Dr. Alex Clark’s installation address October 12, 2023 Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. Elder Campbell, the Honorable Rajan Sawhney, Minister of Advanced Education, His Worship Mayor Rob Balay, His Worship Mayor Colin Derko, Reeve Brian Hall, MLA, Glenn van Dijken, distinguished guests, board of governors, community members, AA team members, colleagues, friends, and family. Thank you all for sharing in today's celebration. I am so honoured to be installed as Athabasca University’s 11th president. Thank you to the board of governors for your confidence in me, Board Chair Nelson, and Vice-Chair Spagnolo for your support, and for the support all the board have given me. Thank you to the Athabasca community. From mayor’s breakfasts to steak nights, you make my belly strain, and my welcome truly warm. Thank you. Thank you to my wife and grown up children who are here today: Fiona, Matt, and Bronwyn, and others who we will connect with later from Scotland, from England, from Canada and Australia, including my parents, Lesley and Michael, and my in-laws, Joy and Peter. Thank you also to friends and colleagues past and present. It's wonderful to be here today in Athabasca on Treaty 6 and Treaty 8 territory to reflect on who we are as a university and as a community, and more than anything, where we will go next. Indeed, my life has been rich with people and togetherness in Scotland and in Canada; with amazing human beings, fantastic communities and stellar teams. People and togetherness is what gets me up every morning, my North Star. As we look at this world, near and far, we have to bring our best because our changing world overflows at every turn with challenges like never before: Strain as we seek sustainable health care systems and affordable food and housing; pain as we yearn for peace in the world and justice for residential school survivors in Canada; disruption for places, many of them rural, battling wildfires and fearsome floods while others endure dangerous droughts; how to build the strong communities we want with the labour needs that we have. In the face of these challenges, how will Athabasca University build on its strengths and rise to address them? What must we do to provide evermore opportunities for everyone, irrespective of background or circumstances, to grow their talents and make their highest contribution
as learners? What must we do to grow ourselves, our university partnerships, our work to make our highest contribution as Canada's only online and open university? When faced with the enormity and complexity of these challenges have, where do we even begin? For me, challenges always start with one vital foundation, our enduring foundation, the true rocks beneath our feet, our core values. Knowing who you are and what you stand for brings courage combined with deep and lasting motivation. Following our values in our hearts and in our minds helps us to show up as our best selves to make good choices, especially in difficult and uncertain situations. AU knows its values and holds these values closely; it's one of our superpowers. At AU, we know who we are and what we stand for: passionately and with pride, we stand with and for all learners. We believe that everyone should have access to a world-class university education, that every person's talents and potential deserve to be nurtured. In this, for this, AU educates learners like no other. From its founding, this university has shattered barriers to post-secondary education, providing access to a transformative university education, irrespective of location, gender, sexuality, race or place; irrespective of physical ability or age. No person is left behind at AU. AU educates learners like no other. Embracing both place and digital space, fully local to global with no zero-sum games, grounded but not bounded in local communities, we’re flexible, open, and online. A university that has true reach across boundaries and across borders. Au educates learners like no other. The average age of an AU student is not 23, but 33, and the bulk of our other learners are in their 40s and 50s, and studying and working where they live. 70% of our undergraduate students are the first in their families to attend university. 66% of our students are women, many of them working and raising families in their communities. From the politicians building our policies, to the project managers building our homes, AU educates learners like no other. From micro-courses to undergraduate programs to graduate master's degrees and doctoral degrees, AU has something for every learner, and our programs create such impact. 30% of all nurse practitioners in Canada are AU graduates. AU educates learners like no other. This has never been more needed. Because the world near and far needs more skilled and working people. By 2025, Alberta alone will face a labor shortage of 33,000 people. And by 2030, that number will grow to 46,000. AU provides learning opportunities for
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upskilling and reskilling to develop our talent right here in this province and indeed, across the world. Au also stands with communities like no other. Our flexible and online approach provides Canada's largest, and often only, programs for learners who need flexibility to pursue their study while continuing to work and care-give and contribute to their home communities. We provide the education learners want and needs exactly where the learner is. Many learners enroll in programs to grow in their roles, and help their organizations and businesses grow too. Others enroll to fill a vital skills gap. All translate their learning into real community benefits as they learn. Let me tell you about Kira Steele. She's a recent graduate of our Bachelor of Commerce program. Kira found a home at Au after many years dealing with alcohol and drug addiction. During her degree, she received the support, affordability, and flexibility she needed to learn at her own pace, but also to maintain her own sobriety and promote her advocacy in her home community. While Kira earned her degree, she also founded the Boring Little Girls Club, an organization of people supporting each other to maintain their sobriety in and through community. She then became manager of a harm reduction service for homelessness and addiction. And Kyra is not done yet. To advance her advocacy efforts, she's pursuing her AU MBA. AU truly changes lives and communities in the most profound way, bringing a world-class university experience to each learner’s door, when and how they want it. This means Kira could live where and how she wanted while attending a top-ranked business school. And among Kira’s fellow AU alumni are the builders and leaders of community organizations, of businesses, of governments, and industry throughout the province and throughout the world. AU indeed educates learners like no other. In a world replete with immense challenges, everyone who can contribute must get that opportunity. This is who we are, and this is what we stand for. This is Athabasca University’s time. This is our time. What makes our highest contribution possible not only as individuals, but also as communities and as teams? It's not ego and bravado. It's not fancy roles or fancy robes. It's not hollow visions or blind hope, nor indeed, smooth paths. Far more important than our successes is how we respond to tough situations, even how we respond to our failures.
