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I am pretty sure every university has a heartbeat. At Queen’s, you can hear it if you lean close enough to the walls of the John Deutsch University Centre, known affectionately as the JDUC. It’s where students come to live their Queen’s experience outside the classroom – so says the 2019 revitalization proposal to the Board of Trustees. And after what was one of the university’s most ambitious revitalization projects, I’m experiencing the JDUC anew. The reopening in May heralded a new era for the building and also prompted many of us to think about its storied past. 

I still remember my first days here at Queen’s, memories that are intertwined with my first days in the JDUC, as a sort of sensory feast: the hum of conversation spilling from inside, the shuffle of my shoes climbing the worn stone steps, the mysterious sense of timelessness in the bunker, and the perfect scent-storm of vending-machine energy drinks and tomato soup from the Brew, the student-run coffeehouse, mingling with the sharp fall air. 

It was here that I got a first glimpse of the true character of our community. Students huddling over laptops, clubs gathering with posters and big aspirations, and strangers striking up conversations that would last all night or, perhaps, if you were lucky, a lifetime. The place was alive. Every outlet in use, seat taken, and room booked. It was a place to connect with others or, if you felt alone, to feel part of something by just observing the swirl of university life as a wallflower. The JDUC was where friendships formed, ideas happened, and traditions endured like stubborn ivy. It is where Queen’s has always come together, day after day, year after year. 

And, in my seven years here, it has been very, very good to me.

The Queen’s Pub kindly introduced me to the JDUC. Ultimately, I owe this life-informing experience of being the university rector to a weekly appointment with a pitcher of sangria and a side of fries. Since I took a gap year after high school, I was legally allowed to order it, which felt like a small but consequential victory. I work well in noisy spaces, and the pub became mine. I’d pull out my deck of 120 handmade flash cards for a course about art history of the west from antiquity to modernity, and let the memorization game begin.

Friends would join me with laptops, until screens were inevitably shut and playing cards emerged on the sticky tabletop as an unbroken stream of conversation carried us away for the night.

I learned that one of my high school teachers, David Suchanek, met his wife when they were head managers of QP and what was then known as Alfie’s in the ’80s. Not necessarily to find love, I applied to work as a server. I was hired to start in my second year, but then was unexpectedly fired in a stinging staff-wide email when COVID-19 made it impossible to run the pub. Things turned out well for me anyway, and I ended up working for another Alma Mater Society (AMS) service, Studio Q. I spent two lovely years learning how to use the Adobe Suite, riding around the JDUC on a scooter, and looking up to the senior student leaders. Now I get the joy of watching students display shock when I confess that I got fired from my first job at Queen’s. (Saying I was “let go” just doesn’t conjure up the punch I need when I’m trying to leave an impression during a motivational speech to a group of wide-eyed undergrads.)

My first three years at Queen’s in the JDUC, and these last six months since moving back in, have been filled with experiences that have shaped who I am. This is where I learned how to be an adult and, no doubt, my story mirrors the stories of thousands of Queen’s alumni, including generations of rectors, who have unique ties to the building. Over the years, it has been the home of spirited rector election debates, a place where champagne corks ricocheted against low ceilings after ballots were counted, and also the stage where new shoulders have first felt the singular weight – real and symbolic – of the renowned tricolour robe.

And it was in the JDUC that many a rector shed tears or slept curled into a sagging red corduroy couch. (I hate telling you like this: it didn’t survive the move. In its absence, I push two rolling office chairs together to form a makeshift raft for stolen naps.) 

Somewhere along the way, an inspiring office motto was created for the rector, a historic role steeped in Scottish academic tradition: Princeps servusque es – “Be a leader and a servant” – to guide our developing frontal lobes as we serve the student body. And amazingly, there is perhaps no better example of a rector leading than the 22nd rector, Antoinette Mongillo, who had the privilege of walking with a future king as she escorted Prince Charles from Grant Hall to the JDUC after he received an honorary degree in 1991 with his then wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, at his side.

“He walked over after seeing Diana off on her visit to the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment downtown, and said something like, ‘Lead the way,’” she recalled. And so, she did. 

But the JDUC is not just significant because it houses the rector’s office or has been a destination on royal tours. Behind its giant doors and shiny finishes, it has acted as a home for developing leaders of character. In the late ’80s, Nik Nanos was running the Queen’s Debating Union (the oldest club at Queen’s and the oldest debating union in Canada) while launching the polling firm that would become a national force. Peter Milliken served as the Speaker of the AMS Assembly and went on to become Speaker of the House of Commons. Students are using the JDUC in an almost parallel way today, only now with more space, brighter lights – and quadruple the outlets. It feels inevitable, then, to imagine today’s students growing up with the thrum of the JDUC and then carrying that beat with them out into the world. 

