President's Forum (Waterloo at 100) - April 11

PRESIDENT'S FORUM - WATERLOO AT 100 (APRIL 11, 2023)

Sandra Banks

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us here for this version of the President's Forum. My name is Sandra Banks, and I'm very honoured to serve here at the university as vice president, university relations.

And I'm joined here in the Humanities Theatre by President and Vice Chancellor Vivek Goel, as well as our live audience.

But regardless, whether you are in here and in here, here in person or joining us via teams this afternoon, welcome. It’s a pleasure that you are able to join us afternoon.

Before we begin our formal program, it is important to reflect and acknowledge the University of Waterloo’s campuses in Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge are situated on the Haldimand Tract, land 6 miles on each side of the Grand River granted to the Haudenosaunee of Six Nations. The land inside and surrounding the Haldimand Tract, including our Stratford campus, is the traditional territory of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee.  I also acknowledge and recognize this area is now home to many diverse First Nation, Inuit and Métis Peoples.

Vivek, It's great to be back on stage with you this afternoon at the President’s Forum.

Vivek Goel

It's great to be here with you and to be with in person audience.

Sandra Banks

Absolutely. And when we think about our territorial acknowledgment, it reminds us all of the university's many actions and active work towards reconciliation.

And just a few weeks ago, perhaps some of you were there, we welcomed an eagle staff to our campuses that was presented by local elders and knowledge keepers.

Vivek, can you speak to the importance of this eagle step of the ceremony and how we might see that eagle staff in the future?

Vivek Goel

Certainly. And it was a pleasure to take part in that ceremony. We had a sunrise celebration as well as the formal event where we were presented with the eagle staff. It is an important element of Indigenous relationships with the land and our surroundings as well as it reflects

the wisdom, strength and honor of those who bear it. The eagle staff is going to become a part of our traditions, including events such as convocation, it will remind us of our commitment to truth and reconciliation.

Sandra Banks

Thank you. I certainly look forward, as many of you may, to seeing it incorporated at the convocation ceremonies in June. So, as you know, this president's forum is being held as part of a special session as part of the Waterloo Staff Conference.

And for those just tuning in now or joining us for this forum, including both staff and faculty attendees, welcome. It's great to have you here for this portion.

For those of you who are able to join the sessions from this morning, I hope you feel energized and motivated from the different discussions and activities that were ongoing.

Vivek, I understand this is your first attendance, maybe speaking at a Waterloo Staff Conference.

Vivek Goel

Certainly it is. And it's great to be here again with so many staff and thanks to OHD for all the work they do to support our staff.

Sandra Banks

That's wonderful. Of course, the conference is all about building personal and professional development opportunities and involves a lot of reflection and goal setting, which makes it a perfect opportune time to discuss the Waterloo at 100 Vision.

And as many in the audience may know, or maybe well aware, Waterloo at 100 is a visioning exercise that had us looking ahead to where we want the university to be at our 100th anniversary in 2057.

And after more than a year of consultations with the university community, we've officially released the Vision paper, which is now available here in the room. I think many of you have a copy, but it's also available for everyone online.

There are also, as I said, paper copies available if you don't have one outside the room today.

Today, we'll hear more from you, Vivek, about the content of this document. But we also want to hear from you and the audience again, whether you're online or in the room. After a brief discussion, we will turn it over and take questions from audience members, regardless of where you are.

So why don't we start at the beginning? Why did we as a university embark on this visioning exercise? And what are we hoping to achieve with Waterloo at 100?

Vivek Goel

Certainly so. So obviously, the world is in a state of flux right now. We've come out of a global pandemic. We have armed conflicts in many parts of the world. We have the existential threat of climate change. So it's a period of time where we really need to think about where we're going as a society, what we're doing with our planet.

We're also at a stage where our sector, the post-secondary education sector, is changing very rapidly. Use of new technologies proved a lifelong learning. People want to access education in different ways.

We're also in an environment where we have declining public support but increasing public expectations for what we deliver. So it's certainly felt to me that it was a good time for us to take stock as an institution. We're still, as universities go, a relatively young institution when we started. We're just coming up to 65 and we were doing five year strategic plans.

There were laying out very ambitious goals, but it almost felt like by the time a plan got done, work was starting on the next plan, and we weren't really clear on where or as clear as we could be on where our longer term vision was. The other thing we have to recognize is five years is just an arbitrary number. Some people say it actually comes from Soviet era strategic planning, when that was to let the time it took to put up an industrial plant.

