Welcome New Board Member – Ruth Hayhoe
Ruth Hayhoe is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Her professional engagements in Asia have spanned more than 50 years, including Secondary School teacher in Hong Kong, 1967-1978, Foreign Expert at Fudan University, 1980-82, First Secretary for Education, Science and Culture at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, 1989-1991, Visiting Professor at Nagoya University in Japan in 1996, and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now the Education University of Hong Kong, 1997-2002, where she holds the title of President Emerita.
Ruth grew up in a strong Christian home in Toronto where she was the third of eight siblings. She studied Greek and Latin classics at the University of Toronto; then on graduation she moved to Hong Kong in 1967, where a cousin of her father had a small Christian school and served with several other Canadian missionaries. She taught in a Christian secondary school for eleven years, while learning Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin) and living with a Chinese family. In 1978 she moved to London, England, for graduate study in comparative education. Then in 1980, as China opened up after the Cultural Revolution, she took a teaching position at Fudan Universiy in Shanghai where she could access archives for her doctoral research on Chinese-Western relations in higher education.
Ruth returned to Canada in 1984 for postdoctoral study at OISE, where she took up a faculty position in 1986. In the years that followed she had many wonderful opportunities to reconnect with China and East Asia. She was seconded to the Canadian Embassy in Beijing from 1989 to 1991 and then led the Hong Kong Institute of Education from 1997 to 2002. In 1996 she married Walter Linde, a German businessman and widower who had set up a subsidiary for a German company in New York. His retired status enabled him to accompany her for the five years in Hong Kong. She was also blessed to inherit five grown children who keep in close touch, now with 10 grandchildren!
Ruth has published widely on comparative education and Chinese-Western relations in education and has received many honors. (http://individual.utoronto.ca/hayhoe/)
Her work on Canada-China educational relations is detailed in this pdf: https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/cidec/wp-content/uploads/sites/79/2022/08/Transforming-Canada-China-Educational-Cooperation_Content-Hub.pdf.
Through all the years, her Christian faith has been a sustaining element in her life and she has been greatly encouraged by the faithfulness of Christian communities in China and Hong Kong. She served as Trustee and subsequently Secretary for the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia from 2001 to 2010, and a member of the Senate of Tyndale University from 2015 to 2020. She is honored to have the opportunity to serve on the Board of Global Scholars Canada and hopes her international experience and Christian commitment will enable her to give useful support to its important mission.