A warm welcome back to Ronald Mackay with his fifth contribution to the 2019 Authors Showcase.
Read and enjoy Ronald's latest memorable life experience Pâtisserie Tomaž here.
Read and enjoy Ronald's latest memorable life experience Pâtisserie Tomaž here.
Ronald Mackay
For more than a decade, Ronald Mackay combined farming close to Toronto in Ontario with teaching undergraduate and graduate students at a university in Montreal in the province of Quebec some 500 kilometers apart. He travelled between these two locations every week by train, spending four days in Montreal and three running a farm. For much of that time, he successfully chaired a large and fractious department made up of immodest and difficult people. He had learned, during many years working in Central Eastern and Europe, by noting its very absence, the importance of managing in a way that the broadest possible range of faculty members were willing to accept. During those years behind the Iron Country, he developed a great respect for the Central European intellectual and, since then, has too often – by his own admission -- made the mistake of assuming virtues in people where there are few or none.
For more than a decade, Ronald Mackay combined farming close to Toronto in Ontario with teaching undergraduate and graduate students at a university in Montreal in the province of Quebec some 500 kilometers apart. He travelled between these two locations every week by train, spending four days in Montreal and three running a farm. For much of that time, he successfully chaired a large and fractious department made up of immodest and difficult people. He had learned, during many years working in Central Eastern and Europe, by noting its very absence, the importance of managing in a way that the broadest possible range of faculty members were willing to accept. During those years behind the Iron Country, he developed a great respect for the Central European intellectual and, since then, has too often – by his own admission -- made the mistake of assuming virtues in people where there are few or none.
Ronald, in 1995, enjoying a whisky with a great Romanian intellectual and friend who still, despite all that life has thrown at him, possesses many virtues.
