TIME CAPSULE 1970-71: John Pierce, Interdisciplinary Visionary

Men's UTSC Water Polo team 1970 left, John Pierce at dig site in greece, right

UTSC alumnus and former dean broke down academic and personal silos throughout his career

 

“For me, the answers to certain questions lie in the intersections of [academic] fields, not just looking at one area or an exclusive area,” says former Simon Fraser University dean and UTSC alumnus, John Pierce.

That “philosophy of the interconnected nature of knowledge,” as Pierce puts it, has shaped an extraordinary career. Through research that extends from geography to climate change to anthropology and archaeology, Pierce has made his mark by toppling some of the siloes of academia. But it was Pierce’s first experiences at UTSC – known then as Scarborough College – that became the springboard for what was to come.

Pierce majored in Geography at UTSC, graduating with the class of 1970 before going on to complete a one-year Honours degree program at St. George in 1971. He credits much of his early direction to the “fantastic people” he interacted with at U of T, particularly at UTSC, where faculty members were able to engage with the small student body.

“They were really influential,” says Pierce of the faculty during his undergraduate days. “They changed my thinking and aspirations, and they were really generous with their time,” he recalls.

Pierce became friends with then-principal Wynne Plumptre and his wife, Beryl, who were highly visible and available to the 500 or so students at the Scarborough campus at the time. As a student, Pierce was enlisted by Plumptre to help develop an art collection for Scarborough College. Pierce continued his passion for art during his time at St. George, sitting on the Hart House Art Committee (for which he was awarded the Frederick Banting Prize for service).

 

"They changed my thinking and aspirations, and they were really generous with their time"

 

From U of T, Pierce went on to complete a Master’s degree at the University of Waterloo, and then earned a PhD at the London School of Economics in London, UK. For his doctoral research, Pierce used satellite data to spatially map the growth of 17 Canadian cities – a novel enterprise during the 1970s.

Arriving back in Canada in 1976, Pierce landed a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, which had been established just 11 years earlier. His research looked at the relationship between humans and the environment through work that focused on environmental issues in food production, global environmental change and resource policy. He was named chair of the department in 1990.

In 1997, Pierce became dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at SFU, and found himself in a prime position to have a major impact on the renewal of the academy. Over the course of the next ten years, that Faculty hired 150 new faculty and staff members in a wide variety of core and hybrid fields in the humanities and social sciences. It’s a legacy Pierce is proud to have had a hand in.

“We paid a lot of attention to diversifying and differentiating ourselves from other universities,” says Pierce.

That same sense of interdisciplinary growth was invoked when Pierce took on deanship of SFU’s brand new Faculty of Environment in 2009, a role he held for five years.

“We had to start from scratch to define a mission and new career and programming possibilities,” says Pierce, who called the period “exciting, yet challenging.”

Throughout his years of administrative service, though, Pierce continued to teach and supervise graduate students. Remarkably, he also continued to branch out in his academic research.

An early experience during his U of T years, for instance – a dig at a Huron village on Lake Huron – had “impressed him greatly.” Later in his career, he returned to this passion for archeology and anthropology. In conjunction with SFU’s Hellenic Studies, he created an archaeological semester abroad program, “Dig Greece,” on the island of Kefalonia, Greece, to study pre-classical societies.

While that program is no longer active, Pierce still partners with other academics, charting the rise and fall of Bronze age Mycenaean societies in the Ionian Sea region. He’s even published a major research monograph, Ainos and its Region, The Story of a Mountain Ecosystem and its People (2018) with collaborators.

Pierce’s life outside of his academic career has exuded a similar blurring of boundaries. As well as being a well-respected academic, Pierce is a painter, sculptor, and art collector.

“The seeds were planted at [UTSC],” says Pierce. Now, that garden is in full bloom.

 

Photo: (left) Men's UTSC Water Polo team, 1970 (Don Carr/John Pierce); (right) John Pierce at a dig in Kefalonia, Greece (John Pierce)