Thank you, Sarah, James—and Ben— for welcoming us into your home for this gathering for King’s.
And a warm welcome to all of you from King’s, and from me and our Chancellor, Debra Deane-Little.
“Welcome” is, in many respects, why we are here. Welcome is a word that marks an ushering in, a broadening of perspective to acknowledge and include others. I have always viewed undergraduate education as a welcome into adulthood and into a life infused with ideas and debate crucial to our role as citizens in a prosperous, equitable, democratic society.
Welcome is the word we chose to reflect our work on a new campaign for King’s. The future we envision is a King’s that welcomes students, faculty and staff from all backgrounds and that celebrates individuality and the diversity of thinking and opinion that is the lifeblood of higher education.
Each time we create a new pathway into King’s our community grows in strength, vibrancy and inclusiveness—and we’re all richer for it.
Welcoming: The Future King’s Campaign has three strategic goals.
Our first campaign goal is to empower student success and make a King’s education more equitable and accessible.
We aim to build on the progress of recent years to create financial awards, scholarships and bursaries that attract and support the best students from diverse backgrounds and experiences, whatever their own capacity to fund their education. No student should have to choose another university because it is less expensive.
Our second goal is to expand and diversify the educational experience.
For this, we need new faculty positions in fields of existing and new academic strength for new colleagues who will help us create a faculty that better represents our increasingly diverse student body. To include a broader range of voices, we will create new lecture series and welcome more visiting scholars and writers in residence. We need to modernize learning spaces to serve an evolving curriculum and provide funding for pedagogical innovation, such as our courses that now happen in Berlin, Florence and in Mi’kmaw communities. And we need to continue our innovative work on experiential learning in journalism and the liberal arts.
Our third goal is to enhance excellence and the cultural life of King’s beyond the classroom.
With this goal, we aim to continue our work to modernize the King’s campus while protecting and enhancing its unique architectural character and the pedagogical philosophy that character supports. We have restored four of our original residences – we have one more to go – and made Alex Hall into an accessible building. Our work on accessibility must continue. And our welcome to everyone must be conveyed in the art and ambience of King’s, including by rejuvenating the foyer of the Arts and Administration Building into the grand entranceway to our Collegii Regalis and into higher learning Andrew Cobb intended it to be.
To achieve these goals, we set a target of $15 million.
The objective is a King’s that is fundamentally about accessibility in all its holistic dimensions: open to aspiring students living with disabilities and from all economic and cultural backgrounds, of all gender identities, sexual orientations, races, and of all perspectives.
This is an objective that is deeply personal for me for two reasons. First, university was only possible for me, and many in my community, because of the generosity of strangers who funded the scholarships and bursaries that I needed.
Second, through my nine years at King’s, I believe I understand the role King’s has always played in helping students feel belonging. I also understand the struggle that students from communities that are minority communities at King’s can face in knowing they belong and are welcome.
The role of universities, of King’s, is to give students the education that allows them to think for themselves, not to tell them what to think. The excellence of King’s has always been its success in doing exactly this. Our continued excellence depends on our ability to incorporate a greater diversity of perspectives. It also depends on upholding and continuing to live by the principles of freedom of opinion and expression and that of academic freedom as we make our community more welcoming for all. This combination has been tested in recent years at King’s and universities across North America. It is crucial to our goal of making King’s a university that is for everyone who wants the transformative education we offer.
In the past academic year, King’s has provided a forum for many diverse, sometimes difficult, but always lively conversations. This included the course and interdisciplinary lecture series recently completed on “Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives”.
In March, our journalism program welcomed four leaders in Canadian journalism to a roundtable to discuss the future of journalism. We’re fortunate to have one of the esteemed journalists from our panel here tonight—Editor in Chief of the Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Sun Nicole Feriancek, a graduate of King’s journalism program. Nicole, thank you for being here.
Another of the panelists was Karyn Pugliese, an award-winning journalist very well known here in Ottawa for her work as a Parliament Hill reporter and for covering press freedom issues and Indigenous communities. She’s currently the Ottawa Correspondent at APTN.
When asked what it’s going to take to regain the trust of the public in journalism, here’s what Karyn had to say:
“We’ve got to be able to have these conversations about things like objectivity, racism, sexism, fairness, polarization without getting down on each other’s throats. We’ve got to … treat each other like human beings when we’re having them and not just get up on a moral high ground and say, ‘You’re wrong,’ and walk away…. Nothing gets better if you’re not talking to each other.”
Nicole, you also spoke of the importance of these kinds of open conversations, noting that transparency between journalists and audiences is one of the best tools for building trust in the media.
Brodie Fenlon, the Editor in Chief of CBC News, was also part of our panel. Appropriately for an event at King’s, he invoked John Stewart Mill. Mill described how society must, as Fenlon paraphrased, “provide a kind of town square to gather, to air out all the ideas, good, bad and terrible.” Journalism and universities are both crucial to the town square Mill envisaged.
Brodie noted how polarizing social media is—and how journalists, and everyone, must now work even harder to find spaces to explore the complexity and the nuance that can only happen in conversation—with all viewpoints present.
King’s is and must robustly be one of those spaces.
It can be so precisely because of our commitment to grounding education in the great books of the western tradition as we incorporate voices from other traditions. For example, our FYP students now experience the Mi’kmaw creation story as they encounter the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of Genesis.
We are also that kind of space in nurturing new authors from across the diversity of our country in our MFA programs in creative writing.
We are also that kind of space, and increasingly so, through our journalism program, which has been core to the identity and mission of King’s for 50 years and will be so for 50 years to come and beyond.
Journalism is at the centre of our growing collaboration with the Mi’kmaw community, including through the Mi’kmaw Journalism Initiative, which is preparing Mi’kmaw students to become the journalists of the future.
King’s also sponsors the J-School Noire, an educational and mentorship initiative for Black youth—just one part of our growing partnership with the African Nova Scotian community.
To conclude …
In this polarized world, we need more people who live with—and who help others live with—the biggest, most profound questions that humanity must continually ask itself if we are to meet the challenges and opportunities we face and if life is to be more than meeting challenges and seizing opportunities.
For this process of formation to be as profound as it can be, we need the widest possible range of viewpoints, insights and lived experiences.
This is why inclusion must be a focus and not an ancillary element of every part of our educational mission.
And, if we are to fully realize the richness of the educational excellence we have always aspired to achieve and uphold, we must open ourselves to being changed by those who have not always felt welcomed.
We are fortunate to have the support of so many communities around us who appreciate what we are trying to do, knowing that we’ll all be stronger for it. And that includes each of you in this room.
In November, when we publicly launched this $15 million campaign, it was my pleasure to announce that we had already raised $10 million toward our goal. Tonight, I’m pleased to say we are closer still; we have now raised over $11 million. It is terrific to provide that kind of update with our Chancellor Debra Deane Little and Bob Little in the room. They, along with many other committed donors, have taken us over two-thirds of the way to the finish line! And I want to thank each of you for coming tonight to learn more about what we are trying to achieve together.
Thank you for coming out to learn more about Welcoming: The Future King’s Campaign and the goals that drive it. And thank you again to our hosts, Sarah and James—and Ben—for your hospitality and friendship towards King’s.