Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Fifth Pillar

They aren't adequate to the university's ecological obligations, or to the university community's ecological activities and commitment, but at least the draft Strategic Plan is blunt about its priorities: "To achieve our vision and mission as a university, we must focus on four key areas and goals." These four areas and goals are the following:
  • people: "to recruit and retain a diverse group of exceptionally talented students, faculty and staff and to support them in ways that allow them to achieve their highest potential"
  • quality: "to offer programs in teaching, research and support of such quality as to place us in the upper 20 per cent of a national set of comparable programs as judged by peer evaluation"
  • community: "to establish UVic as a recognized cornerstone of the community, committed to the sustainable social, cultural and economic development of our region and our nation"
  • resources: "to generate the resources necessary from both public and private sources to allow us to achieve our objectives and to steward those resources in a sustainable fashion"
To which I say... pardon?

It's not that the areas and goals are in themselves deficient. It's that together, they represent a distinct blindness on the part of the drafters toward the university community's acknowledged (and carefully marketed) area of strength, namely its ecological commitment.

It is essential that our Strategic Plan be explicit about the university's obligation to the ecological reality of its site, of its region, and of the planet. If the Plan isn't explicit about that obligation, then its silence represents an admission that the university administration is trusting this essential work to be accomplished under the radar, without explicit support, and I regard this as unacceptable.

Accordingly, I'd like to see one of two serious changes made to the Plan's description of its key areas and goals.

Option one - Add a fifth key area of "ecology," complete with an express goal along the lines of "to give local, regional and global ecological concerns primary significance in all the university's planning decisions, as well as to support the teaching of and research into ecological sustainability." My preference would be for this area and goal, in layout, to run across the page below the other four areas, to indicate that this area underlines the rest of them.

Option two - Revise all four goals so that they involve ecological principles. They'd look something like this, after the revision:
  • people: "to recruit and retain a diverse group of exceptionally talented students, faculty and staff and to support them in ways that allow them to achieve their highest potential, particularly in understanding their ecological obligations"
  • quality: "to offer programs in teaching, research and support of such quality as to place us in the upper 20 per cent of a national set of comparable programs as judged by peer evaluation, emphasizing whenever possible questions of ecological literacy and ecological sustainability"
  • community: "to establish UVic as a recognized cornerstone of the community, committed to the sustainable social, cultural and economic development of our region and our nation, and above all else the ecological health of the site, the region, and the globe"
  • resources: "to generate the resources necessary from both public and private sources to allow us to achieve our objectives and to steward those resources in a sustainable fashion, paying particular attention to questions of ecological sustainability."
These revisions are typical of what the Plan as a whole needs to include, acknowledgements throughout of the ecology that underpins every endeavour of human society. To some extent it'd be possible to consider these revisions to be window-dressing, mere rhetoric, but even if nothing else, they'd be a powerful signal of the university's awareness that its community members are committed to ecological sustainability and planetary health. That's not everything, but it's something I'd be more than willing to get behind.

As it stands, the Plan's four key areas and goals are lacking this crucial element of ecology. If the areas and goals are silent on questions of ecology, then the Plan fails to speak for the university community, and fails to highlight the community's acknowledged strength in this field.

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