Speaking about Concordia's future
Provost David Graham invited Concordia’s community to attend an open meeting on the university’s development and direction on April 27.
This was the second annual public address for Graham, who last year presented an opportunity for the university community to take stock of its achievements.
This year, Graham called on an audience of about 100 in the D.B. Clarke Theatre to help him map Concordia’s future. The provost later agreed to respond to key questions about the role of researchers going forward.
Q. How can the academic community best contribute to defining Concordia's future?
A. In my view, there are two important things we can do immediately. The first of these is to agree that it is up to us to create the kind of future we desire for Concordia, rather than assuming that we can relax and let the future take care of itself.
The second is to focus on creating that vision rather than dwelling on our recent past. This does not for a moment mean that we should neglect or discard our institutional history, which has much to teach us, merely that we should not let it hold us back from becoming the university we want to be.
Q. How do you see the evolution of our scholars’ work in Concordia’s future development?
A. Concordia is already becoming a more “academic” university in the best sense: dedicating itself increasingly to engaging in research and advanced scholarship, for example by creating new doctoral programs in areas that traditionally did not have them. I believe we are also becoming a more ethical and coherent university as we resolve some of the issues and the disparities that have inevitably resulted from the period of extraordinarily dynamic growth that we have gone through during the past decade.
Finally, I think that recognizing that many of the “polar opposites” that have bedeviled us are in reality false dichotomies will enable us to see that the best outcome for us lies in determining the proper balance point on a spectrum of possibilities rather than in striving to eliminate tensions that can in the end be highly productive. I’m thinking particularly of dichotomies like teaching versus research, accessibility versus excellence, centralization versus decentralization, applied research versus pure research, and so forth.
Q. What must remain and what must change to build the “institutional maturity” that you mentioned in your presentation?
A. We must not, in my view, forsake Concordia’s traditional commitment to looking at the human being rather than at the document. We cannot afford to give up our sense of being deeply rooted in our local community. At the same time, I believe we need to acquire a greater degree of self-confidence, one that will enable us to confront our shortcomings squarely, acknowledge and correct them, and move on; one that will allow us to celebrate the achievements of our colleagues without always insisting that our own be celebrated simultaneously.
That maturity would allow us to trust our colleagues, because we would see that they trust us to work on their behalf, and to measure our accomplishments against the most stringent benchmarks without ever feeling as though we have to apologize for falling short, and without ever indulging in vainglorious self-congratulation when — as we more and more often will do — we surpass them.
Listen to the April 27 address "Imagining Concordia's Future" with Provost David Graham:
Related link:
• Office of the Provost