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In just a few days the majority of students will arrive on campus and Daniel Woolf, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, is ready to welcome them back.

Principal Woolf took a few moments to share his reflections of the past year with the Gazette and discuss his goals and priorities for 2016-17. 

GAZETTE: The 2015-16 academic year seemed to be a particularly exciting one for Queen’s. How do you plan to build on the momentum of the last year?

DANIEL WOOLF: Well, it was a very exciting year. Between the naming of the Dan School of Drama and Music thanks to a $5 million donation from Aubrey and Marla Dan, the naming of the Smith School of Business after an unprecedented $50 million donation from Stephen Smith, the Nobel Prize in Physics, the installation of a third Rembrandt gifted to us from Drs. Alfred and Isabel Bader and the incredible close of the Initiative Campaign, we have so many people to thank for their extraordinary generosity. However, it is important to remember that we cannot rest on our laurels and I view this as a fantastic launch into our 175th anniversary year. Now is the time to accelerate that momentum, so I have quite a few plans that I’m working on with our new provost, the other vice-principals and the board. I am looking forward to another year of good discussions and academic governance at Senate. And of course, the opening of the revitalized Richardson Stadium will be a particularly exciting moment for our university this fall.

QG: Enhancing the student learning experience remains a key priority in the university’s strategic framework. How can Queen’s continue to improve in this area over the course of the next year? 

DW: We will be revisiting and updating some of our strategic plans of the last few years, and pushing for further advances in areas where we are already strong, such as the provision of online courses and the measurement of learning outcomes. We have also been offering longer-term internships, which contribute to greater experiential learning opportunities and we plan to continue that as well. 

That said, there are some lingering and significant challenges. I still think we can improve on the number of research opportunities that are available for undergraduate students. I would say that while the general student learning experience scores very high with undergraduate students, there is room to improve with respect to the graduate student experience. So, Dean of Graduate Studies Brenda Brouwer, Provost Benoit-Antoine Bacon, the SGPS and I will be working on ways that we can advance things in that area. I’m pleased with early discussions with the new presidents of the AMS and SGPS on both these issues.

QG: What are some of your goals and priorities for advancing research excellence at Queen’s in 2016-17?

DW: Last year was a fantastic one for research at Queen’s, between the Nobel Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Particle Physics, the work of the Canadian Clinical Trials Group being recognized, and the many honours received by our individual faculty members and research groups. That being said, we’re not where we need to be for a major Canadian U15 institution. In terms of Tri-Council awards, we do quite well on the NSERC side, but I’d like to focus this year on improving the metrics with CIHR and SSHRC awards. The other area that I’d like to work on is international research collaborations, so Vice-Principal (Research) Steven Liss and Associate Vice-Principal Kathy O’Brien and I will be working to find ways in which we can encourage them.

Faculty renewal is an urgent priority. We have done remarkably little hiring of tenure track faculty over the last number of years and that’s a concern. We have a great academic staff here, but there’s a whole generation of young and mid-career researchers out there that we would all dearly love to bring to Queen’s. Provost Bacon  and I are committed to working with the deans and academic units on a solution to that. 

QG: While we’re on the topic, how can Queen’s continue to build upon its internationalization strategy over the coming year?

DW: I have a number of international visits planned for the year, including one to the UK, one to Israel with the Royal Society of Canada, and others to China and India in the fall. We are doing very well in terms of improving our undergraduate visa-holding students – that’s gone up by a significant percentage (from a relatively small base) over the last three years. We’re fully confident we will hit our 10 per cent goal by 2019 and indeed it may well be time for a strategic discussion with the Board to determine what a suitable, longer term number is. 

Ultimately, one of the goals is to improve our standing in the international rankings. While we don’t, and never should, hitch our cart entirely to that horse, rankings are a reality of the modern world, and if one is competing with other universities globally, we must note that people do pay attention to them. I am hopeful that recent achievements like the Nobel Prize and perhaps greater success in nominating our researchers for significant international awards can lead us down the right path.

