The best way to describe the significance of Alvin Finkel on Athabasca University would be through the following experience he related to me interview in mid-December:
“One colleague, as I introduced myself to a new Registry employee who asked “and what do you do here?” interrupted to say “you don’t ask Alvin Finkel what he does at Athabasca University. Alvin Finkel IS Athabasca University.”
He then began to detail key points of his career at AU. He was the first historian hired by Athabasca University, the eleventh professor overall, and he developed many of the history department’s offered courses, many of which are still taught to this day. Throughout his career, Dr. Finkel was afforded opportunities to co-author and author textbooks, where he found great success. Dr. Finkel estimates to have sold 150,000 copies of his textbooks.
When asked to describe himself in the context of his career, Dr. Finkel said “Activist Scholar”, noting that his work has been more focused on the ordinary peoples, not the “big cheese guys” and has always been politically involved to an extent as a result. In this interview, when asked how to refer to him, he said “just call me Alvin.”
Living History: Alvin Finkel’s Early Life and Influences
Raised in an immigrant family in Manitoba, Alvin’s parents and grandparents fled Eastern Europe from areas which were once parts of Poland and Russia, now within Ukraine’s modern borders, to escape the Holocaust. Alvin added that the communities that his family came from had all perished at the hands of Nazis, including his father’s whole village and the Jewish community within the city his mother was born in.
Poverty was a major influence on Alvin’s childhood. Although the war ended, religious discrimination against Jews didn’t. Alvin’s father struggled greatly to break into fields paying good wages due to religious discrimination (something Alvin noted, that Catholics within Winnipeg also faced at the time). However, after a union was formed, Alvin’s father began making a fair wage and his family’s quality of life improved vastly. Alvin explained that the living history of his family was what got him started on his path as a historian.
300,000 Years In The Making: Alvin Finkel’s Latest Work
Adages such as “knowledge is sacred” and “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” often overlook the many barriers to learning that the average person faces, such as jargon needlessly complicating academic literature (amongst others). In Alvin’s latest publication, Humans: The 300,000 Struggle for Equality, he took care to create “jargon-free scholarly material”—similar to a textbook, but much easier to understand. When asked about the ideal reader, he replied that his ideal reader is a person with some education and would like to have a big picture of where humanity came from and where we can go.
A worth-while effort, both contributing to the sum of human knowledge and also garnering acclaim, Dr. Finkel’s novel has been very well-received: it was named one of Indigo’s 2024 Best Books of the Year, despite being released in mid-September. Touted as an exploration of global history within a positive lens, many readers, myself included, view Humans: The 300,000 Struggle for Equality as a refreshing breath of positivity in a turbulent economic and geopolitical climate.
Humans: The 300,000 Struggle for Equality is available for purchase online and in-person at Indigo-brand bookstores throughout Canada, many Edmonton-area independent bookstores. It can also be purchased on Amazon as an e-book or physical copy.
Dr. Alvin Finkel will be speaking about his life experiences and his novel in further detail with the AUSU Speak Series on January 21st from 5pm to 7pm MST.