By Eric Laityer (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 25, 2015
The university’s place in the universe is compromised unless we act. Countless experts said so recently, according to the UFV blog. The provost and vice-president academic agrees that our grasp on knowledge is completely lost. The cause? He blames the internet.
“The current model of a university has been around for about 800 years,” Davis said in the same blog post. “But due to a technological advancement — the internet — universities have lost both the monopoly of knowledge and the monopoly of credentialing.”
However, by virtue of its diversity, creativity, and strong marketing department, UFV is uniquely placed to rocket ahead of other universities in this moment of weakness.
UFV’s plan: to come up with a plan for 2025 — which will be celebrated with an even bigger party than this year’s celebration of how great UFV is at everything — and approve it immediately.
“We need a collective and longer-term visioning exercise focused not on the details of courses and programs, but on the very nature and organization of universities,” Davis added. And so the visioning committee was born, already with a proposal on the table that predicts UFV will surpass the horizon of success.
The initial costs of such an endeavour will require the shutting down of some non-essential academic services and reconfiguring the university’s structure so “departments” and “disciplines” are not really the focus, since the main drain on the post-secondary education system seems to be the demands of such narrowly focused bodies.
Then, with one great leap into the future, UFV will be ready to establish another campus in an entirely new location outside North America, even farther than Chandigarh.
The proposal to establish the new site will undergo an expedited review process so as to be passed by the end of the fiscal year. The initiative has a number of benefits.
One is that UFV will truly be the most diverse university around, as it will be positioned to capture an entirely untapped market of foreign students.
Secondly, our most creative students will be given the ground-breaking opportunity to establish a new kind of innovation-focused institution. The current idea is to have trades and technology students at the forefront of the expedition.
Thirdly, the university will receive government money, all dedicated to the settlement of the new campus. As an added perk, UFV will be able to increase its international reputation as these plans coincide with another organization’s high-profile expedition.
The exact details won’t be worked out until long after the plan is approved, but rest assured that in 2025, UFV Mars campus will be ready to accept its first students.
It is not yet known whether the Student Union plans to charter a shuttle.
