U.B.C.--Sis-Boom-Ah

The University of British Columbia at Vancouver owes much of its existence to the sis-boom-ah of its galumphing student body. In 1922, fed up with government delays in providing permanent buildings, undergraduates marched eight miles to a wooded headland overlooking Howe Sound, heaved boulders into a cairn and started one of the handsomest campuses in North America. In subsequent years they have built a gymnasium, a playing field and stadium, a recreation hall.

Last week they were at it again. They plastered the campus with yellow labels bearing the slogan "It's Up To You." Their goal: a new $500,000 gymnasium as a memorial to U.B.C.'s war dead.

There was good reason to believe they would succeed. Almost overnight, Canada's youngest university had become its second largest (7,000 students), outranked only by Toronto (11,000). In the past year U.B.C. added law courses to its curriculum, won a pledge of $5,000,000 for new buildings from Provincial Premier John Hart, announced that it would offer first-year courses in medicine and pharmacy in September. It was also making plans to teach dentistry, optometry, music, dramatics, physical education, possibly journalism. In noncultural fields it was soaring, too. The Thunderbird basketball team (sometimes called the "Blunder-thirds' ) had surprised everybody by trouncing some crack U.S. college teams.

Up from Pugwash. To match its whoop-de-do student body, U.B.C. has a robust president. He is Dr. Norman Archibald MacRae MacKenzie, a bootstrap scholar, brilliant organizer and a man who gets what he wants. When Ottawa phoned one day last fall giving permission to use abandoned Army huts on the campus, "Larry" MacKenzie chuckled: he had carted them off and put them on campus some weeks before.

Born in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, 52 years ago, MacKenzie quit his studies at Dalhousie University to go overseas, won a Military Medal and Bar. Back at college, he took 39 courses to the average student's 20, worked his way through by digging postholes, taking census, parking cars. Then he took postgraduate courses in law at Harvard and Cambridge. For four years he worked on a Saskatchewan farm. He has long been one of Canada's top men in international affairs, was called by the Government in 1943 to head the Wartime Information Board.

Today he drives to work at 8 a.m. in a rattletrap Chevvie, parks wherever he can find space, and pauses for a long look at the snow-capped Coast Range mountains across the sound before entering his office. His students worship him. So do war veterans, not one of whom he has turned away. Said Larry Mackenzie: "By hook or by crook we'll make room for them."

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