100 years in review
What’s there to say after you celebrate your hundredth birthday?
Perhaps you, like us at The Reflector, while excited about Mount Royal University’s centennial, couldn’t help thinking we were giving too much credit to being an old institution, with somewhat less focus on what we care about today.
Yes, the school is 100 years old, but what’s important now is what we students go through every day.
In honour of our centennial, the year was peppered with events meant to inspire “dialogue, debate and introspection.” Whether the booze-drenched Girl Talk party and our fabulous graffiti murals from the Legacy of Ideas sessions has led to an increase in campus cognizance remains to be seen. But the parties were good.
In between parties we saw professor Naheed Nenshi’s influential mayoral campaign. Thousands of students in Calgary were suddenly excited to vote, thanks to a candidate who seemed to care about our city in a way that went beyond attracting more bitumen-loving head offices and someone who understands what it means to take public transit to work or school. Nenshi was thoughtful in his campaigning, acknowledging the intelligence of his constituency by offering coherent, complete ideas.
More recently, campus elections drew a paltry number of voters yet again, perhaps because administration generally works well with students so we have little to gripe about.
Or maybe it’s because we don’t look beyond campus parking and transportation to discuss deeper issues such as the quality of our education and students as pawns of big business and government.
This past year, we learned we will say goodbye to president Dave Marshall who guided us into universityhood, and who is as comfortable pulling pints of Royal 100 as he is dressing up like an early-20th-century Methodist principal. David Docherty will take Marshall’s place this summer, and our impression is that he values the needs of students as deeply as our old Dave, so far.
As with any birthday, growing pains appeared in the form of not enough course sections, overworked profs, and new, sometimes confusing,
degree requirements.
We wish you luck and hope you too can look back at the past academic year as the beginning of another era of individual and institutional success.