The five year plans for how which plants you were going to build. And then you did your next five year plan. In academic terms, it takes much longer if we're going to develop new academic programs, if we're going to move into different areas of scholarship.

You have to plan out where you want to go. You've got to recruit faculty, you got to create the programs. So five year fixed windows doesn't always make a lot of sense for the academic world.

So we chose the 35 years looking at the 100 because it had a nice ring to it. But it's really about thinking longer than just in these sort of discrete five year sections. Well, I can I can assure everyone it didn't take us five years to develop the vision document, but it did develop over the period of one year.

Sandra Banks

Can you talk me back a little bit about the process that helped us get to this point?

Vivek Goel

Sure. So we started at the beginning of 2022. So just over a year and a quarter and we had a series of consultation sessions across our campuses. We met with students, with faculty, with members of the community, both within the university as well as externally, to just get people's thoughts about where we were as an institution we were headed. We also had the opportunity to examine much of the work that had been done already, so the previous strategic planning process was quite robust.

There were a series of white papers that had been written and consultations based on that. The plan was developed and there were task forces that followed and reported out.

So there's quite a bit of documentation from those exercises. We also, over the last few years have had some very significant  consultations and commissions or committees.

We had the Committee on Student Mental Health Wellbeing with the President’s Anti-Racism Task Force. So in that early period we were listening to community, but we were also examining all of this work that had already been done and recommendations have been made from those and many other groups and, and based on that.

Last summer we developed a discussion paper which we released at the start of the fall term, and we had another round of consultations and discussion sessions again, very broadly across the community.

We had a board retreat that was dedicated to looking at the vision.

And then in January released the first draft, so to speak, of the document we now have.

And then we did a final round of consultations with that. And over the last couple of months, we've taken it through committees of the Senate and then the Senate and the board approval last week. So throughout that process, direct engagement with well over 3000 individuals and over 100 different consultation sessions, lots of input online through email and other means as well.

So I really want to thank the community for the level of engagement that they've had with the process for the excellent input that they provided. Way more input that can appear in a document at this length.

We've got all that recorded because a lot of those are the great ideas that we want to now move forward with supporting implementation of.

So a very comprehensive and collegial approach to get to this point. I was always struck by your interest early on in the process about the importance of understanding our history, to understand how to build a vision for the future.

Sandra Banks

Can you talk a little bit about why that was so important?

Vivek Goel

Yeah. So first of all, the University of Waterloo is really rooted in the way in which was founded. It was founded by local community leaders who saw the world changing rapidly late 1950s in many respects, similar to the kind of period we're in the height of the Cold War computer has just been discovered.

Sputnik had been launched and we were worried we were losing the space race and local community was changing very rapidly and type of industries that were here and they saw a need for a different type of educational experience, a different type of graduate, particularly in areas such as engineering.

And that founding history led to some of the core strengths we now have, like co-op and experiential education.

And out of that evolved our connections with workplaces, with industry, our connections with entrepreneurship, our philosophy around intellectual property that has created the entrepreneurial ecosystem we have now in our community.

And so that shapes what is really our unique identity, which we identify in the paper that we are a global research intensive university renowned for entrepreneurship and innovation, providing co-op and work integrated learning at scale with impact.

And simply put, there's no other institution in the world that does that. Research intensive entrepreneurship and co-op education.

And so that's why we go back to our history to define what we are really known for.

Sandra Banks

That's excellent. Thank you for all that context and background.

And it's so important to understand our unique identity, which certainly I think will resonate with everyone in this room. So that's a great start. Can we now spend a little bit of time just walking through some of the other highlights in the document and perhaps what you're hoping for members of our community that the university community can take away from this?

Vivek Goel

Yeah. So what's important is in our discussions with the community, we heard quite clearly that we want to stay focused  on the differentiation that I just mentioned.

You know, we often talk about should we be more like other institutions and when we look at things like the global rankings of universities, we get asked by within our own community, by alumni by members of our board, well, why aren't we moving up in those global rankings?

We can work towards that. But that would also mean that we would work away from the things that have made us unique and different because the global rankings really drive towards homogeneity.

They drive institutions to all look alike. And so what became very clear in our consultations as we sort of said which direction should be going in our community, really resonates with we have found it to be different and we want to continue to work towards being different.

