The first time Patrick Quinn visited Northwestern, he wasn’t impressed. The campus simply didn’t measure up to his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.
But now, as NU’s archivist, Quinn considers himself one of the university’s biggest fans. He spends most of his time in Deering Library, surrounded by 26,000 cubic feet of records, including 10,000 audio and video cassettes and 600,000 photographs.
“I know more about Northwestern University than any other person alive or any other person who has ever lived,” he said. “You look around, you see what you see; I look around and I know what things happened in the past.”
On Friday NU will start celebrating its 150-year history — a history no one knows better than Quinn. Although NU doesn’t officially turn 150 until next year, the university will kick off its sesquicentennial gala this weekend with speeches, tours and other events.
“I’m in charge of all of the records of enduring value of this university,” Quinn said. “In a sense the university archives is the collective historical memory of the Northwestern community.”
Sitting behind a wooden desk on the dimly lit bottom floor of Deering Library, the gray-haired Quinn seems at home among the thick volumes of books lining the walls of the archive reading room.
In his 34 years as NU’s archivist, he has spent his days organizing the university’s memories — documented in newspapers, magazines, faculty publications and countless other records.
Quinn, who graduated from Wisconsin with degrees in English and history, never intended to become an archivist.
“Nobody of my generation decided to become an archivist when they grew up,” he said. “I was simply a graduate student in history at the University of Wisconsin. I was married, had a child at the time, and I was dead broke and needed a job.
“So I went over to the employment center and they had a job posted as an archivist. I applied, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
And Quinn turned out to be a natural.
“In order to be a good archivist, you have to have at least two qualities,” he said. “One, you have to be at least slightly anal retentive or obsessive compulsive. If you look around your room and your dirty clothes are spread all over the place, then you’re not going to be a good archivist. You have to have a certain passion for order.
“Equally important is that you have a curiosity. You have to be curious about people, about things, about what happened, about why it happened.”
At the core of Quinn’s curiosity is NU’s history.
“What makes (NU) interesting and challenging and exciting is the nature of the institution,” he said. “It’s one of the most unique institutions of higher education in the United States. An archivist’s job is only as interesting as the records that he or she presides over, and Northwestern has produced some interesting records.”
Some of the records most interesting to Quinn: the diaries of the NU alumni who first explored Alaska and recommended the United States purchase it; a matriculation card signed by Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, promising not to involve himself in any hazing or “class scraps”; and the handwritten minutes of the meeting where NU was founded.
Throughout his years here, Quinn has seen the campus go through many phases. More trends have developed than disappeared, he said, and there’s one disappearing trend he doesn’t miss.
“Losing football — it’s not nearly what it used to be,” Quinn said. “These teams would come in here and blow Northwestern away 67 to nothing. I sat through the whole losing streak, didn’t miss a game when Northwestern lost 34 straight games. That was sort of a tradition that’s gone.”
As the university approaches its sesquicentennial, Quinn encourages students to reflect on traditions and consider their place in the big picture of NU’s history.
“William Shakespeare in the ‘Tempest’ once said that the past is prologue,” Quinn said. “And that’s very much true, I think. But today’s generation has been largely trained on sort of an instantaneity. Things are almost immediately destructible and discardable. I think that there will begin developing a bit of a counter trend.
“People will realize that their time on this planet is simply part of a long continuous flow, and in order to understand the role they are playing they have to have some notion of where they came from collectively.”
To begin this search for understanding, Quinn urges students to visit him in Deering.
“We welcome the entire Northwestern community to come down to the archives,” he said. “I think any student interested in any aspect of the history of Northwestern would find it a benefit. There’s something down here for everybody.”
