Issue #14: Winter/Spring 2006

Martha: The Woman With the Jumper Cables

By Richard Littlemore

Martha Piper leaves UBC in June after nine years as chief executive, and her impact will be felt for years to come. As an academic, administrator, fundraiser and shameless promoter of UBC, she ranks with the institution’s most illustrious presidents. Here, in Part One of a two-part profile, Richard Littlemore looks at the personal side of UBC’s 11th president.
Martha Piper can grab you by the eyes. Not physically, of course. It’s a figurative grip, but it’s a death grip nevertheless.

The moment arises periodically, and almost always unexpectedly. The 11th president and vice-chancellor of the University of British Columbia will be chatting in that warm, casual, “call-me-Martha” way, and suddenly something will change. She’ll pause, draw a breath and shift just enough to attract your glance. When you look, you see square shoulders, a determined chin and a flash of fire in Martha’s own wide-set blue eyes. And then she has you. You will listen to the next point and you will not look away.

The remarkable part – one of many remarkable things about Dr. Martha C. Piper – is that she can do this without seeming threatening, or even pushy. Because Martha doesn’t ever tell you what to think; she tells you what she thinks and she does so with such conviction, such absolute determination, that you can’t help but accept the sincerity of her position.
This willingness to commit herself unreservedly to what she has to say, may also explain why so many people feel that they know Martha personally, even if they hardly know her at all.

* * *

Martha Cook Piper was born on November 27, 1945, the third of four tightly packed children. Just six years separates the eldest, another girl, from the youngest, one of two boys. Martha grew up in a big house, right on Lake Erie, in Lorain, Ohio, a little steel town just west of Cleveland. Her father, Dan Kates Cook, was a lawyer, as was his father. Her mother, Margaret Julia Guest, was a homemaker (at the time, people would have thought: “obviously”).

“My life was shaped by my family,” Martha says now. Father was the disciplinarian, mother was “free,” reigning over a house that was “never dirty, but always chaotic.” Inside, there were dress-up boxes in the attic and papier mache puppets in the basement. Outside, there was always a game of tennis or baseball or an impromptu swim in the lake.

Martha was a good student in an unspectacular school. All four siblings excelled, “and my parents never suggested that there were different expectations for me than for my brothers.” In high school, she “signed up for everything,” writing for the newspaper, playing in the band and singing – “badly” – in the choir. She played no organized sports because there were no girls’ teams. “Even in gym, we all waited in the back row, gossiping and hoping the ball didn’t come to you.”

Martha graduated at the top of her high school class, but still found herself unprepared for university. “I got a ‘ c’ in my first chemistry class,” she says, and she’s clearly still smarting from the ignominy of such a mark.

In the tenth grade, Martha volunteered at a local rehab centre and made the decision that she would like to go into health care. At least, she thought she would get an education in the health care field before getting married and going home to raise children. At the time, she regarded a profession as something that a woman might fall back on in the event that her husband was felled prematurely by a heart attack or a bus. She chose physiotherapy because she didn’t want to be a nurse and couldn’t imagine being a doctor. She chose the University of Michigan because it had a good physiotherapy school.

All of which sounds straightforward, but it glosses over a couple of important points. The first is the influence of Martha’s mother, who grew up in a relatively poor family in Detroit in the 1920s and ’ 30s, a time when even wealthy young women were not expected to go to university. But Margaret Guest had a rich uncle: Edgar Guest, the “Poet of the People” whose syndicated column ran in the Detroit Free Press and 299 other newspapers. Guest recognized in Margaret a raw but lively intelligence that demanded attention and, passing over Margaret’s three brothers, he paid her tuition to the University of Michigan, whence she graduated in 1938. It was there that she met Martha’s father, and there that she cemented a lifelong appetite for education in general and for reading in particular. (For example, she was, at time of writing – just shy of her 90 th birthday – enrolled in a college course on British poetry.)

