I get to welcome our entering classes each year at “Meet the Dean” on Imagine Day. This year our entering class was so large that we used up all the seats in the Chan Centre for both ceremonies and had to seat hundreds of students on the stage! Introduction: Making your own history We begin […]

I gave a keynote over the weekend for the Golden Key International Honour Society here at UBC. Given the Society’s emphasis on Academics, Service, and Leadership, I talked about how education can serve to transform students and light a passion for life and learning. ——- The title of my talk, “A Fire to Be Lit”, […]

I stole the title of this blog from the global music radio show I hosted in the 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin, but it seemes a fitting title for a rumination on universities in the global era. As I write this, I’m on the highway from the downtown of the mega-city of Chongqing to the Sijuan […]

Given my job at this university, you might be forgiven for thinking that I have had an intentional and a planned life and career, although in reality, it was far from this. In thinking about the paths that our students will take into their unknown futures, I considered my own path from undergraduate student to […]