RRU honoured for ethics Allan Cahoon, RRU president, accepted a Torch Award in May from the Vancouver Island Better Business Bureau. The university was recognized for its exemplary commitment to honest and ethical business practices and consumer service excellence. Nominated in the education category, RRU was described as "...one of the leading schools we have; they make learning mean something."

by Allan Cahoon, PhD, president of Royal Roads University

Many traditional academics see a liberal arts education and Canada’s need for a highly skilled and educated workforce as somehow contrary to each other. This assumption is based on fear that a traditional focus on liberal learning, a foundational feature of universities, will be compromised by a more pragmatic need for a skilled and educated workforce.

The reality is that Canada needs to ensure more of its people obtain the right combination of technologically specific skills and the ability to apply them effectively in the job market. What comes out of that balanced approach will undoubtedly help individuals, their families, their communities and, most importantly in these times, Canadian society and the economy.

But clearly, as found in a March 13 editorial lamenting the demise of the traditional university at the hands of economic pragmatism ("Education means more than job-training" in the National Post by Patrick Keeney), there is a perceived tension between the pursuit of knowledge as a self-determined institutional objective and the policy statements of some governments to encourage a more economically pragmatic approach to higher education, especially as they get articulated through funding allocations across the educational system.

The challenge for many education administrators is to reconcile individual institutional priorities with the broader social and economic objectives of government. This is the reality of universities in the 21st Century.

This tension means that there are substantial reforms taking place within higher education. These are mainly aimed at encouraging institutions to be more responsive to the needs of society and the economy. The reforms have meant a reappraisal of the purpose of universities. And the results have meant a move from this sense of entitlement within traditional academic circles, to a focus on the relevance of the curriculum and programs to the broader economic needs of society.

Today in British Columbia and elsewhere we have formal quality assurance systems in place to provide funders of public education a sense of value for that investment and a system of accountability for the educational institutions being in part funded by tax dollars. In this way education authorities assume the role of guardians of the public interest to ensure that resources are efficiently spent to support broader societal needs. The growing expectation that institutions contribute to the economic and social goals of our country is reflected in the quality of teaching and the level of learning, and this includes learning that has a greater relevance to labour market needs and research that is linked to sustainable business and community development.

We are also increasingly challenged to become more relevant to societies that support and fund our institutions. There is increased recognition that universities are major drivers of the economic competitiveness and that post-secondary education is an essential contributor to social and economic development.

Royal Roads University began in 1995 in the midst of some tough economic challenges. We entered a very busy post-secondary education sector in B.C. and had to differentiate ourselves. We did this, but not without our critics on both sides of this so-called educational divide. On the one side we had traditional academics who saw us as a publicly-funded, private university with all its pragmatism and vacuous intellectual rigor. On the other side we had critics who said we were diluting a truly applied education with lofty, ivory tower concepts that had no place in the boardrooms of our corporations.

What has emerged is a university that blends not just traditional academics with a more applied, professional approach to education, but also a delivery model that acknowledges the economic requirements of the contemporary working professional. Our students work and earn a degree at the same time. It flies in the face of traditional academics but it also meets a need in the modern economy. Education and work can be blended and delivered at the same time. It makes sense and it doesn’t dilute anything. In fact, it makes our society better because it brings the best aspects of a traditional university education right into the workplace and takes that workplace back into the classroom.

There is no dichotomy in that approach.