Standing long
Standing long
It is New Year’s Day, January 1st, a cold crisp morning, and I have started 2013 with a very satisfying visit to my neighbourhood coffee shop. It is also an opportunity to sit and ponder the old year now passed, and think ahead to the new one now beginning. Faithful readers of these musings will know that I am one who measures out his life – not always in coffee spoons, like Prufrock, but certainly in months and years. And 2012, now safely “in the bank” of my memory, was a very good year, the primary highlight being an amazing family weekend in Las Vegas. If you had told me twelve months ago that I would be spending a November Sunday driving an ATV on trails through the Nevada desert, accompanied by my wife and our three twenty-something children, I would most likely have laughed hilariously … but it happened! And somewhere there are even pictures to prove it, although I don’t expect that they will be going “viral” anytime soon, unlike the 2012 Vegas pictures of a certain member of the royal family.
2012 was also a good year for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, bucking the trend for universities nationally and internationally. We welcomed almost a dozen new faculty colleagues, and a number of FASS units gained some much needed additional space. Two expansions in particular were exceptionally noteworthy: the new Language Centre in St Pat’s, which despite some inevitable teething pains should do much in the long term to further Carleton’s ambition to be the Canadian leader in language instruction; and the expansion of the space for Music, a program which is arguably one of the university’s foremost success stories in recent years.
This sense of satisfaction is not, however, entirely devoid of the occasional dark cloud, and the most serious of these is the marginal decline in our fall term enrollment. As the financial model imposed on Ontario universities requires continuous growth at the undergraduate level, this is a situation that we simply must somehow turn around … and that will be the Faculty’s biggest challenge for 2013. We need to find ways to attract more students if we are to retain the gains made in recent years. Otherwise we fall into the downward spiral of lower enrollments triggering more budget cuts, which in turn lead to fewer programs and courses, resulting in even more reductions in enrollment, and so on. Not a pretty picture!
But despite that shadow, 2013 otherwise promises to be a very exciting year, on a variety of levels. In personal terms, it will be a year of multiple special events, beginning with the 33rd annual Canadian Conference of Medieval Art Historians, (which I am organizing and hosting in early March), and then continuing with the annual meeting of the Canadian Council of Deans of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (which, as this year’s president, I am organizing and hosting in April), the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Medievalists at Congress 2013 in Victoria (of which I am also now president, although at least I don’t have to host this one!), through to an important international conference being planned for Rome in early December. But I suspect that the biggest event of all will be the Power of the Arts National Forum, to be held at Carleton in late September, and co-sponsored by FASS and the Michaëlle Jean Foundation. Stay tuned for more details on that one!
January 1st also marks the three-quarters point of my term of service as dean: 90 months down, and 30 to go … should you be counting! (Am I counting? Of course!) I won’t pretend that I have relished every single minute of the last seven and a half years, but I do know that most days are made bearable by the extraordinary people with whom it is my privilege to work, both faculty and support staff, and I shall single out in particular those who toil with me in the dean’s office. I couldn’t do it without them … and indeed wouldn’t choose to do so. And beyond OD FASS, I am also very grateful for the support and assistance of many faculty, staff, and students across the campus. It is because of these wonderful colleagues that I can look ahead to what will certainly be a particularly challenging year, smile, and say confidently “Bring it on!”
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long,
And the forests will echo with laughter.