BCBusiness

You think that, once you're out, everything will be fine. You leave these crazy people behind and live in truth and beauty, and everything will be wonderful. You think you're over your trauma 25 B C B U S I N E S S . C A O C T O B E R 2 0 24 P a ul J o s e p h / U B C B r a n d & M a r k e t i n g ; H o v e r C o ll e c t i v e / U B C B r a n d & M a r k e t i n g ; D o n E r h a r d t / U B C B r a n d & M a r k e t i n g UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS are prompt. Scripted. Scheduled. Sure, that's a generalization. There are likely presidents at smaller colleges who still operate in absent-minded chaos. But if you're running an organization like the University of British Columbia—70,000 stu- dents, 20,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $3 billion—you're inclined to function like the CEO of any vast enterprise: with discipline. In tightly timed phone calls with any number of previous UBC presidents, it's always been the same: they give you a chatty opening minute, 13 minutes of focused attention, another min- ute of pleasantries and you're out, with the president primed to greet the next caller or delegation in their long day of meetings, entreaties and appearances. So, it's a surprise, sitting in the glassy C-suite offices on the top floor of UBC's Wal- ter C. Koerner Library, when the still-new president, Benoit-Antoine Bacon, comes through the door sweaty, dishevelled and so late that I fear my one-hour interview slot will have evaporated altogether. Bacon is apologetic—even a little embarrassed. It turns out that he had accepted a 5 a.m. invitation to attend a sweat lodge at the UBC First Nations House of Learning, an event he never imagined would last for four hours. And by "sweat lodge," you shouldn't be envisioning an austere, Swedish-looking sauna. Think, rather, of something pur- pose-built but temporary—hot boulders in a big fire under a low, bent-wood frame, covered by blankets. A cramped, dark, cedar-scented space. Bacon says, "It gets quite personal." It turns out, however, that the president doesn't mind. He did his PhD at the Uni- versité de Montréal in neuropsychology, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He loves the personal. In the generous hour that follows, he lays bare his own personal story with something between surprising transparency and actual courage. Benoit-Antoine Bacon grew up bounc- ing around a bunch of undistinguished Montreal neighbourhoods, the son of a tyrannical, alcoholic father and a co-depen- dent mother. In the first seven years of his life, existing in what he describes as "that hypnotic state when you build your view of the world," he got used to a place that was "dangerous and untrustworthy." And as he watched his father wrestle, so unsuccess- fully, with his own demons, with his fear and shame, Bacon says he, too, became accustomed to living in fear and to feeling shame—a sense that he was permanently and irrevocably ineffectual. But he was always a good student. And in the Quebecois transitional year from high school to university, he decided to go to CEGEP (a French acronym for Gen- eral and Professional Teaching College) in English, which he describes as a first step out of his stultifyingly narrow self-image, a neurological break tied not to the French language, so much, as to the whole mindset from which he felt "transformed, reborn." He also discovered psychology, of which he says, "When you are raised in a world that doesn't make sense, you look for sense." Still, it wasn't the clean break he might have been hoping for. "You think that, once you're out, everything will be fine," he says. "You leave these crazy people behind and live in truth and beauty, and everything will be wonderful. You think you're over your trauma." But not so much. The linguistic characterization of "post-traumatic stress" implies that the trauma is over. But in an ensuing decade or more of drink, drugs and depression, Bacon says, that trauma followed him around. At the same time, however, he also found himself increasingly subject to pleasant surprise. In 2003, he welcomed a baby daughter—a powerful motivator to break from the toxic patterns of his own family of origin. "I felt, 'I have to do bet- ter for my little baby.'" He was offered a job teaching at Bishop's University on the edge of Sherbrooke, Quebec—a place, after the harsh surrounds of urban Montreal, that appeared to Bacon as "God's coun- try, where the grass was green and the water blue." He got recruited as the chief

• Cover