Delivered May 31, 2025
Good morning and welcome back to King’s for Alumni Day Weekend!
It’s always so uplifting to bring the extended King’s community together. I look forward to celebrating the winners of the Alumni Awards today—and the special anniversary years that we’re celebrating.
Whenever I gather with alumni, I am truly amazed by your accomplishments and the contributions you have made in every possible kind of career to communities that extend throughout Nova Scotia, across Canada and beyond. Equally, I am always inspired, as I am this morning, that in all of your varied walks of professional life, you credit who you have become, in and out of your professional lives, to your time at this quirky little liberal arts college.
For decades, the emphasis on education that is deemed to be immediately useful, functional and practical, has steadily become more pronounced. It is shaping how universities are funded and the approaches of government to higher education more generally. In Nova Scotia, we are expected to review our academic programs to see if they are producing skilled workers in areas of “labour market needs”. We can and are doing more to prepare our students for success in the labour market, including through the strides we have made in giving them opportunities for experiential learning. We are also doing more to show how their education in the liberal arts prepares them for careers that will evolve as the economy and the world of work does.
Just the same, when I speak to prospective students (and their parents), I congratulate them on having a broader and more holistic vision for what they want out of their education. I assure them that in liberal education, especially here, they will find the skills and capabilities needed for successful careers but also the opportunity to discover what difference they want to make in the world and the career they can follow to make that difference. I tell them a King’s education will prepare them for every dimension of life, which includes their roles as neighbours, volunteers, colleagues, spouses, parents, friends and citizens. I tell them that when they graduate from King’s, they will be self-educating human beings for the rest of their lives who are useful precisely because they are self-educating humans.
I want to thank all of you for keeping faith with the aspirations of liberal education in your continuing support for it at King’s and other universities. You live out the values and demonstrate the capabilities that go with an education in the humanities, social and physical sciences, journalism, music and creative writing in your careers and in your lives beyond your careers. Your example, more than my words, is the abiding encouragement young people need to dream bigger in choosing their field and university of study.
Here, education is not only about the mind, but also the heart. On Welcome Day back in September, I spoke to students about the role that love plays in a King’s education, using the words of one of my favourite philosophers—Mr. Rogers, of the old children’s show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Following his example, I asked our students, as they sat on the lawn in the Quad with their parents and grandparents standing behind them, to think of and give thanks for everyone who had “loved them into being”. I asked them to consider King’s as a place where they would continue to be loved into being and where they would help to love others into being.
I hope that when you think of King’s, you remember many people who have helped to love you into being. [Note – Plentifully on display at two events I attended last new – 10 year reunion of the MFA and gathering of the class of 1975 at the Old Triangle.]
In this remarkable community of higher learning, every one of us gets the opportunity to be the love those around us need to become who they are becoming—not so they become like us, but so they become more fully themselves.
Likewise, King’s is here to provide students with an 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 continuing to live by the principles of freedom of opinion and expression and of academic freedom as we make our community more welcoming for all. This balance is crucial to our goal of ensuring King’s is for everyone who wants the transformative education we offer.
We are in the final phases of a campaign called Welcoming: the Future King’s. This is a campaign for 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 a higher education that graduates independent, critical and creative thinkers.
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.
Through my nine years at King’s, the expectation I came to King’s with—that this university excels in helping students feel belonging—is now for me deeply engrained lived experience. So too however is my awareness that King’s students who do not see themselves represented in the faces of King’s do not always feel like they belong and are welcomed.
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 be better human beings and the world more just, equitable, sustainable and humane.
For this process of formation to be as profound as it can be, in the great tradition of liberal education we proudly represent and uphold, we need the widest possible range of viewpoints, insights and lived experiences to be welcomed into it.
Our aim, with your help and that of our wider community, is to reach the $15-million financial goal of the campaign by the end of this year. We have so far raised more than $11 million, which includes the money for the completed restoration of three bays (we are still in need of the resources to restore Cochrane Bay), the creation of new scholarships and bursaries, and the funding for a new chair in the history of healthcare and health equity. Remaining priorities, in addition to Cochrane Bay, include more scholarships and bursaries, funding for innovation with in our academic programs, and restoration of the foyer of the Arts and Administration Building so that it can once again epitomize the welcoming university it was originally intended to represent.
Our goals go beyond those of the current campaign because our striving for a better future for King’s that expands our contributions to the world must never end if King’s, King’s students, and King’s alumni are to continue to thrive.
We’re in the planning stages for a new and modern home for the School of Journalism, Writing & Publishing in the southeast corner of the King’s Quad, replacing the current gymnasium. This new building, which for now is called the Southeast Corner Project, will include a modern gymnasium and wellness facility, a new location for the bookstore and affordable on-campus housing. It will be Rick Hansen accessible and LEED Gold in its environmental performance. It will be a new gateway between King’s and Dalhousie to build on our progress of recent years in making the student experience at the two universities more than the sum of its parts.
We have a design concept for this building from architects Diamond Schmitt (of Toronto) and Abbott Brown (of Halifax) that I think is stunning. It was developed through a process that combined input from across King’s with input from the wider community that we want to claim this building as its own. Because of this inclusive process, we have the possibility of creating a building that complements the architectural vision of Andrew Cobb and that is also embraced by our Mi’kmaw and African Nova Scotian partners as a symbol of our growing reconciliation and partnership with them.
This project will thereby embody a core truth: 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. 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.
I thank each of you for all you contribute to this community—all the ways you continue to love us into being.
Know how proud we are to have been a part of who you’ve become.
You will always be welcome at King’s … and there will always be a King’s here to welcome you.