Date Posted: June 21, 2011
Print Edition: June 10, 2011
By J.D.R. Brown (The Cascade) – Email
It has been a number of years since our institution was granted the designation of university by the Ministry of Advanced Education. Although we have seen some institutional change in the time since, confusion over the scope of our mandate and the range of our offerings still reigns. Rather than clarifying the role that this institution is meant to play, our university has been gifted an identity crisis that remains unresolved.
During the campaign for university status, it was argued by those in favour of the change that being called University of the Fraser Valley rather than the University College of the Fraser Valley would increase our prestige in all sorts of ways. Employers would place greater value on a degree from a university rather than a university college, while recruitment in the ever lucrative market for international students would be helped along. I remember the excited speculation as to what may lie ahead: expanded graduate offerings, perhaps a law school, or even maybe a medical school! Universities have those, right?
The narrowly written mandate given to our newly named institution by the legislature put to rest any possibility of transforming our humble undergraduate institution into anything more substantial. Nevertheless, none of us here at our institution have yet been able to come to terms with what that truly entails. We remain a public university in name, but with a campus culture befitting an amped up community college. Our anemic strategic plan is rivalled only by the slow bureaucratic turn of committees, charged with creating sustainability and internationalization. Buzz words and consultants cannot replace true vision, and they have yet to bring about either clarity or positive and lasting institutional change.
A solution to this mess will forever be imperfect, especially as we remain beholden to funding decisions made in Victoria. A new destiny for this place can be forged, however. Let us take this regionally focused, special purpose teaching university and shape it in the best possible way. Let us look to our South and to our East, and take the best from institutions such as Reed or Amherst or St. Francis Xavier and truly commit to building a robust university community.
We do not have to settle for being Simon Fraser’s poor cousin. We can be better, and different. Undergraduates everywhere will thank us for it.
