TO:

DOUGLAS COLLEGE BOARD

External Matters - Education

 

Gordon Gilgan and I met with Dr. George Ivany and Dr. Bob Browne
of SFU, the Vice-President for Instruction, and the Dean of Arts,
respectively, to talk about co-operative planning of curriculum. in
the area of the entertainment arts. They also have been given some
seed money by the province. They are showing interest in working
with us as we did some years ago when we developed the criminology
curriculum. I expect to see a gradual increase in such working
relationships with SFU, resulting at the program level, through the
Deans.

The Vancouver Foundation has made a substantial Capital grant to
us. There will be further information later on the agenda. This
has resulted because of some excellent teamwork between a number
of our staff and faculty.

I spent a day on Friday at Malaspina College working with colleagues
from Sir Sanford Fleming College in Ontario, Malaspina, and this
Institution, on a project that Gordon Gilgan referred to at the last
Board Meeting, relating to the possibility of opening a joint centre
in Hong Kong - an off-shore school - with capital costs and some
front end capital and operating costs being borne by the Seaker Chan
Foundation.

Internal Matters - Education

 

I have been forced to become the temporary chairman again of the
Council of Principals. This has had some impact on staff. This
will last until the end of the month at which time hopefully I will
once more be past President.

In that role, I attended a special meeting in Victoria last Friday
with the Deputy Minister and a number of others. There is going
to be a major government information campaign timed for sometime
this Fall that is intended to acquaint the public with the colleges,
institutes, and universities of this province. It is calculated
essentially to be an information campaign, to show that the government
has an awareness of the value of the system and is supportive of
its role in British Columbia. We were asked to go over it for
technical accuracy, which we did. I want to mention this to the
Board as I do believe it will be a fairly significant, large scale
campaign, which will have some impact at the student services and
student recruitment level.

There was an assembly of the College on the 10th of September. A
number of documents were referred to including the long-awaited
Governance document.

Planning for the Board Workshop has been a major feature this past
week for the senior administration and I am pleased to say has been
substantially completed with the help of your Chairman.

The Self-Study is substantially complete and Dr. DellaMattia will
be reporting on that in due course. There will be a lot more work
when the College deals with the implications of these documents this
Fall.

‘September 18, 1986.