So that's the first principle that really emerges is that we continue to go back to those founding principles and what makes us strong, differentiated from other institutions.

Second principle that emerged is acting globally and locally. And, you know, again, it's sometimes I heard people feel like that there's a tension between those two ambitions.

Are we trying to be well known on the global stage? And maybe that takes us away from the local community and in the local community. Sometimes people feel that the university has not been as engaged as it could be. It's seen as a place inside of Ring Road with these big brick buildings back to the road that's removed from the community.

And in reality, we have to be engaged with our community. We have to be making a difference

in our community and we have to show  that the innovations that we can help produce can help our community be better. We can't be significant.

The global stage, if we're not making a difference locally, we can't go up with solutions to global challenges like climate change if we're not addressing them locally.

And the final thing, and perhaps most significant for the discussions here at the staff conference are a lot of the discussions about how we need to work together in a more collaborative way with stronger coordination across units across ASUs, between ASUs and faculties, between disciplines and departments.

Sandra Banks

And so a lot of the work that you'll see coming out of this is really about how we work on our culture of collaboration. I'm sure we may come back to that in some of the questions that we get from the audience.

I hope perhaps before we turn it over to those questions, can I just let me just follow up on an area of discussion that was quite prominent in the early days of developing the vision document, and that was the five futures and how we can address the five futures in a very unconventional, like a Waterloo way.

Do you want to just spend a minute on that?

Vivek Goel

Yeah.

So the you know, the five futures that we talked about, societal health, sustainable, technological and economic futures, again, emerged from a lot of the conversation options that were already under way out of the previous strategic plan as areas in which Waterloo has strengths and the potential for significant impact.

And certainly there are themes within there that resonate right across the institution, engage many different academic units, many different programs. But what also became clear,

the more conversations that we had is as we want to work towards building a culture of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, the five futures have the risk of becoming silos themselves and and where the really exciting opportunity is that the intersections, the intersections of the futures, the intersections of disciplines.

And so if we take as examples, the new Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics, it cuts across all of the futures. It engages people from all of our faculties and looking for the areas in which we could have the greatest impact.

As we look ahead to the future of humanity, where we can work at those intersections. We haven't tried to predict that coming out of the Waterloo at 100 exercise exactly what those areas are going to be.

Our role as an institution is to create the conditions so that the next Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics something that gets driven at the grassroots level that is going to be bold, innovative, help address some really big challenges out there can be successful.

Exactly. Thank you.

Sandra Banks

So I think we're ready. Unless someone waves a flashlight at the back of the room.

To me, I think we're ready to start taking some of the questions from the audience. I should say we did gather some in advance during the registration, so we can definitely start with those again, whether you're online via teams or in the room, we'd ask you to go to the chat or to visit this link to which will take you to a forum where you can upload your question.

So hopefully that's pretty straightforward. And I do have a question I might be able to kick off that came in during again the registration and it's a good one. It asks about what are the bold ideas that underpin the vision. What can the community expect to see and hear in the years ahead.

Vivek Goel

So first of all, the bold ideas are going to come from the community, right?

And as I said, we've received many ideas and we've certainly got those collected.

One of the first things we want to work on amongst the next step actions we've laid out is creating a place for those bold ideas. So as a great institution, that's really great at doing innovation and entrepreneurship. We've created programs that support our students like Velocity and innovation and entrepreneurship.

We've got work underway on a teaching innovation incubator, but something we don't have is a place for incubating bold ideas that might come from staff. Bold ideas about how we can do things differently. So what we will be doing is again, creating some of those conditions.

And I think your next session will help get you going on thinking about how we can move forward with some of those types of developments. A place where we can not only bring the bold ideas forward, but help develop them further and then work on how we can support their implementation.

But we have laid out a few things in terms of our differentiators about where we can directions we might head in to make a difference. So if we take co-op education, we are clearly the global leader. As I said in co-op education at the undergraduate level, we've identified in the current strategic plan developing graduate work-integrated learning by 2057 can be also be the global leader in graduate work-integrated learning, just like we're the global leader in undergraduate.

So that's an example of the type of way in which we can evolve our differentiators. Staying true to our roots, but stake out a new area for us to be a global leader in.

Sandra Banks

Very good. Thank you.

I do have another question that came in in advance, and it is about that word that we use a lot unconventionality a theme throughout the paper is redefining or rediscovering our own conventionality and resisting the urge to follow the crowd.

