Episode 09: Moira Hudgin

"The best way to predict the future is to study the past.” Moira Hudgin, Arts’68, shares the story of how she used her economics degree – and her philanthropy – to shape the future.

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Cause & Effect Podcast, Ep. 9, Moira Hudgin, Artsci’68

Host:  Life would be a lot easier if we could predict the future, wouldn’t it? That’s not a new insight. People have been fantasizing about predicting the future – pretty much forever. And a few people over the years have actually believed that they’d found a way to do it – including Winston Churchill. Churchill once said, “The best way to predict the future is to study the past.” He’s not wrong.

It turns out studying the past is probably the best tool we have for predicting the future. And it works on just about every level – from the universal to the personal.

I’m Deborah Melman-Clement, and this is Cause and Effect, a Queen’s Alumni Review podcast, where we dive into the motivations of philanthropists and explore what they’re passionate about and the impact they have on the world. 

“The best way to predict the future is to study the past.” I’m pretty sure Moira Hudgin wasn’t thinking about that when she decided to come to Queen’s, but a moment in her past actually did influence her decision – and ultimately, her future. You see, her older sister studied here, and she came to campus to visit from her home in Brockville.

Moira: And I remember when I was in Grade 13, I was staying with her, and I used I think it was the Douglas Library at that point in time to work on one of my high school essays. So that was sort of fun. I got a feel for it.

Host: Moira credits her forward-thinking father for challenging a family tradition and sending his daughters to university. High school memories aside, though, when it came time to choose which university, Queen’s wasn’t her first choice.

Moira: But given a number of factors, I decided it was probably the best choice. So it had a good economics department, which was what I was interested in. So I went there. 

Host: So, Moira came to Queen’s in the mid-1960s to study economics. It didn’t bother her that she was one of only two women in her class. She was just happy that she found her calling.

Moira: It just gave you an overview of the world and let you sort of try and think forward – what had happened in the past and how it was going to help the future.

Host:  Studying the past to and using it to help the future. Just like Churchill said. That’s what economists do. And studying the past certainly helped Moira’s future. She had a long career as an economist for the federal and provincial governments and in management in the private sector. Eventually, she found herself in a position where she could give back. Like a true economist, she looked to her own past to determine the future she wanted to build through her philanthropy. And she chose to build it by giving to Queen’s.

Moira: It  was a worthy cause to support, both faculties and students. So there was that aspect of it, and the fact that there was a broad area of things you could do. But my real focus was on the Indigenous population – the potential for Indigenous students, youth to get an education, to become leaders, both in the Canadian economy and also within their own communities.

Host: That focus on Indigenous peoples was also inspired by her past. Moira’s parents had worked in Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, and they both had a lot of respect for the Indigenous communities there.  Her mother, Lilian, was a teacher who had seen the Residential Schools and it made a deep impression on her. In fact, she became an advocate for reconciliation – more than half a century before the Truth and Reconciliation movement started. 

Moira: She was a supply teacher when I was growing up down south here. And she would try to make the children in the schools aware of what was happening up there.

Moira: She was not an advocacy person, but she did things quietly.

Host: Lillian also taught her daughters about the Residential Schools. It was a lesson that stuck with Moira.

Moira: The facilities that were given to them in school, the quality of the work, supplies, the quality of the teachers, the quality of the curriculum, etc. etc., was not up to the standards down south. And as a result, it was an added disadvantage for them in trying to go to higher education. And that’s why I really wanted to push for that. But of course, there weren’t really many students because of colonialism and lack of support for our Indigenous community.

Host:  Helping make a university education more accessible for Indigenous students became Moira’s passion.

Moira: There are very few things that I will become involved in to that very deep sense. I know there are other people who do that and have done that, but it just hasn’t been my way of getting involved.

Host: Her way of getting involved was through philanthropy. In 2016, she created a bursary to help make it easier for Indigenous students to study at Queen’s. 

Moira: Because a lot of these students live in remote communities and just come down, they couldn’t afford to, even if they got scholarships. And that’s why I like the idea of bursaries.

Host:  She also liked the idea of helping to preserve Indigenous arts and culture. So, she created another award to help Indigenous students train for careers in art history and art conservation. 

Moira: You know, that was something that I’d seen and appreciated and was taught to appreciate and I thought we have to preserve. We have to preserve the history of this country, no matter where it’s from, and we have to appreciate, and we have to understand and appreciate it in its best format.

Host: That commitment to reconciliation wasn’t the only cause Moira inherited from her mother. Lillian also passed on a passion for music. It was a bond they shared all through Moira’s childhood.

