Delivered October 7, 2026
Thank you.
My late mother would have been thrilled…and probably a bit relieved.
She didn’t have the opportunity to get a university education herself, but she believed in its value for her children. My sister, Judith, got her first degree at King’s. I, on the other hand, was so eager to get on with what I thought of as “real” life, I dropped out of Dalhousie a few credits short of my BA, having majored mostly in the Dalhousie Gazette. Each fall after that, my mother would urge me to take those missing courses and get my degree. Each fall, I would solemnly promise, enrol in a new course, and then somehow never find the time to attend class or turn in assignments.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go well. Finally, Dalhousie told me not to waste their time or my money.
A decade later, after I’d become a freelance journalist, I got lucky. George Bain, the director of the then-new School of Journalism, asked me to teach an elective course in Magazine Writing. But teaching, I quickly discovered, is also learning…and often humbling.
I remember carefully preparing for my first class. I spent weeks figuring out what I would say that day. I’d mapped out a complete syllabus for the 12-week course. But when I stood in front of my first class, I panicked. I speed-delivered my entire first two-hour lecture in 15 minutes, then had to improvise. So I told the students everything I’d intended to teach them over the next 12 weeks. Finally, exhausted—relieved that I’d gotten through that first class—and hoping no one would notice, I glanced down at my watch. I still had an hour and a half to go.
Things did get better after that.
A few years later, I joined King’s full time on an emergency, end-of-summer two-year contract to fill in for a broadcast professor, who’d been offered a job with the CBC. Two years passed. He came back. I didn’t leave. I kept my head down and looked the other way until no one noticed I wasn’t supposed to be here. That said, for years, I still thought of myself as just passing through on my way somewhere else.
But King’s isn’t the kind of place you just pass through. I became a “lifer.” Our three children all ended up earning degrees—and much else—at King’s.
When I reached what should normally have been my retirement age, I suggested we start this new MFA program, which allowed me to spend another 10 years here.
Working at King’s has been one of the best experiences of my life: my personal university education, undergraduate and post-graduate, and now doctorate….well, honorary doctor.
In order to teach journalism, I discovered I had to better understand it myself, in ways I’d never thought much about as a practising journalist. What did we really do? How did we do it? Why did we do it? How did what we do fit into the larger society and into history? And what are our responsibilities to that society and to history?
I might have taught the students, but the students taught me more. I believe I became a better journalist—and an author—because I had to learn in order to teach. And I became a better teacher because King’s in those days encouraged its journalism professors to practice what we taught in the classroom back in that so-called real world. That was often a humbling (and learning) experience, too.
King’s, as I’m sure you’re discovering in your new role, Tim, is a special place, a quirky, odd little community of communities.
I say “odd” with wonder and affection. Where else would you find a tiny campus that is home to a practical nuts-and-bolts journalism school, a head-in-the-clouds great books program and, when I began, a God Squad that didn’t realize religious education had moved elsewhere. Not to forget those World War II vets who used to wander onto campus from time to time with their stories of the war—and the Wardroom.
King’s shouldn’t work, but it does. I think that’s because, at heart, King’s begins as small, intense but separate communities—students who live together in Radical Bay, or engage in earnest debates in FYP tutorial groups, or pull all-nighters during journalism workshops. More recently, MFA students—on campus for just a few weeks in the summer—have created their own community. But those communities ultimately become part of the larger King’s community, a community that doesn’t end at graduation.
When I started teaching here full time, the J-School newsroom was filled with noisy manual typewriters, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. The entire Registrar’s Office consisted of one person working half-time. There were no upper-level undergrad programs, no master’s degrees in journalism, no MFAs.
A lot has changed since then, almost all of it for the better.
Even that sense of community has evolved…and, I believe, for the better.
When I began at King’s, the university had a reputation for being elitist, for being unwelcoming to those outside its charmed inner circle. Sometimes that was intentional. More often it reflected a lack of intentionality. That has changed, particularly in the last decade, thanks in no small part to the work of our former president, Bill Lahey.
In 2024, I had the privilege of attending the Black Cultural Centre for a ceremony to present a King’s honorary doctorate to Sherri Borden Colley. When Sherri attended King’s Journalism School in the 1990s, she was one of the very few African Nova Scotian students at King’s.
It could not have been easy.
She didn’t always get the support she should have. But she persevered. After graduating and beginning what became a stellar journalistic career, Sherri didn’t forget where she’d come from or what had been missing here. She held us to account. But she also volunteered. She helped King’s to improve, to become more inclusive, more welcoming to those communities that hadn’t felt at home on our campus in the past.
That night at the Black Cultural Centre was an overdue thank you to Sherri, but it also marked the official beginning of a new relationship between King’s and Nova Scotia’s Black community. That partnership with the Black Cultural Centre is designed to help reduce the historic barriers that had resulted in their under-representation at King’s. It’s a partnership that was achieved through the efforts of Bill Lahey and my fellow honoree today, Dr. Russell Grosse. I am grateful to both of them.
Of course, none of that is to suggest there isn’t much more to do. There is.
King’s has always been—and hopefully always will be—a work in progress.
But there is progress.
When our new president, Tim Vine, was interviewed for a recent profile in Tidings, the alumni magazine, he was asked how he would pick up on Bill’s work to make King’s —quote—“more diverse and more welcoming to those who may not previously have felt invited into this community.”
Tim’s answer was unequivocal. “Right from where Bill left off,” he said.
We’re in good hands.
Thank you again for this honour.
My mother definitely would be thrilled!