Alan Shaver was formally installed as the third President and Vice-Chancellor of Thompson Rivers University on June 8, 2011.

Alan Shaver was formally installed as the third President and Vice-Chancellor of Thompson Rivers University on June 8, 2011. Citing Thompson Rivers University as the epitome of the next transformation of universities that have originated because of the aspirations of community, Alan Shaver paid homage to the five outstanding university presidents he has learned lessons from: David Johnston, Bernard Shapiro, Heather Munro Blum, all at McGill, Tom Traves at Dalhousie and Roger Barnsley from TRU.

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen. First I want to thank the Board of Governors for honouring me with this appointment.

I also want to thank the TRU community; the students, the faculty, the staff and the alumni and the people of Kamloops who have been so warm and welcoming to me and my wife Deborah.

And thank you Deborah for supporting our decision to come here.

In my career have been privileged to been able to learn from 5 outstanding university presidents: David Johnston, Bernard Shapiro, Heather Munro Blum, all at McGill, Tom Traves at Dalhousie and Roger Barnsley from TRU. I thank them for the many lessons. I think the most important lesson is that students are the heart and soul of the university. I feel that being a university president is a sacred trust. It is humbling and I promise the students I will to do my best to justify being your president.

The Chancellor has made a compelling case for investment in education as the only proven way to reduce poverty and hence the misery that arises from poverty.

Thanks to the people of Kamloops and the BC government, the investment in TRU has made it the most modern, capable and ambitious university that I know of. There is a determination here to continue to deliver on the promise of university accessibility to all students who want to develop themselves.

In the last 60 years there have been two transformations of university accessibility in Canada.

Before the 50’s, a very small minority of the population attended university, many students were from families where the parent(s) had attended.

After the 60’s a wave of baby boomers attended, many of which were from families where the parent(s) had not attended. This transformed Canada’s PSE system by driving a significant increase in capacity.

TRU epitomizes the next transformation that has started just recently because it is a university that originates in the aspirations of the community of Kamloops, and it is founded on the goal of facilitating university access by a broad range of students including today’s non-traditional students.

Who are non-traditional students? They include:

1. Rural/urban people in smaller cities and regions distant from the large cities
2. Care givers, such as single parents or those students caring for aging relatives
3. Working students who cannot afford to stop work to attend university
4. Historically underrepresented communities, in TRU’s case native communities for whom university education is a dream that is starting to become reality
5. Mature students in the workforce who want to attend university to upgrade their credentials or for personal development.
6. And international students from all over the globe

TRU says to all of today’s students: We are for you. We will help and support you. We will listen to you, we will respect your cultures and your choices, we will include you, we will understand you and we will help you get the excellent education you want.

TRU serves over 25,000 learners with a wide range of learning and research experiences both on line and on campus. We offer Innovative Programming, Research Opportunities, and Faculty with expertise in a wide variety of fields. We offer caring, knowledgeable staff and a community which supports the out of class needs of our students. This rounds out an excellent educational experience for BC students including many First Nations students, for students from the rest of Canada and for many international students.

What’s in the future for TRU. What do we have to do to continue our commitment to human development. I see three key’s to the future:

1. Diversity of the TRU Commuity
2. Information Technology
3. Innovation, creativity, scholarship and research

First Diversity. The people of the world face many challenges including : poverty, social injustice, war, climate change, and environmental degradation. As the Chancellor has stated, poverty is the cause of much misery and the best way to address poverty is through education.

Ideas are our stock and trade and we have to learn how to convert the intrinsic value of ideas into social and economic benefit. The problems are complex and we need people from many disciplines working together to generate and apply ideas for the benefit of the people. We need all the new ideas we can get and this means we need people from all walks of life and from all over the world to work with us. We need the hearts and minds of all peoples to be involved. We need people from different cultures, from different countries and different races with different experiences and with different views of life. We need to continue building TRU’s diverse community of learners and scholars. We must remember that we don’t do students a favor by admitting them to our community; they do us a favor by joining us. TRU is a leader in diversity.

Second Information Technology. We all know the impact that IT has had our society. But do we really understand that this generation of students is the first to learn in a completely different way than most of the university instructors they will meet at university? Our students have easy and constant access to information to a degree that was unimaginable two decades ago. MIT has put its course content on line and expects to serve 1 billion people in the coming years. So it is not about the content of courses any more its about what we do with the content. It is about how we educate our students to evaluate, understand and use the content to develop their knowledge and learning skills. So we need to develop learning communities, active learning, experiential learning and community learning.

The IT revolution is also the means by which today’s students including many of those non-traditional students I mentioned earlier are going to learn. TRU is well positioned to facilitate learning though on campus courses and through on line courses and via a continuous spectrum of blended and hybrid courses. This is the future and TRU is ready to lead the way.

The Third Key is Innovation. Our mission is to generate new knowledge and understanding for the benefit of people. We do this through our teaching and through our creative, scholarly and research work. Our graduates have to thrive in a constantly changing world where the questions of tomorrow cannot be imagined today. The challenge is to build a culture of inquiry at TRU, in our courses and in our intellectual work. We need to facilitate inquiry informed learning: to develop students who know how to think rather than what to think. A research informed education is the best way to give our graduates the confidence and the skills to formulate tomorrow’s questions, to develop creative and objective plans to address those questions and to analyse and share their answers with others. This applies to the graduates from all of our programs: the trades, fine arts, social sciences and humanities, science and the professional programs.

This broadens the discussion about research. There has been a tendency for some leaders in our country to define research too narrowly. This fails to communicate the broad range of intellectual work that goes on at universities and it fails to recognize the full value of intellectual work to our communities.

Interestingly I believe that Canadian taxpayers recognize and define research much more broadly than some people in Universities. Canadians see the impact of that solution oriented collaborative inquiry can have when it engages communities about their own communities for the benefit of their communities. TRU is already at the cutting edge of this broader and more fundamental concept of research. TRU is ready to lead.

In conclusion, learning to be an innovative problem solver is the way to be successful and to be a lifelong learner. Information technology is one of the tools to remain a lifelong learner. Solution oriented collaborative inquiry is the way of the lifelong learner.

Diversity, Information Technology and Innovation these are the features that differentiate TRU. It is a powerful tirade that we must develop and advance. These features put TRU in the lead of the direction that university education is going around the globe.

The world is bursting with non-traditional students with access to IT and with challenges that require collaborative innovation. They are looking for TRU. What we do here is important to the world. So we need to get it right and that will take a lot of work together. But we will do it and we will be of tremendous benefit to people. We will lead.

We started as a college and now we are a university. Someday we will graduate PhD’s who will take positions in universities in Canada and around the world. They will carry TRU’s culture and values. And TRU will continue to lead. I look forward to building this future with you all.

Thank you