Three questions with historian Robert J. Young

Dr. Robert J. Young (BA’63, MA’65, PhD) never expected a career as a historian.

But after studying at the University of Saskatchewan College of Arts and Science—and later at the London School of Economics—he went on to a 40-year career as a faculty member at the University of Winnipeg. Young became known as a leading Canadian expert on 20th-century European history and won national acclaim for his teaching.

This spring, Young was named one of five 2025 winners of the Alumni of Influence Award: an honour that celebrates the most outstanding graduates of the College of Arts and Science.

We reached out to Young—now a professor emeritus and an author of historical mystery novels—with three questions about his memories of the college and his advice for today’s students.

Q: What is your favourite memory about your time in Arts and Science?

My least favourite memory derives from November 1963 when, on arriving to his lecture class, a visibly shaken Dr. Roger Graham broke the news to us of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas that very morning.

My favourite memory derives from the very same history course, where I met Kathryn Hird, a ‘girl’ from distant Regina who was in Education. Two years later we were married and living in London. She taught in an elementary school, and on return to Canada completed an honours degree, a master’s degree, a PhD, and, oh yes, delivered three now no-longer children!

Q: How did your Arts and Science education help you in your career?

Apart from a mandatory course in biological science, I was strictly an arts student (for which the sciences should have been grateful): history, English, French. Together they explain my unplanned trajectory to become a history professor who found satisfaction in research and writing. Even to the point of becoming a late developed novelist. The French courses built on the work of two talented and persistent collegiate teachers at Nutana and Aden Bowman, teachers who would never have foreseen me specializing in a tiny corner of French 20th-century history.

Q: What advice would you offer to current students in Arts and Science?

Advisors of any kind are irrelevant without listeners. So I put listening at the top of the tree for today’s Arts and Science students. I do not mean hearing! I mean listening with an active, concentrating brain! That is a very tall order in days cluttered with seconds-long bursts of social media, much of it commercial in nature, too much of it deliberately or inadvertently misleading. The chances of detecting the latter on page or screen are better with one’s cell turned off.

Finally, I add language to listening. Don’t keep foreign languages foreign. You need to be as best equipped for the future as you can be, so share your mother tongue with a “foreign” language. There my sermon ends. Go in peace.

The Alumni of Influence Awards celebrate and recognize outstanding alumni of the College of Arts and Science. The recipients’ remarkable achievements have impacted their fields, their communities and the university.

If you know a College of Arts and Science graduate who is making a difference, submit a nomination. Nominations can be made at any time of the year.