Bill Taylor: The Great Enabler. “Wait, he did what?”

October 2024All of us can identify individuals that have had an outsized influence on their lives. For many of us this includes parents, spouses, siblings and kids. But often there are others, people to whom we are not related, that, for one reason or another, make a big difference to how our lives unfold. For me, for the second half of my life, that person was Bill Taylor. I am sure that I am one among many – including the other authors contributing to this special issue – who can make this claim.In academia, it's often the case that mentors – teachers, advisors, more experienced students – have massive influences on their mentees. Bill Taylor was a mentor for many, many graduate students, as well as younger faculty, and I'm sure others will write about Bill's impact as a mentor. But he was also so much more than that. I like to think of him as The Great Enabler. Together with you, he would identify things that would facilitate your professional advancement, sometimes before you even realized it yourself, and then go about helping you to make it happen. And pity the poor administrator who tried to get in the way! Bill enabled three critically important things to happen during the academic phase of my career, and I'd like to tell you about them as a way of illustrating why, for me and many others, he was The Great Enabler.I first met Bill soon after I moved from ESSA, an environmental consulting firm, to a position as a scientist with the Ontario government. I was invited to join the GLFC Board of Technical Experts (BOTE), to co-lead a project on salmonine stocking in the Great Lakes; at the time Bill was the chair of BOTE. Bill and I immediately hit it off, and soon after he arranged for me to visit Michigan State University and give a guest lecture on Adaptive Management. There I met Jim Bence and Dan Hayes and learned about PERM, the Partnership for Ecosystem Research and Management. Little did I know at the time how much this visit foreshadowed my future.A few years later, Bill managed to convince the Great Lakes Fishery Commission to sponsor a PERM faculty position, with the title “Sea lamprey scientist”. I did not think of myself as a sea lamprey scientist, although I had done some modeling work involving sea lampreys, and I wasn't really looking for a career change, so I never even considered applying. However, the first round of searching for someone to fill this position in spring 1996 was not successful, and that summer I found myself back in Michigan at the American Fisheries Society meeting in Detroit, just as a second round for the search was beginning. I ran into Bill and he asked me about the position (it wasn't the first time he had probed my interest in applying for an academic job). I said, “I don't really fit the job description”. Well, Bill saw this as an opening – I didn't say that I wasn't interested – so he quickly grabbed Chris Goddard, then the Executive Secretary for the GLFC (who would be paying for the position), and took us up to the top of the hotel where we were staying, for a drink or two. A week later I was back in Ontario preparing a job application letter and brushing up my CV. And a year later I was a new member of the Fisheries and Wildlife faculty at MSU.The truth of the matter is, I did “win” the job, and history has proven that it did turn out to be a very good fit for me. But Bill enabled it. I would never have applied for the job if he hadn't spoken to me at that conference in August 1996, and encouraged me to talk to Dan Hayes and Jim Bence about PERM faculty positions. And on paper, I wasn't a good fit to the position, because my research credentials in the world of sea lamprey science were very limited. But Bill realized that I nevertheless had a lot to offer his department, and the GLFC, and he made sure that my potential would outweigh my limitations in the eyes of the search committee and his colleagues at MSU and in the GLFC.I started at MSU in 1997. In the ensuing seven years, I established a research group that focused on empirical and modeling work in support practical fishery management issues such as sea lamprey control and salmonine stocking programs. My research interests overlapped considerably with Jim Bence and we ended up sharing lab space and collaborating on several projects. Jim's PERM position was sponsored by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Division, and my PERM position was sponsored by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. These partners, along with most other state, provincial, and tribal fishery agencies in the Great Lakes basin, saw value in the work Jim and I were doing, and expressed interest in establishing a Center at MSU that they could turn to for research support, training, and quantitative fisheries advice – a Center that would have core funding to enable us to respond nimbly to requests for support. Needless to say, Jim and I found this idea very appealing, but didn't know where to start.Happily, Bill also liked the idea, and The Great Enabler sprang into action again. Bill encouraged us to develop a Center plan, complete with a funding model. We proposed a three-way funding arrangement, with the primary partners being the GLFC, MDNR-Fisheries, and MSU. The GLFC provided a means to obtain sponsorship from other Great Lakes agencies and included their own matching funds. The MDNR was already providing substantial support for Jim's program. All that remained was the university. Jim and I had no idea how to persuade the university to pitch in, but Bill did. He reached out to our College, the Experiment Station, the Graduate School, and the Provost's office, and managed to cultivate enough interest to bring them to a lunch meeting with our other partners. To make a long story short, this luncheon gave our partners a chance to impress on the MSU administration how supportive they were of the Center idea, and that they were counting on MSU to be the third partner. Six months later, the Quantitative Fisheries Center opened its doors, in spring 2005. We have enjoyed uninterrupted funding support from all of our partners for the past 24 years, a testament to our apparent contribution to Great Lakes fisheries. But the QFC never would have come into being without The Great Enabler.In 2006-07 I enjoyed a sabbatical leave in Canada and Australia. When I returned in fall 2007, I was energized and excited to lead the QFC to bigger and better things. But then, in December 2007, Bill dropped a little bomb. He announced that after 17 years (with a brief interruption when he served as Acting Dean) he was ready to “step away” – as he put it – from his position as Department Chair. Our Dean needed to appoint an Acting Chair while an external search for a new chair was organized and carried out. The Dean invited Fisheries and Wildlife faculty to self-identify if they were interested in the acting role.In this case, Bill's role as The Great Enabler was perhaps more indirect. He never suggested to me that I volunteer for the position, nor did he (to my knowledge) take steps to facilitate my appointment. But his departure from the position where he had such an enormous impact on so many people, certainly enabled my next major career move. And when he learned that I had agreed to apply for the Acting role he supported me with enthusiasm. I also don't think he had anything to do with the failed external search which led to me agreeing to serve as Chair for an additional five years, but I've no doubt he encouraged many others to support me, and helped me to make my role as Chair more successful.I have just described the three most significant events of the final third of my professional career: joining MSU, creating the QFC, and serving as Department Chair. In all three cases, Bill Taylor had a outsized influence on how things worked out. Many years earlier, when I was finishing up my PhD, and enjoying an exciting career in environmental consulting, I was convinced that I had no interest in an academic career. I was wrong, and I have Bill, more than anyone else, to thank for guiding me in a direction that I look back on with immense gratitude, and some bemusement.As I'm sure others will say in reflecting on his career, Bill often didn't let himself be constrained by the expected norms for how things got done. He wasn't afraid to make some people angry if he was pursuing an end that he believed in. Nearly anyone who knows Bill at all well could share a story or two along these lines. As the Chair of Bill's Department for 6 ½ years, I myself experienced the questionable pleasure of have to follow through on the commitments Bill made “on our behalf”. But I've never heard anyone question Bill's motives – he is living proof of the cliché “sometimes the ends justify the means”.In this vignette I have shared three examples of how Bill Taylor enabled important events in my professional life. I know my story is far from unique. Frankly, I'm sure nearly all of my former Fisheries and Wildlife faculty colleagues experienced, at some point in their career, an example of Bill's enabling, many of them more than once. And then there's the students. Readers of this volume will hear from many of them, I'm sure.Bill Taylor is a remarkable person. He has positively impacted the lives of so many people, and he has helped further the ambitions and objectives of many organizations, most notably MSU, the American Fisheries Society, and the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. In 2019 the Canadian Aquatic Resources Section of the American Fisheries Society established a roster of fishery greats called “Legends of Canadian Fisheries Science and Management”. If there were an American equivalent, Bill would be near the top of the list.

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