Note: This is a bonus blog fragment written a while back, that I didn’t want to put through much of a tune up, but the standards I’ve been trying to apply to recent and soon-to-come blogs aren’t being met.

The Winds of Change Conference of 1990 lived up to its name. The conference is often credited with being the birth of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA). Plus, it scooped the idea of naming a Canadian political conference “Winds of Change” by six years from Levant, Frum et al..

Thanks to the old archival work of Titus Gregory (the closest thing this blog has to an inspiration in the student association world), we have the list of delegates and observers to that conference.

Through some easy LinkedIn trawling, we were able to identify where people have gone since.

Who they are isn’t as important, but I find it useful sometimes to go through and see what the trajectories of different student leaders are. For example, old presidents of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance’s Steering Committee used to really like going into public affairs and communications. Now? Law is a very common path. Maybe the trend is due to small sample size, but I think it says something about the kind of people these positions attract and how our institutions chagne.

So, what about that generation of mid-90’s leaders? We categorized them subjectively based on a word that best encapsulated the sweep of their career. A little PivotTable action reveals a wide range of careers.

Our first observation was that there are a lot of people working in generic white-collar business work. Between sales, HR, IT marketing, more general business, consulting and the environmental scientist who works as a corporate VP, we have a total of 15 of these 30 categorized individuals working in business. At least 4 are employed full-time as a founder/CEO of their own business, with two of these being run out of the UK.

Only a few people landed in the public education sector, something that you might otherwise expect.

Notably, one of these people became and a Provincial Minister of Advanced Education in New Brunswick, as a PC member. Another member is ran for the NDP in a competitive seat in Alberta in the recent election.

The delegates also included an Assistant Deputy Minister at Indigenous Services Canada at time of writing.

And of course, these members also included the presence of one Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates and whose newsletter is another inspiration for this blog.

While there might be some more interesting stories here, there’s none that we can readily spot. More interesting to us is the relatively low level of policy and law persons in this sample, a snapshot we can possibly compare with more modern student leaders in a later post, if anyone clamours for it.