The Academic Cloister, revisited

Samara co-founder Michael MacMillan was the Brockington Visitor at Queen's last week. His visit involved a variety of talks on his career, film, the role of the university and, of course, Samara. It also included a screening of his controversial 1976 film about univeristy life, the Academic Cloister.

Unfortunately the lectures were not recorded, but here's a lovely piece on Michael by Queen's Journal features editor Emily Davies. It traces the origins of Alliance Atlantis back to his days at Queen's, hi-jinks and all, and includes this quote where he describes his reasons for starting Samara:

"I've always been interested in public policy and politics. I was probably the only kid in East York to have Hansard delivered to the house everyday at age 11. Crazy, but true," he said. "What distresses me is that we have developed in a country as fortunate as ours an attitude that public leadership, public service won't make any difference. Therefore, you don't have to vote, you don't have to volunteer, you don't give a s**t that public affairs journalism is not where it should be. ...all of this leads to a culture or attitude where either it makes sense to solve these public challenges together or it doesn't and I come down on the side - loudly, that it does."

The Kingston Whig Standard also covered the screening of the film.