What are the some of the ways we we can do this that will allow us not only build to build on our differentiators that make us unique, but but perhaps even discover new ones or new variations?

Vivek Goel

Yeah. So I think that's a really important point. And I'm still new enough at Waterloo that I can say this, that, you know, I'll sometimes ask, why did we do this some this way and not that way?

And they said, Well, that's not the Waterloo way. And so even though for relatively young institution, we have started to get attached to certain ways of doing things, and maybe I'd like to read the quote that I like to say a lot. It’s right up here in the front.

But, you know, our founding president, Gerald Hagey, said in a speech a few years after the University was established, I cannot perceive a time when the universities will not be challenged by new requirements from society. Equally, I cannot foresee a time when the University of Waterloo will be so hidebound by tradition that it cannot adjust itself to providing education to meet these needs.

And, you know, that's my response to it's not the Waterloo way we should not ever get caught up in.

That's the way. Because then that will take us down that path of conventionality. We'll start there. So that's the way we've always done things. We'll continue to do it. That's the way everyone else does it.

So hopefully we will reinvent unconventionality. I can't again, predict exactly what that bold new innovation is going to look like. But in our first 65 years, we did many things that no other institution did.

But most of those things we actually probably did in our first 20 years. And so can we get back to those early days when we were coming up with bold new ways of doing things every few years. So it's not just what we do, it's how we do it.

Sandra Banks

Well, based on the reaction of the room when I couldn't see the reaction of the online audience, but I think there's a lot of support for that approach, given the smiles and chuckles and the nodding of heads. So I think you might be on to something there.

Here's a question that came in online. What will we do to improve the student experience and better support our students to help achieve the impacts outlined in the vision?

Vivek Goel

That's a great question. And, you know, I think it's an area where we have quite a bit of work to be done. As I mentioned over the last few years, we did have the Committee on Student Mental Health, which even though focused on mental health, we know that the student’s mental health is really driven by their overall experience and their overall engagement that they have at the institution.

We've also have the work that's been led by Marlee Spafford as the provost advisor. There's work on health and wellbeing, the Wellness Collaborative. So we do have a lot of activities underway on addressing student experience.

But I'll go back to the point about taking more collective action, about collaboration, about improving communications, because even when I talk about some of these things, there's not awareness of everything that's being done.

And so if we're not working in a collective manner for students, they're going to continue to have experiences that feel fragmented, that they don't feel that they are as connected with the institution as a whole as they could be.

And so, again, we could have an entire President’s Forum at some point, perhaps, that explores the work that we're doing around student experience. But I would go back to there's a collective aspect to this. Every interaction that a student has with a member of staff, with a faculty member is a part of their experience. It's not just something that happens over at the Centre or at a physical activity centre or a certain places.

Sandra Banks

It's all of the institution, and that's the work that we need to do. It's a great message. It's all of us, not just some of us.

Here's a question that builds in or adds in the alumni experience building on the student experience. What are your views on alumni engagement and giving specific for giving that ask grads of the last decade to support us financially?

Vivek Goel

So those two are obviously very interconnected because if students aren't having a great experience, they're not going to remember us as alumni.

So becoming an alumni really starts the day that someone makes their application to the University of Waterloo. The experience when they're admitted, their experience when they arrive for orientation, their experience throughout their time here is shaping what their engagement will be as an alumni with the institution. And so I think if we focus on the student experience, it will help build towards that alumni engagement that we all aspire to.

We do have work clearly to be done in this area. Again, as a relatively young institution. We didn't have a lot of alumni until a few years ago. You know, I was looking at some of the numbers.

In the early years, we were only graduating a thousand, less than a thousand students a year. And so it's only in the last 30 or 40 years that we've started to graduate large numbers of students.

So even though we're up to half a million plus alumni globally, most of them are still relatively young. And so the second part was about the financial giving.

I think we will start to see that as our alumni start to mature and get to the stages of their lives that they're able to share and give back. But we need to work on that engagement and again, work on that engagement at an institutional as well as the faculty and program level.

Sandra Banks

Thank you.

Now, just we all know for those of us in the room that this is part of the Staff Conference. So a good question that has just come in is can you speak to the particular role of all our employees in achieving the Waterloo at 100 Vision?

Vivek Goel

Yeah. So, you know, without staff, without our employees, we obviously can't achieve anything.

