Holiday closure: The King's campus is closed from end of day December 20 to January 2.
Remarks delivered on November 21, 2024
Hello everyone. Thank you for being here. And thank you, Doug, for your introductory words.
As Doug mentioned, after I speak, you will also hear from another esteemed member of our Board of Governors, Kathryn Burton. Like Doug, Kathryn is a distinguished King’s graduate.
Both Kathryn and Doug are outstanding exemplars of what we’re here to talk about today. On the basis of who they became here at King’s, both have made incredible contributions to the community, affecting significant positive changes throughout their careers.
Last year, King’s awarded Kathryn a Doctor of Civil Laws to acknowledge her distinguished career in public service in Canada and the United States, including her continual work to help Indigenous and settler cultures, and Americans and Canadians, to better understand one another.
And just a few weeks ago Doug delivered his groundbreaking report, “Regaining Trust,” to members of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society, a list of recommendations to address systemic discrimination in the Society and the legal profession.
As leaders, Kathryn and Doug have been essential in shaping and bringing to life the campaign we’re launching today. A campaign that looks to the future of King’s and the difference King’s can be to the future of us all.
Thanks to all of you for being here. A particular welcome to our new Mayor, Andy Fillmore.
Welcome to the public launch of The Future King’s Campaign and the three goals that drive it.
Welcome is a word that marks a beginning. It’s an ushering in, a broadening of perspective to acknowledge and include others.
This is reflective of our work on this campaign and it’s just the beginning. The work we do here won’t end when we reach our financial goals. It won’t end at all. This work is about continually striving for a better future for King’s and what King’s contributes to the world.
And the future we envision is a King’s that welcomes students, faculty and staff from all backgrounds.
Each time we create a new pathway, our community grows in strength, vibrancy and inclusiveness—and we’re all richer for it.
Our first goal is to empower student success and make a King’s education more equitable and accessible.
We aim to build on the progress of recent years to create financial awards, scholarships and bursaries that attract and support the best students from diverse backgrounds and experiences, whatever their own capacity to fund their education. This will include additional tuition waiver programs, such as those we have created for students from care and Mi’kmaw students and “no questions asked” bursary programs so we can help students stay focused on their studies when they encounter financial challenges along the way.
Secondly, we must expand and diversify the educational experience.
For this, we need new faculty positions in fields of existing and new academic strength for new colleagues who will increase the representation our increasingly diverse student body rightly expects to find at King’s. We will create new special lecture series—like the one happening this year on disability—and more opportunities to welcome visiting scholars, and artists and writers in residence. We need to modernize and upgrade learning spaces to serve an evolving curriculum within our academic programs, each one of which is clearly one-of-a-kind in Atlantic Canada but, arguably, also in Canada.
We need to continue our innovative work on experiential learning in journalism and the liberal arts, building on initiatives like Books by Heart, in which King’s students are testing the question of whether healing in cardiac patients can be improved through the technology-aided nurturing of book culture on hospital wards.
Our third goal is to enhance excellence and the cultural life of King’s beyond the classroom.
We aim to continue our work to modernize the King’s campus while protecting and enhancing its unique architectural character and beauty. This follows the progress we have made in restoring four of our residences and making the iconic Alex Hall into an accessible building. Our work on accessibility must continue. And our welcome to everyone must be conveyed in the art and ambience of King’s, including the rejuvenation of the foyer of the Arts and Administration Building into the grand entranceway to the College and higher learning Andrew Cobb intended it to be.
To achieve these and other goals, we set a target of $15 million.
The underlying and overarching goal is a King’s that is fundamentally about accessibility in all its holistic dimensions: to open our doors to aspiring students from all economic and cultural backgrounds, of all gender identities, races and abilities. I agree with that in my bones.
It is what brought me here to King’s eight years ago.
I was part of the first generation in my family to have access to a university education, thanks to the generosity of the strangers who funded the scholarships and bursaries I needed. I know that it has made my world better. And I believe that access to education is how the world becomes better for everyone.
Being President comes with the honour of knowing King’s students—brilliant, thoughtful, caring students. They impress me every day with their intellectual curiosity and how they care for each other and the world around them.
I take every opportunity I can to spend time with them—often in this very room, in the house that George and Tia rebuilt. Here, we meet for lunches with alumni, for dinners with residence and day students, for hot chocolate after wilderness hikes and skating parties, and for coffee and cinnamon buns with the President, perhaps my favourite part of our three-day celebration of each graduating class.
We’ve invited quite a few students here today, too. I hope you’ll also take this opportunity to chat with them.
I want to share with you the words of two recent graduates to illustrate the spirit of this campaign.
In her 2024 valedictorian speech, journalism graduate Kaitlyn MacNeill described how she struggled when she first came to King’s and wondered if she belonged here. However, as she progressed through the Foundation Year Program, she changed her perspective.
Here’s how she described it: “After Plato’s cave allegory, we started learning about Socrates, who famously said, ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ We went on to learn about René Descartes, who basically wrote an entire book trying to figure out if he was real or not…. I came to the realization that the greatest thinkers in all of history truly knew NOTHING. They came into a world that was incomplete and made something of it.”