A second early influence was Martha’s paternal grandfather, a retired judge who moved in with the family when his own wife died in the mid- 1950s. Martha was about 10 at the time. Grandfather was a voracious reader, an avid conversationalist and someone who clearly loved being in the midst of his extended family. He taught Martha about baseball, listening to games on the radio, he taught her about the world as a member of an armchair travellers’ club, and he imparted all manner of grandfatherly wisdom. (See sidebar: Always Carry Jumper Cables)

A third influence is one that is as relevant today as it was in 1967. Martha had met Bill Piper at a local church group while she was still in high school. They went off to different universities to do their undergraduate degrees (Bill Piper went to the College of Wooster, southwest of Cleveland) and then got together seriously while at home in the summer before their senior year. They married soon after graduation.

“He’s probably influenced me more than most people realize,” Martha says of her husband of 38 years. “He’s always supported and encouraged me.”

For the next decade, Martha more or less followed Bill. They both studied at the University of Connecticut (where Martha added an ma in Child Development to her bsc in Physical Therapy), and then they moved on to Bethesda, md, before Bill, (who is a professor in the department of Psychiatry), got a faculty position at McGill in the late 1970s.

Unable to get a work permit in Quebec without fluency in French, Martha opened a daycare centre at Concordia University while she began studying a third language (she had taken Spanish in university). Once her French was serviceable, she resumed her physiotherapy practice at the Hôpital Saint-Justine, and from there, still feeling that “I didn’t have enough information,” she returned to academics at McGill, where she completed a phd in Epidemiology and Biostatistics in 1979.

What followed was one of those instances that Martha is inclined to pass off as incredibly good luck. The dean of Medicine, Dr. Richard Cruess, was searching for a new director of McGill’s School of Physical and Occupational Therapy. There was no doctorate available in the discipline, and, at the time, there had never been a phd holder in the director’s chair. Dean Cruess was looking to change that situation, Martha says, adding “I was the warm body.” He appointed her as soon as she received her degree.

If it was a risk to give such a position to someone with no administrative experience – without even tenure – it would prove to be one of the great gambles in Canadian academic history. Martha is inclined to turn any praise back to Dean Cruess – “He worked with me and he was very supportive” – but it’s clear that his judgment, perhaps even more than his mentoring, was well-rewarded.

Somewhere during this period – actually in 1971 and 1976 – there was an outbreak of little Pipers, specifically Emily and Hannah. As with all families, the children brought joy and complication. Hannah, especially, provided Bill Piper with an opportunity to really prove what it meant to be a supportive husband. “I was just finishing my phd when my youngest daughter got bacterial meningitis,” Martha says, adding that she was both terrified and guilt-stricken, believing that her 2½-year-old daughter had become infected at the McGill daycare centre. Martha offered to quit her studies and become a stay-at-home mom, a proposal that Bill nixed immediately.

From that point forward, the Pipers employed a nanny who would come in during the day and, while not quite playing Mr. Mom (he has a phd, an md and a handsome academic career in his own right) Bill Piper was the parent you could always reach in a hurry. (“I don’t even have my mother’s work phone number,” Emily Piper says now. “Really, what would be the point? I can’t keep track of her travel schedule, let alone her daily calendar.”)

In 1985, Bill was offered a position at the University of Alberta, and Martha was delighted to find that the university was also in the market for a new dean of Rehabilitation Medicine. She accepted that position and was appointed vice-president Research in 1993. In 1995, that portfolio was expanded to include External Affairs.

It was in this role that Dr. Martha Piper began to establish a national reputation. She had already distinguished herself in her chosen field, having published widely on issues of child development. “But it was as a political lobbyist that she really made her mark,” says Dr. Allan Tupper, who was a colleague at U of A and is now associate vice-president Government Relations at UBC. “One of the biggest recent changes (in the Canadian polity) has been the growing role of the federal government in education and especially in research. Martha has been critical in shaping those policies.”

Dr. Tupper points to three reasons for Martha’s success – for UBC’s success – on this front:

1. “We acknowledge good works in a clear, non-partisan way.” (Which is to say, Martha says, “thank you” better than anyone in the business.)
2. “We speak to the national role, albeit sometimes using UBC examples.”
3. “We constantly relate universities to the goals and priorities of the current government.”

