Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Jane Fee has found herself right back where she started – but her return to her hometown is anything but anticlimactic.
The university’s vice-provost for students was born and raised in Surrey and left to pursue a successful academic and professional career. Now, having returned home and having won a Surrey Women in Business Award on March 5, Fee reflects on how she got back to the place she started out from in the first place.
“I spent 35 years elsewhere and I kind of started my life [in Surrey], and this seems to be where my career has brought me back to,” she said.
Fee points to Grade 10 at Princess Margaret senior secondary school in Surrey as the starting point of her academic career. It was at this time that she discovered the path she wanted to take after graduation.
“One of the things about Surrey in those days was because there was no university south of the Fraser [River], there was really not a lot of discussion within our high school about going on to university,” she said. “So there was a handful of us that kind of banded together as a close-knit group with the same intentions in mind.”
However, after graduating from high school in 1972, Fee put her academic ambitions on hold temporarily to be a hostess at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, and quickly experienced the unpredictable nature of the outside world.
“I was right there,” Fee said, speaking of the massacre that claimed the lives of 11 Israeli athletes. “I was about two buildings away from where it all happened. And I was locked down in the Olympic compound for a few days.
“Of course back in 1972 the Internet didn’t exist, and so when we were locked down, we were locked down from a communications perspective as well as physically. So my parents were sitting at home quaking in their boots.”
When she came back – after backpacking through Europe for another six months and being exposed to many new cultures in the process – she found that starting university also brought its own unique level of intensity.
“Being a kid from Surrey, from the ’burbs, I was very intimidated by the size of some of the classes at UBC [the University of British Columbia],” she said.
A number of like-minded former Princess Margaret secondary students had enrolled at the university, and Fee linked up with them, which helped her get her bearings. She soon found her way into the prestigious ArtsONE program. Established in 1967, it offered small-group learning and an integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum. Fee credits ArtsONE for taking her academic career to the next level.
She then headed into second year, taking classes in French linguistics, and in her third year did an exchange at Laval University in Quebec City. It was there that Fee cemented her love for linguistics, a field she notes is invaluable in her professional career on a daily basis.
“It’s the science of human language; it’s about people. People study sociology, where you’re studying societal systems, and linguistics is all about language systems. And the sub-field of … first-language acquisition, which is about how children acquire their native language, is what I focused on.”
In 1978 she graduated from UBC with a bachelor of arts degree and headed straight into a master’s degree in linguistics at the same university. During her career, she had the honour of rubbing shoulders with the world’s most famous linguist, Noam Chomsky.
“He’s a really interesting guy, he’s a fantastic speaker. I’ve heard him speak both on his social politics and on linguistics. And he’s one of these guys in the field of linguistics that changed the nature of linguistics.”
After completing her master’s degree in 1980, Fee moved to Chilliwack with her husband, who’d been posted to the Fraser Valley for a job. She soon found herself pulled back to UBC, however. In 1986, with two young children, she started her PhD in linguistics.
“I did a PhD while having two preschool-aged kids, which is not something I would recommend to anyone. One of the things about that, however, is that you’re probably the most efficient PhD student on the planet. I didn’t have a car, I had a bike with a bike seat on the back, and I’d put the youngest one in the carrier and the other one would ride his bike to kindergarten.”
Although she wouldn’t trade the experience for the world, Fee acknowledged she did miss out on certain extracurricular activities normally associated with post-graduate work.
“About the time in the afternoon when everybody was heading off to the grad student lounge to have a beer, I’d turn around and get back on my bike and pedal like mad to pick the youngest one up from daycare and the eldest one up from a neighbour’s house and get them to bed. And then I used to work from about 7:30 at night until about 2 o’clock in the morning. And then you get up and do it all again the next day.”
After obtaining her PhD in 1991, Fee made the transition from academia to administration, though it required a cross-country move. Following the completion of a project with the faculty of medicine at McGill University, she served as an associate professor in the School of Human Communication Disorders at Dalhousie University. At Dalhousie, she also served as a faculty representative on the board of governors and as the president of the Dalhousie Faculty Association. She was also involved in the integration of the Technical University of Nova Scotia with Dalhousie University.
However, the West Coast was calling, and on a trip back home in 1997 to visit her mother, she was headhunted by the Technical University of British Columbia (TechBC). Fee, who was the first woman hired for the university, took on the roles of academic assistant to the president and associate professor before becoming associate vice-president. Later, Fee served as acting vice-president of learner services until the transfer of TechBC to Simon Fraser University (SFU) during the initial development of what would become SFU Surrey’s Central City campus. Of course, the campus went through some growing pains after opening in 2002 – as did the surrounding neighbourhood.
“There were both challenges and opportunities, certainly in terms of challenges for SFU Surrey in the early days,” Fee said. “A lot of it was breaking the myth of what is Whalley. Whalley 15 years ago was a very different place than what it is now.
“It was a real struggle, and part of my job in the early days was to lure … programs down from the hill and out to Surrey. And we would build offices for them, and they would not come. But a lot of what we did there was to build student programming that was so exciting, in many respects it was the students that brought the faculty and the staff down from [Burnaby Mountain].”
In 2011 she made the switch to Kwantlen, and now she finds herself in the interesting position of working with students out of high school looking to make that tough transition to university life. Fee noted a study that found 40% of post-secondary students drop out after their first year. Looking back on herself as a teen growing up in the community, when higher education in Surrey was not an option, is definitely something Fee takes note of in her current position.
“Yes, it’s interesting to think of myself growing up,” she said. “When I was a kid we didn’t have the opportunity to go to university south of the Fraser, and now everything has changed.” •
