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.

Pubs nights first step toward Kwantlen campus pub

The fall semester brings Kwantlen students a new status as a university, a new president and along with that, approval for a pub night.

The Kwantlen Student Association approached the school’s new president, Dr. David W. Atkinson, about creating a pub on campus soon after he arrived last July, said Nathan Griffiths, Director of Operations for the KSA. Atkinson was on-board with the idea and suggested starting with a pub night, as opposed to a fully licensed pub. Although the KSA is interested in creating pub nights on all campuses, Surrey is the only campus that currently has space to do so, Griffiths said.

Pub nights will be held Fridays in the Grassroots Lounge on the Surrey campus. “There are still finer details to work out with administration,” said Griffiths, adding that the KSA plans to focus on this project after CramJam is finished.

Griffiths says that the KSA has a “gentleman’s agreement” with Atkinson to aim to have a fully-licensed pub in one year.

“Campus pubs are typically a hub of campus culture,” said Griffiths. “Now that we are a university, its important that we foster bringing students together, bringing students and professors together.”

Added Atkinson: “We’ll take another look at it at the end of the semester and I am absolutely convinced it will have been a success. We will look at doing more in the spring.”

« Previous Page