We need, for instance, to encourage our faculty to apply for visiting fellowships at places like the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, or the National Humanities Centre in North Carolina; or to apply for major research time awards such as Guggenheim fellowships. And we need to ensure that when they are successful, their departments are able to maintain course offerings during their absence. 

QG: Looking ahead, how will the university continue to address its financial competitiveness? 

DW: Well, financial sustainability is the one driver that supports all others in the strategic framework, including support for our academic mission, so we constantly have to stay focused on that, as mundane and unexciting as it sounds. I and my colleagues in senior administration continue to work with our employee groups and others around the province on a reform to the pension plan and its possible migration to a sector-wide or multi-employer jointly sponsored pension plan because the pension problem remains a significant financial risk for the university. 

I have also asked Provost Bacon and Deputy Provost Teri Shearer to make progress on a cost-containment exercise to enhance our procurement ability. And, I’ll be working with the HR department on improving and enhancing our current talent management program so that we can reward and promote people within the university. 

QG: What challenges and opportunities lie ahead for Queen’s in 2016-17?

DW: In the current fiscal environment, the financial challenges are always there. We live in a province that, for the last several years, has projected a significant deficit. However, together with our sister institutions, we will be having discussions with the province on modifications to the province’s funding formula over the course of this year and I expect to be a little more closely involved with this as the current Vice-Chair of the Council of Ontario Universities. 

This year, one particular area of focus will be the revitalization of Queen’s historic place as a major provider of, and educator in, public policy. I don’t just mean the School of Policy Studies, but the fact that the university, as a whole, has been a significant source of counsel to government and training ground for career public servants over the last century. But we don’t own the field anymore and haven’t for a while. We’ve got a lot of competition out there at the moment, and that is one reason why I’ve empaneled a Principal’s Commission on the Future of Public Policy at Queen’s.

Finally, I think we need to view all of these things over the long term. Partly because of some fairly urgent fiscal issues over the past decade, I think we’ve become a little too fixated in recent years on annual metrics, whether we’re talking about financial sustainability or, for that matter, research. Nobel Prizes in science or, major publications in the humanities and social sciences, are not short-term outcomes.

Metrics  are important, of course, but I think we all need to ask ourselves where we like to see Queen’s in 30 or 40 years, when many of us will be long gone and a generation of faculty and staff being born now are stewarding the institution. I go back to my installation speech from 2009 and subsequent essays like The Third Juncture where I noted that if we want to be a leading university, not just in 2019, but in 2050 or 2060, we have to really do our best to plan for the long term and try to imagine (as best we can from imperfect evidence and the lack of an absolute ability to predict the future) what students will truly need. We must identify global social problems and emerging areas of research that we at Queen’s can contribute to. Of course there are a huge number of unknowns—we can best deal with those by ensuring that there is a culture here that looks forward, and has the capacity to respond quickly and decisively to changing circumstances.

I’ve always said that the greatest challenge for Queen’s is to not constantly fall back on tradition and our past achievements, but to be prepared to adapt to change. Yet, one of the things I’ve been really impressed by over the past seven years has been the great deal of flexibility I’ve seen at this university, which helps us to capitalize on our opportunities. 

QG: Are there other things you are looking forward to in the year ahead?

DW: This will undoubtedly be a special year for Queen’s, as we officially launch into our 175th anniversary in October. The 175th planning committee and individuals from across campus have planned so many great things for us on a very limited budget and so I must thank them for all of their hard work. Even with a few bits of scaffolding still visible and active construction underway, our campus has never looked more beautiful and we are on the verge of opening the revitalized Richardson Stadium. We also are hosting a number of major conferences this year, including the Joanna Briggs Collaboration, the Tobacco Endgame Summit, and the Royal Society of Canada’s Annual General Meeting. It is incredible when you think about the fact that this university is older than Canada itself, so we want to make this year a particularly exciting one for our community, and I think we are well on our way to doing just that.