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AU learners like Kira know what it means to overcome true challenges, to realize their potential. When we do our job well, AU learners gain the skills, confidence, and ability to better act on the challenges and opportunities they have and they see in their communities, in relation to our most pressing priorities, such as health. My first degree, many of you will know, was in nursing, and as former Dean of the Faculty of Health disciplines at Athabasca University, I'm especially proud that AU is home to one of Canada's largest Bachelor of Nursing programs. Every day at AU, we directly contribute to solving our healthcare crisis by educating thousands of registered nurses. At this year's convocation ceremony, I met Michelle Monkman, the Governor General's Gold Medal winner and graduate of a Master of Nursing program. She's a registered nurse from Kinosao Sipi Cree Nation. She shared with us that her spirit name translates into light-giver, and her purpose is to bring light into dark places, and insight into places of uncertainty. In her 19-year career, Michelle has broken down barrier after barrier, opening up access to health care for Indigenous peoples. She also shared with us that AU taught her how to speak a new language, a language that strengthened her ability to advocate and to create positive change in Indigenous health. What an honour to be able to help learners like Michelle make their highest contribution, especially with Indigenous communities, and educate the highly skilled health professionals that we all need near and far. We know that health needs are particularly great in rural communities, where many struggle to find a doctor or receive timely care. So today, I am ecstatic to share that we have established the President's Award for Rural Alberta Nursing Students. This fund will create awards for AU students living in rural Alberta to gain valuable experience caring in and for rural communities; to understand not only the profound complexities of rural healthcare, but also the profound impact health professionals have when they come and stay in our rural communities. Our values are indeed the foundation of our highest contribution, and the world needs the vital differences they can make. But how can we ensure our values lead to this contribution? What takes us to sustained and sustainable success? To realize our fullest potential, we should never think we've arrived. Instead, we should constantly seek to improve and grow, grow always and in all ways. This is the growth mindset. Research led by psychologist Carol Dweck shows that having a growth mindset brings greater motivation, better performance, and more success in life and work. Adopting this
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mindset ourselves means learning continuously, from both success and failure. Always seeking not to prove ourselves, but to improve ourselves. Building on our biggest strengths, but being open, being courageous enough to develop our biggest weaknesses too. Learning is a big, big term. We apply it to so much across our lives, from toddlers, kneehigh, learning with glee how to walk, to us as adults, learning to accept with wisdom and serenity our own fragility and death. Some learning is easy and comfortable, like wading into the shallow end of the pool. But what about learning in the deep end of the pool? Can we, can you, jump into the learning that really challenges us? That scares us even to our core, to turn to face our own weaknesses and blind spots and innermost and secret fears. The most important learning often happens in the toughest places. At those times where we face rejections and failures, sometimes it feels like years. But we can always learn, and we can always improve. We only really fail if we fail to learn. This deep-end learning is vital for each of us, but also for our university, as we strive in this world of lightning-quick technology and change to create innovative research and teaching spaces to promote learning in our students. A growth mindset helps us innovate and improve how we teach and how we support each other, each student. A growth mindset sparks new research questions, creative partnerships, better pedagogies, and more responsive programs. I see this growth mindset each day at Athabasca University. AU’s mandate has been to provide exceptional online learning for anyone with an Internet connection. This year, the university launched our new integrative learning environment to enhance our students’ experiences. While most of our students are from Alberta, we reach globally to 81 countries, based right here locally in Athabasca. We're not like anyone else and who would want to be. We want to go further still: to grow the choices we offer learners in the programs they can study; to offer more diversity in how they study, integrating place-based, communitybased learning into our online learning offerings; to grow the choices team members have to work and to connect and build community in place as well as digital space; to grow in our efforts to renew, refresh, Indigenize, and decolonize curriculum across faculties. AU is committed to conciliation and finding new ways to incorporate Indigenous knowledge, these experiences and voices, into all that we teach, as one of Alberta's four researchintensive universities and the only university based in a rural community in Western Canada.
