November 2, 2009

The announcement last week that Mount Royal has been accepted for membership into the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada deserves more than a moment’s celebration. Right outside my office I still have a copy of the 1400-page submission we made as an institution, which encapsulates years of collective faculty effort to transform our institution into one that provides excellent programs and instruction to serve our students’ needs in progressively better ways. This is work that’s taken literally a generation to accomplish, from the introduction and development of Applied Degrees, to learning outcomes, to conjoint and collaborative degree partnerships with other universities, to the creation and implementation of the General Education program, to the launch of our own baccalaureate degrees. Faculty life has changed steadily in these contexts, with the Task Force on Research defining a framework for scholarship; the Faculty Roles and Responsibilities Task Force advancing the institutional conversation about the nature of faculty work, about tenure and rank, and about meaningful peer review of our professional activities; and with successive rounds of collective bargaining building the structures in which we will operate. All of this has been layered on the intensive departmental program and curriculum development processes, the hiring, orientation and evaluation of many new colleagues, the new responsibilities of faculty councils and General Faculties Council. And all of that has been layered on the excellent teaching, service and scholarship we continue to deliver as faculty.