It’s partly for these reasons – for her very public successes with the Chretien and Martin administrations – that Martha is sometimes seen as a capital ‘ l’ Liberal, notwithstanding that she has enjoyed equal success dealing in Alberta with Conservative premier Ralph Klein and in her early days in BC with ndp premier Glen Clark.

But if you suggest a partisan affiliation, you are apt to find yourself, quite suddenly, locked in Martha’s determined glare. She was, herself, once guilty of complaining about government, Martha says. Dr. Peter Meekison, then vice-president Academic at U of A, a favourite mentor and, Martha says, “a really astute guy,” stopped her cold and said, “Those people were elected by the public and you are part of a public institution.”

“I decided then and there,” Martha says now, “that I would always honour the electorate and whatever government they elected.” And if you look at her record in securing funding for such programs as the Canada Research Chairs and the Indirect Costs of Research, it has been a remarkably successful strategy.

In 1997, Martha made the move that would catapult her from a national figure to an international one, coming to UBC as the 11 th president and vice-chancellor. Then-UBC chancellor Bill Sauder, who was chair of the search committee, is delighted to take credit for the hire. Struck by her energy and integrity, “I pretty much pushed her through the committee,” Sauder says, adding that, even in spite his high expectations, “She turned our far better than I had imagined.”

Those expectations were perhaps not uniformly high. Dr. Herbert Rosengarten, executive director in the Office of the President, reports that, after Martha’s first extraordinarily upbeat public speaking engagement, many staid faculty members responded with a horrified, “Oh my God! She’s a cheerleader,” a president more suited to an undergraduate college than an international research institution.

“They didn’t allow for her shrewdness or her strong intellect, her persistence and determination,” Rosengarten says. And after nine years – during which the UBC student population grew by 30 per cent, the budget by 65 per cent, and research funding from both government and private sources doubled – there are still policy-by-policy quibblers, but no one who would suggest she wasn’t up for the job.

Three years ago, Martha Piper became a grandmother to Charlotte Piper Elgie. Martha spent every spare hour taking turns with Emily reading from the Great Big Book of Mother Goose. “Those old fairy tales are full of morbid details – babies falling out of trees – and the nurses would just stare at us,” says Emily. “But I was thinking, ‘Hey, these are classics!’”

Emily is officially Dr. Emily Piper, 34, a consulting psychologist at BC Women’s and Children’s Hospital and a clinical instructor at UBC, who in addition to looking after Charlotte, also maintains a private practice on the side. Her younger sister is now Dr. Hannah Piper, 29, who, having graduated from Princeton (BSc) and Harvard (MD) is in the midst of a general surgical residency, also in Vancouver.

Does that suggest that the expectations were high in the Piper household?

“My parents probably would say no, but I have to say yes,” Emily says. For example, “I would have been happy to fill out one application for university; but my parents said, ‘Let’s try 25.’” Once the giggling dies down from that bit of overstatement, Emily goes on to describe filling out 25 (twenty-five) university applications, “one third to ‘great schools,’ one third to ‘middling schools’ and one third to what my dad calls ‘shoe-in schools.’” Emily doesn’t say how many accepted her, but she allows that she considered a nice range of options before settling on Colorado College for her undergraduate degree. She did her phd at the California School of Professional Psychology.

With the family having consolidated in Vancouver, the extended Pipers now spend most Sunday evenings together, enjoying gourmet meals prepared in tandem by Martha and Emily’s husband Damon Elgie. “They cook together,” Emily says. “You don’t dare go into the kitchen when they’re in there.” Martha and Bill also try to spend Friday’s at Emily and Damon’s house, giving grandmother Martha one more opportunity to shower Charlotte with little gifts, sourced from Martha’s travel destinations around the world.

And for the future? Martha and Bill have recently moved out of Norman MacKenzie house and into a new home on Chancellor Boulevard. They plan to stay in Vancouver, and if you want more detail than that, you will have to practice patience. In response to any such questions, Martha will draw a breath, square her shoulders, stare into your eyes – and not tell you anything.

It’s a convincing moment. ¤

Richard Littlemore is a freelance writer living on Vancouver Island. He has been Martha Piper’s speechwriter for the past 7 years.