Mike Douse BSc (Econ) 1960, DipEd 1961

The 2013 Golden Reunion was pure gold. Debating. Dining. Drinking. Discussing poetry and politics. Much as I spent my time at Queen’s.

Looking back across the decades, I am amazed that I was allowed to get away with it. During my second, third (and indeed fourth and fifth) years of Economics I had scarcely any interaction with lectures or tutorials. Eventually I graduated – perhaps my professors discerned some well-hidden potential. More likely, they were keen to get rid of me.

The DipEd year required me to attend teaching practice, but somehow I managed to keep that to the barest minimum, attending as few lectures and tutorials as possible. Again, I somehow scraped through. By no means a good foundation for a lifelong career in education.

I read avidly – anything but textbooks! I wrote more for The Gown than for my tutors. Academic distinctions arrived later and elsewhere. I have been a headmaster, university professor, foundation director of Australia’s Disadvantaged Schools Programme and, now in my latter-70s, I’m still involved in international education planning (recently in Darfur, Solomons, Belize and Dadaab).

Some of that which I experienced at Queen’s has helped me directly and significantly. For example, I was involved in establishing the World School Students Debating Championships and have produced poems that publishers have looked kindly upon. But I thoroughly wasted my undergraduate academic opportunities: I learned virtually no economics and – although Professor Knox’s history of educational thought was wonderfully stimulating – I picked up very little that was at all useful to my subsequent half century (and still batting) in education worldwide.

None of this I say with any sense of pride, still less as a model for those currently studying. I’m simply telling it as it was. But I savoured the university experience for those six seminal QUB years. With careful editing, reminiscence therapy works wonders.

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