Queen’s purchased the building, once an orphanage, in 1927 to serve as the Students’ Memorial Union (a men’s club). After a devastating fire in 1947, the building was reconstructed and women were let into some spaces, such as the offices of the Queen’s Journal and the AMS – and then were finally given free rein in 1960. An extension was added in the 1970s, and the entire building was renamed to honour former principal John Deutsch. Some things remained untouched during the revitalization, such as the ornate memorial room that commemorates the 351 students and alumni who died in the First and Second World Wars, and Wallace Hall, a banquet space that hosts the portraits of all Queen’s principals.

The revitalization project was a collaboration between students, administration, the Board of Trustees, and alumni for an entire decade. The road to our new JDUC was uncertain and could have slipped away at several points if we hadn’t gripped tight enough. Along the way, the project itself became an informative lesson on shared governance, capital planning, financing deals, fundraising, negotiation, and persistence for generations of student leaders. The AMS officially initiated the concept in 2015, and by 2016 members of what was then the Board of Trustees’ Capital Assets and Finance Committee were touring the building to see its state at the time. The Society of Graduate and Professional Students (SGPS) joined the mission in 2017 when AMS President Jennifer Li set an ambitious goal of hosting a referendum. Her team’s contribution can be best described as building a train that would take eight more years of executive teams to push and, eventually, ride.

With new student leaders cycling in and out on an annual basis, projects often risk being forgotten in the shuffle of fresh visions, but the JDUC revitalization has been a steady fixture that ties all our terms together. There were devastating setbacks, like when the first vote for a mandatory construction fee fell just short of passing. It wasn’t the outcome Ms. Li hoped for in her term, but she found reassurance in Provost Tom Harris and Vice-Principal Finance and Administration Donna Janiec, who gave her their word they would make it happen. And so, they brought in consultants and architects who confirmed what students already knew: the JDUC no longer fit the needs of a campus that had grown and will continue to grow dramatically. Then came the victories. In his very first month, AMS President Zaid Kasim stood before the Board of Trustees and pleaded with them to waive the $10-million fundraising bar; otherwise, he and others feared, the project would be dead in the water. Luckily, he got the call of a lifetime from Chair Emeritus Mary Wilson-Trider, then chair of the board, later that evening that his pleas had been heard, and the project remained alive.

Once the development got going, there were many delays. So many, in fact, that an entire class of students graduated without ever stepping foot inside – first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then thwarted by construction delays that stretched on and on. For three years, Queen’s students grazed the perimeter of the JDUC, slowly seeing the building grow above hoarding lines. I frequently thought about how students didn’t even know what they were missing. To them, the JDUC was an elusive rumour. All they knew was booking club meetings in whatever old basement classroom they could find that wasn’t taken and going off campus to host events. Student government societies were tucked away during construction on the outskirts of campus (on the first day in the LaSalle Building, some of those groups quickly realized it used to be the student walk-in medical clinic when it was noticed that our office supply shelf had labels for items such as lubricant jelly and pregnancy tests). We all made the most of the quirky buildings on 
Stuart Street, but student engagement suffered. 

I’m happy to report that after our move back this summer, the JDUC still hums like a hive. While almost no current student had experienced its charms before, there was an immediacy in how they figured out how to live here – it was as if they were hardwired to find it, a homing beacon that has become part of our collective Queen’s DNA.

I have the luck of being located at the intersection of it all. On Friday afternoons, I can lean over the railing and watch the pub’s lunch line curl like a ribbon out the door with students waiting for a pint with friends. At the same time, just around the bend of my office, in Wallace Hall, the steady rhythm of prayers from the Muslim Student Association drifts around the halls. And through our semi-detached offices bursts the laughter of concurrent education students as they plan events. 

This building belongs to every student. I mean that literally because students are funding $71.4 million of the project cost over the next 30 years. One day, our children may pay the same student-fee levy that built these walls – like us, they will push to maintain it, expand it, and improve it. But that’s just how important this building is to us. It offers the quiet comfort of knowing there’s always a place to sit. It hosts the campus jobs that carry us through our degrees. And it opens social circles that create friendships to outlast our time as students – a place where the pulse of campus life can be felt in its purest form. 

Niki Boytchuk-Hale, ConEd’23, MEd’26, took office as the 39th rector of Queen’s in May 2024.