Kaitlyn realized that you don’t come here with the answers or for the answers but to live with the questions and develop the perspectives that shape a life of purpose and meaning. This has always been at the heart of our pedagogy and traditions at King’s.
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 meet the challenges and opportunities we face and if life is to be more than meeting challenges and opportunities.
For this process of formation to be as profound as it can be, we need the widest possible range of viewpoints, insights and lived experiences.
This is why inclusion must be a focus and not an ancillary element of every part of our educational mission. If we just focused on getting students in the door, but did not embrace the goal of inclusion in the whole of their educational journey, inclusion would fall short of fostering a true sense of belonging.
Let me share an example of how an expansion of perspective changed one Indigenous student’s experience.
In 2023, King’s student Jessica Casey wrote as follows about a very significant event at King’s.
“Starting with some of the earliest recorded texts and moving towards the present day, FYP begins with The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Holy Bible. For the first time, this year’s first week of FYP included a creation story from the very land that the Halifax campus stands on: Mi’kma’ki.”
That lecture was given by Mi’kmaw Hereditary Chief and scholar Stephen Augustine, who delivered it again this year.
Jessica continued, “Including the Mi’kmaw Creation Story represents a meaningful expansion of the program’s knowledge and scope…. I know that hearing those stories strengthened my sense of belonging and our collective responsibility to work towards good relations in Mi’kma’ki.”
Jessica, who is of Inuit ancestry—and a Dr. Carrie Best Scholar—went on to write her Contemporary Studies thesis on Indigenous social health in the history of medicine.
What if Jessica had not experienced that moment of seeing Indigenous knowledge included in her educational journey? She may have felt initially welcomed, but would she have developed that deeper sense of belonging every student should have?
Emphasis on community and belonging is not new to King’s. It has always been a part of who we are. Since 1802, King’s students have in our matriculation ceremony promised fidelity to the “precepts of communal living and learning.” Notice that the notion of community—of living together—comes first.
What draws and keeps us together is our love of reading, ideas, writing, thinking and storytelling—a life of the mind and heart and, above all, of friendship—surrounded by the ambience of what we call “Quad life,” including music, theatre, athletics, residence life, a smashing good pub and a library that is a temple of books.
And speaking of books, we had the honour earlier this month of hosting acclaimed writer Zadie Smith at King’s. Our students chose her to come and speak at this year’s Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture.
Smith spoke about writing as a way of developing your consciousness. She shared that her first love, over writing, is reading. In her book of essays, Changing My Mind, she states, “Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.”
To us, she said, “There are as many versions of a novel as there are readers to read it.”
This diversity of perspective must define how we study the humanities, flourish in the books written in our creative writing programs and inform how our journalism students learn to tell the stories the world needs them to tell.
And so, King’s must reach beyond what we have been historically to what we need to become. 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 here.
To truly live up to the precepts of the communal life that have been our guiding star for centuries, we must welcome students from all cultures, experiences and backgrounds who wish to pursue an education at King’s to help them find and realize their dreams.
For guidance, we are reaching out to the communities around us.
We’re grateful for our partnership with the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, represented tonight by Chair of the Board, Mervyn Broome. The Centre is helping us come to terms with our history in ways that create opportunities for African Nova Scotian and Black students and their communities.
We are grateful for our deepening relationship with the Mi’kmaq, particularly through the Mawaknutma’tnej Circle that brings the leadership of King’s together with Mi’kmaw students, graduates and faculty and Mi’kmaw leaders and wisdom keepers from around Mi’kma’ki. In helping us develop the Mi’kmaw Journalism Initiative, and in so many other ways, the circle has helped us see our role in reconciliation and to ensure that Mi’kmaw and other Indigenous students can see themselves at King’s.
Our partnership with Dalhousie continues to grow and evolve. In October, President Kim Brooks and I appointed a task force to explore areas for deeper collaboration, including new opportunities for inclusivity and diversity. I want to recognize the Dalhousie colleagues who are here, including Jen Laurette and Theresa Rajack-Talley, and also Dr. Sarah Clift, our Vice-President, who somehow is managing to serve on the task force in addition to everything else she does.
How fortunate King’s is to have the support of so many communities around us—those who appreciate what we are trying to do, who help make our community better, knowing that we’ll all be stronger for it. And that includes each of you in this room.
Here, with you today, it is my distinct pleasure to announce that we have already raised $10 million toward our target of $15 million. It feels terrific to say that, especially with our Chancellor Debra Deane Little and Bob Little in the room, who, along with many other committed donors, have taken us two-thirds of the way there!
Thank you for your interest in King’s and our remarkable students.
This campaign is not just about the future of King’s, but our collective future. And we are buoyed by the vision of working with you to get there.
And now, as promised, I invite Kathryn Burton to speak next. In addition to being a member of our Board of Governors, Kathryn is the Chair of the Board’s Advancement Committee and is also a member of the Mawaknutma’tnej Circle and our Campaign Leadership Council. Her dedication to King’s and our mission is inspirational.