Back to the future

When the transition from OUC back to Okanagan College was announced in 2004, Jim was asked to lead the college’s transition team. “Our job was to work with UBC Okanagan and Okanagan University College, and effect an orderly transition and get the college up and running,” he says.

Jim is particularly proud of the work his team has accomplished. “Mainly we ran on volunteer labour from people who were not only working on start-up of the college, but also continuing to work full time at Okanagan University College,” he says. “Draining though it was on their time and their energies, I don’t think many of them thought twice about it — it was just the right thing to do. And as a consequence of all that hard work, when we first opened the doors on the first of July 2005, and started welcoming our first students into the new Okanagan College, we were ready to go.”

Mission accomplished, Jim’s position evolved into his initial five-year appointment as president. Those five years, he says, have been a bit of a rocket ship trip. “We had a pretty clear idea of where we were going, in terms of the values that we espoused, the vision that we had, and what we perceived to be our mission — which quite simply is transforming lives and communities by educating and training people.”

Rather than merely going back to the way things were before OUC, or simply opening with standard college programs and practices, the college has taken full advantage of the rare opportunity to create something new. Embracing what is loosely termed “the learning college movement,” they researched what’s happening in other like-minded colleges, adopting and adapting with their own vision firmly in mind. “We’re doing things that others aren’t doing, and we’ve learned a lot from others as well,” he says.

Jim says the outstanding Centre for Learning at the Kelowna campus is a good example of what they’re trying to achieve. “We recognized we had a deficit, particularly on this campus, of informal student study and gathering space,” he says. His experience at the school district had made clear to him that people learn at different rates and in different ways. “In this building we tried to accommodate that truth about learning. We’ve put in spaces that are round, spaces that are funny shapes, big spaces, little spaces, formal spaces that look like a conventional classroom, informal spaces … Part of the library looks like a living room. That’s intentional.

“It comes back to us trying to remind ourselves constantly of what our core values are. It is all about learning — our learning, student learning,” he adds. “We don’t differentiate, when we talk about learners, between staff and students, and we have to create the spaces to promote and accommodate that. This building does it beautifully.”

The Centre of Learning will also be one of the first buildings in Kelowna to achieve the LEEDS gold standard — a designation also being sought by the recently announced Centre for Excellence in Penticton, which will research, train and showcase cutting edge advances in the building trades.

“Colleges ought to be at the forefront of change,” he says. “The whole sustainability agenda — we have so much to contribute to that.” Colleges not only teach the ideas, they also teach a lot about how to bring those ideas to life. “We ought to be modelling in our buildings what we’re teaching about. That’s what’s so exciting about both this building and the Penticton building: we’re actually going to have a building that is what we teach and is capable of change.”

Community central

These projects have invited both national and international attention. Add that to the local buzz generated by OC’s many achievements and it’s not surprising people see the facility as more than “just” a community college.

“It still needs to be that little local college, though, in people’s minds, in some ways,” says Jim. While teaching at OC, he came to understand that his students were coming from a different place than those he studied with at Queen’s. There, he says, “you get kids whose families have gone to the university, and there’s an expectation that they’ll go there; you’re looking at the third or fourth generation…by and large a pretty privileged bunch of relatively high achievers.

“It’s a very different profile than I encountered when I first came here — not to say we don’t have students who fit that profile; we do. Our students are much less homogenous. We have such diversity. And for many of our students, it’s an act of courage to walk through the door.” These students may be the first in their family to attend post secondary; they may be coming from a background where school is not equated with success or anything remotely pleasurable; or they may be returning from a long absence from formal education — some without having finished Grade 12.

“We like to say we have multiple levels of entry and exit and re-entry,” he says. “We can accommodate the person who is a star student in high school, coming in with a straight-A average. We can also accommodate that person who can’t read and write. We can accommodate the single parent, and the person who needs to undergo a career change and is a little apprehensive about coming through.”

This is why what happens in the classroom is paramount. “Students value the relationships in smaller classes,” he says. “We have a really outstanding faculty,” he adds, crediting a genuine interest in students with everything from the business students’ consistently high performance at international competitions to the evolution of new programs. At the Kalamalka campus, for example, a passionate English department developed and implemented a creative writing and publishing program.

When it comes to good ideas, Jim says the college is blessed with an embarrassment of riches. “My job is to remove the barriers between the people with the good ideas and the realization of those ideas,” he says. “We’ve done that as much as possible, creating the conditions that allow that good idea to have a chance.” These faculty-driven successes help spread the wealth. OC doesn’t automatically place all its programs centrally. In Salmon Arm, an overhaul of the mobile trades program allows students to learn without relocating to Kelowna.

Enrolling locally is not only more convenient; students attend OC to acquire a high-quality education in a range of diverse fields. Small surprise the enrolment numbers are up. Yet impressive though it is, the huge number of full-time equivalents illustrates only a partial picture of what the college does.

“That captures what you might call our regular academic programs and vocational programs,” says Jim. “But then there’s this whole host of programming that we do outside of that, primarily through continuing studies.”

He recently asked his number crunchers how many individuals were served in a year. The number staggered him: last year, they served over 19,000 through short-term vocational programs — upgrading and continuing studies like viticulture, horticulture, creative writing, photography and interior design.

“Continuing studies is really another doorway into the institution for the community. Or, to look at it the other way around, it’s another way in which we serve some of the needs of our community that would not otherwise be met.” These needs may not be addressed through the usual collage or university programs, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real or important. “If somebody comes to us and says, ‘We really need a program for these 20 people to learn this,’ we can do it,” he says. “Although we don’t call ourselves Okanagan Community College, we never lose sight of that word.”

Term two

While Jim’s first term as president was focused on charting the course for the new OC, he’s been busy with other things as well — sitting on several related provincial committees and spending, he says, too much time “in the air.” Through it all, his wife Liz and his now-grown children have been very supportive.

Jim sees his second five-year term kicking off with a thorough review, including plenty of good conversations about the current vision for the college and what, if anything, should be changed. “We always have to find better ways to serve our communities,” he says. “You know the old cliché: if you’re not moving ahead you really are falling behind.”

So what does he say about staying put? “I’m a builder, not a maintainer,” he concedes, so naturally he thought about stepping out, perhaps taking a less challenging job and spending a little more time involved in other aspects of the community, maybe even going home and relaxing in the evening.

“Then I thought, you know what? We’ve exceeded every expectation for the first five years of operations, including our own … but we’re not where we’d like to be yet,” he says. “I want to be there for the next phase.”

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