by Mattael Darson

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n a warm spring afternoon, Peter MacKinnon paces in his office at the College Building. He suns himself in the large windows of his office surrounded by years of personal trophies. The office speaks to the character of the man. As an avid hunter and lover of the chase, the walls are lined with the pelts of his many prairie safaris. In a corner far from his desk, a garbage can is topped with a small basketball hoop, the floor around it littered with crumpled and discarded office memos.

In a few months, MacKinnon will be retired and likely forgotten by most people, but for now he is simply worried about getting through the last spring convocation as President of the University of Saskatchewan. And although few on campus are aware of him, this little-known administrator looks back fondly on his career, which started at the most humble position.

“I started as a dishwasher at Marquis Hall in ’68,” MacKinnon remembers fondly. “I just knew I wanted to be part of the university community, and that job was the proverbial foot in the door.”

MacKinnon impressed his superiors and soon moved up the ranks. Before long, he had a long resumé that included groundskeeper, janitor, library assistant and waterboy to the Huskies football team for three weeks during the 1972-73 season.

Mackinnon’s big break came in 1975, when the Dean of Law, D.A. Schmeiser, overheard him arguing with a group of Louis’ patrons. MacKinnon was a waiter at the time, and it being the Christmas season, his table chatter centred around the holidays. “I remember Peter’s words exactly,” Schmeiser would write in his memoirs. “He insistently and pointedly told those young people, ‘If I were the prosecution in Miracle on 34th Street, Santa would be rotting away in a mental institution.’ ”  Impressed, Schmeiser offered him a faculty position, assuring MacKinnon that his lack of education or experience in law was, if anything, an asset.

“There was a legal revolution in Canada,”wrote Schmeiser, “and what the U of S needed wasn’t another vapid egghead. We needed someone with grit, passion and determination. And Peter proved very capable at forging the necessary documents.”

MacKinnon still chuckles at the framed PhD he supposedly received from the World University of Earth. “Those were simpler times,” he says wistfully. “In those days all you needed was a song in your heart and a working understanding of calligraphy and the whole world could be yours.”

Schmeiser’s intuition proved to be flawed, however, as it soon became clear that MacKinnon was gobsmackingly incompetent as a professor of law. “His first lecture was 15 recitations of the Webster’s Dictionary definition of the word ‘law,’” wrote Schmeiser. “The students all did well on the quiz, however, so we allowed him to stay as he was single-handedly raising our average GPA.”

Despite his deficiencies as a professor, MacKinnon did display an uncanny knack for making friends.

“One thing I do remember about MacKinnon, or Professor Pete as he asked us to call him, is that he was always so considerate,” says James Reilly, a member of the ’86 class of law.

“He wasn’t like most professors. There was always an apple waiting on our desks at the start of class, and he never forgot a birthday. And sure, his loosey-goosey teaching style may be the reason I got disbarred and now work at RONA, but I don’t hold that against him.”

In time, MacKinnon’s friendly demeanor and general popularity at the College of Law made him the natural candidate to become dean when the position opened up in 1988. That was also the first and only time the dean was chosen by popular vote.

After a decade at the College of Law, MacKinnon would find himself elevated to an even greater position of influence. In 1999, with then-President George Ivany stepping down, recruiters from the U of S turned their eyes toward MacKinnon. “George was one of my strongest supporters,” Mackinnon says, his hands behind his head, his feet up causing his running shoes to drip mud onto the fine oak finish of his desk. “The thing that really set me apart from the rest of the candidates, at least according to George, was my vision for the future. When I was Dean, the law college was the only one that was prepared for the Y2K disaster. We had the biggest stockpile of water and canned goods of any of the colleges.”

Ivany, being a man of both considerable political weight and unrestrained paranoia, insisted that the visionary MacKinnon be the one to succeed him in order to better allow the university to weather “the technological dystopia of planes falling from the sky and calendars reverting to the year 1900.”

With Ivany’s support, MacKinnon ascended to the presidency, where, for the first time in his life, the former dishwasher was finally addressed as sir. Surprisingly enough to his critics, MacKinnon proved to be a very effective administrator. Board of Governors meetings, which had a longstanding reputation for being a raucous and disorderly affair, were tamed by the new President’s introduction of a Speaker’s Conch, of which he had sole possession.

Public opinion of the new president was still favourable. Never one to disappoint his friends, MacKinnon followed a policy of signing whatever came across his desk, leading to the unrestrained campus construction boom of the last decade.

“Peter is an easy man to work with,” says Richard Florizone, the university VP of finance and resources. “You walk into his office with a piece of posterboard and say the words ‘good fiscal policy’ and you walk out with a multi-million dollar construction budget.”

MacKinnon says he’s proud of the legacy he will leave at the university. “Looking back,” he says, “I’ve built a lot of buildings and handed out a lot of papers to students in fancy dresses.”

He strokes his chin thoughtfully and adds, “I wonder who the new guy is going to be.”