Moira: My mother was an excellent pianist. She had received at least her teacher’s degree from the Royal Conservatory. I don’t know whether she got beyond that, but she was very gifted and she could play on sight very complicated classical music.

Moira: Brockville had a theatre there, and it was a place where major artists who were playing in either Montreal or Toronto could stop and practice and have concerts. So there was a concert series that Mom and I used to go and I was probably one of the youngest people there. And we would love that.

Host:  Moira and her sister celebrated their mother’s passion for music in 2014 with a gift to the newly opened Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Like many of The Isabel’s donors, she’s been known to make the trip to Kingston from her Toronto home to catch a concert every so often. In 2016, she came down to see “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” a concert of harpsichord music by Johann Sebastian Bach. She was completely impressed with the experience – with one glaring exception.

Moira: The harpsichord was not up to the quality of that venue. That is just a fabulous concert hall. I just loved it. And so, I felt that if they were going to have more Baroque in particular and earlier classical music, they needed a good harpsichord because to bring one in, have it tuned can be very expensive and isn’t necessarily that enjoyable. It’s like a rental of almost anything, it isn’t as good as having your own.

Host:  Tricia Baldwin, the Isabel’s director at the time, also felt that the rented harpsichord wasn’t good enough for the venue. In fact, she called it “an amateur harpsichord.” And Moira agreed.

Moira: It’s like any other instrument. It’s like if you have a Steinway or a Yamaha or something of a lesser quality. It’s those top-level ones that bring so much pleasure to the creator, to the musician, and also to the audience. 

Host: So, Moira set out to make sure musicians and audiences at The Isabel had access to a top-level harpsichord. She made a gift that enabled Baldwin to go out and by a new one, made by Montreal harpsichord maker Yves Beaupre. The Moira Hudgin Harpsichord arrived at The Isabel in 2018. Since then, Baroque groups from around the world have been calling, eager for their chance to play it.

It’s not every philanthropist who can count a harpsichord as part of their legacy, but then again, Moira has always taken great care to ensure that her gifts are a unique reflection of her passions.

Moira: The music was one I could support in a way that probably not many other people would support, and that’s what I like. I like to offer support in areas where I don’t think there’s a lot of other interest. 

Moira: I’m not interested in mainstream. It has to be something that I’m personally interested in, but it’s something that can help things that aren’t otherwise perhaps going to be as well endowed.  

Host: And while Moira is excited about the impact that the harpsichord and the bursaries have had, she’s still thinking about new ways to make an impact through her philanthropy.

Moira: I don’t think that one should rest on what one’s done. You think things out and that’s fine, but then you learn more. One should always be growing and learning. And then if you can find something where potentially you can make a difference, maybe you’ll be ahead of the curve, then that’s where I’d like to go.

Host:  Staying ahead of the curve. That’s what Moira learned to do by studying economics. And she’s incorporated this approach into her philanthropy. When she created her bursaries in 2003, the Truth and Reconciliation Report was 12 years away, and bursaries for Indigenous students weren’t a priority at any university. And when she decided that The Isabel needed a concert-quality harpsichord, she had no idea how many musicians would be clamoring for a chance to play it. But by understanding the past, she was able to see the future. And she sees that as a way that any donor can contribute to an institution they care about.

Moira: I guess I see a little bit of what a donor can do is to help move the institutional thinking along as to what they see in the real world out there outside of academia that will enhance the academic learning and environment. 

Host:  As Moira looks into the future, she plans to continue letting her passions inform her philanthropy. She is already planning a gift to support students following in her footsteps and studying economics. She sees changes ahead for the discipline that eventually became her career. In fact, she says the study of economics has to change if it’s going to remain relevant.

Moira: The world is becoming much more complicated, both in terms of the science, in terms of the tools to review it, in terms of the global nature of things. What I would look at as the opportunity -- work much more closely with other sciences, arts sort of thing – you know, geography, history, defense, all sorts of things. 

Moira: You look at that and you look at a science such as economics which does look at the past and does look at the future and it’s got to broaden its wings and look at different things and look at them differently.

Host: Looking at the past and using it to see the future: It works in economics. It works for philanthropy too.

I want to wrap this up by thanking our executive producers, Karen Bertrand and Scott Anderson. I also want to thank my Advancement colleagues, Michelle Fuko, Anna Samulak, Alex Beshara, Callum Linden, Amy Lee, and Wendy Treverton. And, of course, I want to thank Moira Hudgin for sharing such an amazing story with us.

If you have an amazing philanthropy story that want to share, we definitely want to hear from you. Reach out to your relationship manager if you have one, or look for me on the Advancement staff directory at Queen’sU-dot-ca. 

I’m Deborah Melman-Clement, and this was Cause and Effect. If you want more, you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or Amazon.