Daniel O’Brien, the man who transformed St. Thomas University from a small parochial institution into a leading liberal arts university and one of the most beautiful campuses in Canada, died Sunday. He was 77 years old.
“He was a visionary,” says Ilkay Silk, who taught drama at STU for 36 years. “He had a gift for seeing a good thing and going with it. Before he came, St. Thomas was a small liberal arts university. It was this kind of hidden jewel in Eastern Canada and he recognized what a special place this was. He took that and ran with it.”
O’Brien was president of St. Thomas from 1990 to 2006. He was at the palliative care unit of the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax at the time of his death. His funeral will be held in Halifax on Thursday Nov. 3 at 2:30 p.m.
Patrick Malcolmson, political science professor at STU, worked side by side with O’Brien for two years as vice-president in 2004.
“He greatly changed the perception of St. Thomas.”
O’Brien renovated the university both physically and academically. He introduced new academic programs including Journalism, Human Rights, Criminology and Communications.
“Without these programs, the university might not be here at the moment,” says Malcolmson.
Peter O’Brien says his father believed appearances could truly show inner qualities.
“The beautification of the STU campus, the building up of its physical presence in Fredericton, is something he was really proud of.”
He describes his father as a strong man with goals and ideas.
“I was his eldest son and that meant that I had a lot to live up to. He was always very supportive in, I would say, the most robust of ways. Because being the strong character he was, and skeptical spirit that he was, he never let things go easily.”
Malcolmson says O’Brien was a hard worker who didn’t tolerate people not doing their job.
“He was very focused on the success of the university so he demanded a lot from the people who worked for him because he wanted to ensure they made a good job for the university,” says Malcolmson.
“He got the best out of people.”
In 2004, the university was trying to balance teaching, research and staff demands. Malcolmson says the union was pushing their demands and at the same time, the university was holding fast to its own stance.
“I very distinctly remember getting increasingly worried about what was going to happen and stressed out about the whole situation.”
He remembers almost word-by-word the conversation he had with O’ Brien.
“He said … ‘At the end of the day, labour negotiations are a process and either we will reach an agreement or we won’t and then there will be a strike or there won’t and then we will come to some agreement at the end of the day and life will go on.’ And he was right.”
O’Brien’s leadership skills were able to calm this stressful situation.
“He projected a sense of confidence which a president needs to do … You feel like you have the leadership that will carry you through,” says Malcolmson.
O’Brien greatly changed the perception of the university in the city and within the province, he says.
“It was no longer seen as the poor second-rate competitor to UNB [University of New Brunswick]. It became much more in the sense of if you want to study science, go to UNB; if you want to study arts come to St. Thomas. Our prestige went way up as a result of him.”
Peter O’Brien recalls attending ceremonial events at the university with his father.
One of those events was the opening of the Black Box Theatre, a project he presided over with Ilkay Silk.
“He gave me an awful lot of freedom to have what I think a good Black Box Theatre really needs,” says Silk.
St. Thomas’ Black Box Theatre was the first one built east of Montreal at that time.
“I remember being asked to go over one day to see what height the mirrors should be in the dressing room. And it was that kind of attention to detail he had. He gave you ownership of anything you were doing but he also had opinions of his own,” says Silk. “He was very much part of the Black Box Theatre success. I remember him coming out of a packed house really having enjoyed what he’d seen and I remember him saying, ‘Ilkay, did we build the theatre big enough?’”