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We don't just foster knowledge of our teaching, but we also generate knowledge through research with wide reach, reach beyond academia, from examining the sustainability of water, food, and ecosystems to the sustainability of businesses. From digging through the material fragments from the past, to designing the Smart Cities for our futures. AU research probes vital questions and seek solutions to the province’s, and the world's, most pressing challenges. Our amazing faculty’s research is growing quickly. Supported by AU’s Idea Lab that accelerates research using cloud technology, we've increased our research funding by 120% in the last year alone. We are just beginning to grow in all the ways that we can, and the world has never needed this more. This is AU’s time; this is our time. But to make our highest contribution, we need one more vital thing. It's a thing that has defined my values and has defined my life. It all comes back to people; the power of people, the power of teams, and the power of communities. For me, working together is always better than working alone, because complex problems demand diversity; diversity of people, of ideas, of values and approaches, diversity of partners from all communities and sectors and types of organization. Diversity challenges us, sometimes to our limit, to be curious in our head spaces, and inclusive in our workspaces. We now have the most inclusive senior leadership team in AU’s history, standing for collaborative administration, prioritizing, building trust, to enable every team member who works at AU to thrive. Part of AU’s foundation is also in this community. By embracing difference, and even disagreement, our past rifts can yield precious gifts. We know there have been disagreements in the past about this university, and also about the role that the university has in the region. Those disagreements were tough on so many, and trust was damaged. Hurt is the price we pay when we truly care. The African American writer James Baldwin once said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. I love that wisdom. By showing up with courage, respect and openness, through listening and sharing with patience and with passion, we've made new precious common bonds as community members, faculty, members of our team and of our board. These experiences show that we share a deep, enduring passion for the well-being of AU and its learners. I have listened to our team members and the community here. I know, we know, building trust every day is needed. Because without trust, virtually nothing is possible, but with it, virtually anything is. To build on and improve trust, to improve in place and in the digital space, to further increase diversity of our workplace, our team members, and administration. We want to do these and also increase our local presence, to build
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community and connection in a revitalized campus and workplace here in Athabasca and beyond. As you've heard from Byron – did I get the message? – convocation right here and Athabasca this spring. Also to use this foundation to increase our local to global reach, improving our student experience, diversifying our income, increasing relations with alumni, and harnessing new technologies and artificial intelligence and all that we do. We will work to widen our most needed-programs, to add more work-integrated learning opportunities for each student anywhere, but particularly in diverse and rural settings, and continue to increase our research with reach and impact for our most pressing problems. Development like this will lead to the creation of new jobs for AU, in the region as well as in rural communities across Alberta; growth that can only truly come when we work together. Because there is no leadership without learning, today, I am thrilled also to announce a new initiative called AU for You leadership circles. Two communities of leadership circles will be created: one based here in Athabasca and the other online for AU team members. In Athabasca, emerging leaders from diverse sectors in the region will come together in-person with AU as the convener, with established leaders as mentors. Online, our team members from across disciplines and all staff categories will gather in the digital space. Both circles will be a venue for sharing experiences, mutual support, and developing leadership and mentorship values and skills amongst people dedicated to learning by leading together in that deep end. Along with the launch of the leadership circle, over the past months, I've been honoured to work with members of our team to revitalize AU House to be not only my home, but also a uniquely special gathering place once more for our team members, for our community members and stakeholders. To build community and connection further, we will also revitalize our physical campus in Athabasca more, and work to increase campus spaces for community use too. Our openness extends to the community as well. I look forward to convening and building other partnerships to grow our contributions and assets here, across rural Alberta and the north of Canada. As a knowledge hub of the north, AU will bring together those across Alberta and Canada to work together on our most pressing challenges in place and digital space. Bringing academia together with government and industry, together with not-forprofits and communities, to transform knowledge and relationships into actual actions and benefits. A university not just in the community, but bringing together stakeholders to create real benefits for communities.
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Most crucially, I look forward next month to beginning the start of our new, five-year strategic plan, a major step in AU’s growth and the foundation for AU’s highest contribution. Making this contribution in life, and as a university, is seldom easy. I can count the easy days I've had as president on no fingers. For our plan, if we are to make our highest contribution, we must care for and nurture our togetherness. This is our great opportunity and our obligation, and, I believe, our calling. This is our time. To meet the needs of this changed and changing world, we must first harness our values, the university of opportunity for everyone, enabling each learner to live, work, and study in community for the benefit of all; we’re the university who leaves no person behind. Secondly, we must grow always, not despite successes, struggles, or failures, but often because of them, learning in both ends, shallow and deep, to be a university whose contribution never ends because our commitment to our learners and growth and our leadership never ends either. And finally, we must remember that these two are nought without the third. This is where I started, this is where we will finish too; my North Star. Our biggest, most precious power, people and togetherness, because facing the challenges ahead and the opportunities that we have, it all comes back to people. It's me. It's you. It's each of you here and online. Each learner, each team member, each community member, and each board member together. It's time for us to come together to create our new plan, a plan for AU’s highest contribution. One with boldness built in and from our values of community and diversity, harnessing our growth mindset and our leadership to realize this university's highest contribution. AU educates learners like no other. Everyone, near and far, local to global, a university like no other, with a people and a togetherness like no other. This is our time. This is AU’s time. Thank you very much.
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