faculty of Health has been an interesting proposition. As I see it, health has taken on its own momentum. [The School of Public Administration] is moving to Social Sciences. Health is one part of public administration. There’s criminal justice, budget management, managing environment, building infrastructure. There are so many areas of public administration one has to respond to. Our old home was connected to political science, that’s where public admin got started. But, it is really a multi-disciplined profession, including not only political science, but economics, law and other social sciences.

It's sad in a way. There's a lot of history there. On the other hand, it’s very positive. In the people I see, I can’t speak for everyone, I think a lot of people are energized by it. My whole life has been in HSD. I’m retiring at the end of the academic year. I won’t participate in the new energy. But I think the Faculty of Health is a good thing. I think it’s an energizing thing.