Robert Wilson/Record…
WATERLOO — There is tranquility in the submerged moment.
There is warmth in the wondrous, fish-filled waters of the Sea of Marmara, where a young boy from Istanbul can swim and snorkel and sail away the days of his youth.
“You lose track of time,” said Feridun Hamdullahpur, recalling the childhood sanctuary he discovered by dipping beneath the surface of Turkey’s inland sea.
“You lose your presence. You forget about it. You are so immersed in that environment because it’s so fabulously beautiful.”
Maybe this morning will provide Hamdullahpur with another serene moment when the 57-year-old professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering is officially installed as the University of Waterloo’s sixth president at the Physical Activities Complex.
He has already taken over for the departed David Johnston, Canada’s governor-general.
But this is the instant where the former skydiver figuratively parachutes in to guide a world-renowned school of 30,000 students with 4,000 faculty and staff.
Maybe he’ll get a skydiver’s rush during fall convocation ceremonies.
“The first 5-10 seconds of your jump, once you are in a vertical position, after your chute opens, it’s silence,” he said.
Hamdullahpur’s is an international man, educated in Turkey and Canada, bent on leading Waterloo into an increasingly international age of higher education.
As he turns 58 on Nov. 3, he’ll be on a flight to the south coast of China where he’ll open a Waterloo office in Hong Kong. He takes off Nov. 2. He touches down Nov. 4. Technically, he’ll miss his birthday.
But the cause is worthwhile.
Hamdullahpur believes the university’s physical and intellectual presence must be felt around the world to reach out to alumni and potential new students.
That’s the only way to stay on top with new universities emerging from India, China, Brazil, Singapore and Europe to challenge the established school powers.
“The world has changed,” he said of the international push.
“No reputable university on this planet will survive if we continue in our ways of how we attracted students and talent to our universities. Ten, 15, 20 years ago, we could sit in our offices and expect that people from around the world will come.”
That’s no longer the case, he said.
Waterloo already has a Dubai campus in the United Arab Emirates, along with local campuses in Kitchener, Cambridge and Stratford. On Saturday, the first 87 graduates of the school of pharmacy in Kitchener earn degrees.
Hamdullahpur, the former school provost, is perhaps best-known for sacking the 2010 football season of the scandal-ridden Warriors.
“It was a bitter pill for everybody but it was a necessary pill,” he said.
“Education sometimes has hard lessons.”
Hamdullahpur met his Canadian wife, Cathy, in Halifax in 1983, was former provost at Carleton University in Ottawa and wants Waterloo’s students to get to know him better.
“It’s an open-door policy with me,” he said. “I’m not somebody who is sitting in his office whose name they can’t pronounce.”
Hamdullahpur is the youngest of five brothers raised by a single mom. His businessman-father, Nasri, died of liver disease when Feridun was barely one. He didn’t know his dad. So Hamdullahpur, a father of two grown boys, said he will think of his mom on Saturday.
Merziye, 92, preached humility and the value of education to her boys.
She still lives by herself in Istanbul.
“One very independent-minded woman,” Hamdullahpur said.
He’ll also think of his oldest brother Perviz, who quit school when his dad died in order to run the family business and support his mother and brothers.
He’ll remember Firuz, the brother he lost in a car crash nine years ago.
When Firuz was old enough to go to matinees, his smaller brothers would give him money to go to the movies. Feridun and Riza were too young to go.
When Firuz retuned, he would retell the entire move to a pint-sized audience.
“We would just sit and listen,” Hamdullahpur said.
On Saturday, about 2,000 graduating students will get a chance to sit and listen to him.
jhicks@therecord.com
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