New year, new president

Kwantlen students are attending a university and welcoming a new president they begin the fall semester. Dr. David W. Atkinson replaced Skip Triplett, who had served as president for Kwantlen since 1999, in July.

He brings to Kwantlen Polytechnic University an abundance of experience in working with universities, as well as new ideas for the institution.

“One of our ambitions should be co-op education across the curriculum, so that if you’re an English major or a history major that you have a co-op placement. You actually go out in the work world and you see how it works and you take some of those skills and you see whether or not you can apply them. That is my concept,” Atkinson said during an interview last week.
 
[audio:http://www.kwantlenchronicle.ca/audio/atkinson.mp3]
In his own words: 3’48″ audio of David Atkinson

In the first edition of his newsletter, which will be released every two months, he focussed on program development, university governance, campus development and senior reorganization.

“At this stage in my career, am I ready to take an institution like this and forge it into a university, so when I leave in five or six years time it is established and it’s ready and nobody questions it. Am I really up to this?” he asked rhetorically during the interview.

He is. “The real challenge is controlling expectations, because you can’t do it all overnight.”

Atkinson is in the process of establishing a university senate, “which is the way in which a university does business.”

“There’s no senate here and people have no concept of what a senate is. It just baffles me,” he said.

Atkinson joined Kwantlen University College in July, with more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He studied at the University of Calgary, where he received his BA, MA and PhD in English Literature. Later, Atkinson found himself at the University of Lethbridge where he joined senior administration and stayed for 15 years.

He was later named Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He then went on to be both president and vice-chancellor of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., where he is an honorary member of the Board of governors, then to Carleton University in Ottawa.

“The most important thing about Kwantlen, the most important thing about any university, is the quality of its programs. And so, to establish ourselves as a university, not only do we need to determine what kinds of programs we want here, which will distinguish us, because I think what we don’t want to be, is another wannabe.”

Atkinson’s newsletter, which outlines some of the changes taking place at Kwantlen, can be read at www.kwantlen.ca/president/newsletters/issue1.html.