Susannah Bunce, whose father, Michael Bunce, taught in the Department of Geography while Susannah was a child, recalls her experience growing up in Scarborough and seeing UTSC through her father’s eyes. Susannah herself currently works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Geography at UTSC.
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0:05
Lincoln Alexander came to my high school. He was the first Black Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, and he came to my high school in my last year, and he talked to the Black students about self empowerment and going to university and furthering education, furthering skills.
0:23
Funnily enough, he was the person who gave me my BA degree when I graduated. And he was asking everybody where they were from.
0:31
And each person in front of me was saying idyllic places like Caledon, Ontario and Dundas, Ontario, beautiful, sort of rural, bucolic kind of places, and he got to me, and I said, I’m from Scarborough.
0:42
And he said, way to go. And I thought it was a nice kind of feeling that someone had acknowledged the fact that Scarborough isn’t kind of a place that a lot of people kind of successfully come out of.
0:56
My father [Prof. Michael Bunce] taught here, so that’s one of the reasons I knew the campus very well from being a child. I knew it through his eyes, so it wasn’t really like I knew it through my own experience of it.
1:09
It was really through where his office was, where he would take me as a small child to go and eat lunch when I came to visit him at his office. I would go to the gym sometimes, the meeting space, which I loved as a kid, because it was so huge.
1:21
And you’d look up and you could see people looking over. And I remember going to see a play there, maybe I was 8 or 9? And I remember feeling like it was so spectacular, the space, the echoes. Everything was really quite amazing.
1:35
I guess, in terms of going to a park, it would be the valley down behind UTSC because it was very close to my parents’ house growing up. They used to have a stable down there that was run by the University of Toronto Students’ Association.
1:47
And so they provided really inexpensive riding lessons to people from the community but also students and staff and faculty. So I spent all my summers down there riding horses through the valley, so through Morningside Park.
1:59
So that’s always been kind of, I have amazing memories when I walk down there now, of riding and the trail rides through the valley. Then also there’s tennis courts still there, but I played tennis as a kid too, so it was always like this amazing park space that was just really accessible.