And so first thing is going to be creating the opportunities for our employees to be involved in the initiatives that are coming forward. And the first thing that we're really going to engage in is around the revisiting of our values.

We've identified that as the first next step. One of the things in the last few months of the consultation, so I started to ask questions is how many people know current values? Maybe get a show of hands here, a few hats.

So, you know, and, you know, there's a set of values articulated in the previous strategic plan. Some people will remember one or two, but they're generally not that well. Adopted or known within the institution. We also have values that different teams have adopted, which is great, but there's not a relationship between those and the institutional values. And finally, another important reason for doing this is the President’s Anti-Racism Task Force did identify that the current set of values didn't reflect inclusion.

So and Melanie here from OHD, along with Michael Dorr from your team Sandra, are working on developing a plan for how we revisit our values and engage with our entire community, because if they're not values that are built with the community, then we will continue to have this. Only a few people will remember what they are. But it's also important because if we want to think about that culture that we want to work towards coordination, collaboration, we start with what are the values that we aspire to?

Sandra Banks

So you'll be seeing quite a bit more about that in the coming weeks and months, and there will be an opportunity for all of our employees that engage in that.

To stay tuned on that.

There will be some prep work, I think, over the next several weeks and then starting September

and October specifically,  you should be hearing more and have an opportunity to engage on the discussion around values.

Well, since we're on kind of the immediate next steps and what do we do now, here's a question that just came in online.

How do you see academic and administrative units applying Waterloo at 100 in their own strategic and operational planning processes?

Vivek Goel

Yeah. So this is actually another one of our next step items is evolving how we do planning and performance. So maybe I'll just say a couple of words about that as we address this.

As I mentioned at the start, we've been doing these five year plans, do a five year plan, might start a little bit of work around implementation and leadership.

But years three or four, you start thinking about the next five year plan. But then there's also lots of other plans that are done. We have an institute strategic research plan. We have plans for new capital projects, we have enrollment management plans, we have faculty complement plans.

They're all done in different places and different parts of the institution. What we'd like to work towards is what we're calling integrated planning, where we bring all these disparate planning processes together across as ASUs and faculties. And rather than doing discrete five year plans, we move towards rolling five year plan. So you're always doing a plan for the next year, a few years beyond, and every year you're fine tuning and updating and you just do that within the context of the longer term vision. And the longer term vision is not meant to be static.

We can't predict what the world is going to be like in the next couple of years, let alone 35 years out. What we've laid out is almost like a set of guardrails for how we're going to work towards that and the processes we're going to develop. So we know that that vision will constantly be adjusting as well. So every year we'd look at our plans in a much more integrated way and look at extending out by year and adjusting where we're going.

And so we can work towards that long term vision. We agree that we're working towards graduate work-integrated learning. We have a number of ASUs that need to work that into their five year or operational plans. The faculties need to consider how it's going to work in each academic unit.

Each graduate program will have to consider whether it works for them and how it'll work for them.

Sandra Banks

So I guess each of us can look forward to hearing more from leaders as the integration of plan starts working through the organization. Here's an important question that we have. How is the university ensuring equal opportunities for under-represented groups within the university's leadership and employees?

Vivek Goel

Yeah, so this is something that we've obviously been spending quite a bit of effort on in the last year and a half. We created two new roles that the Associate Vice President, Indigenous Relations, Jean Becker and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism. I don't think Christopher is here, but so we have two senior roles that are really leading the institution's drive. We have, you know, again, look at it across all of the levels.

It's also about students as well as employees. So recruitment of students, recruitment of employees at all levels of the institution, ensuring that they're supported, feel welcome once they arrive, and that they have opportunities for growth in their careers. And so, again, it's another topic that perhaps you could devote a future President’s Forum to hearing about all the great initiatives that are being developed.

Sandra Banks

Excellent. Thank you.

We did get a question that was specifically about one of the five futures, and that's the Sustainable Futures and the individuals wondering what actions the university is taking now on our campuses as it relates to sustainability and sustainable futures.

Vivek Goel

Yeah, and this is something that, you know, if we're going to be positioning ourselves as a leader coming up with innovations mentioned Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics and people come and visit our campus and see our big chimney, they're going to say, Well, how serious are you yourselves? Right? And so it is something that we need to address on our own campus. We do have our plans in place for 2025 and 2035 and right now we're aiming for carbon neutrality for 2050.

It's certainly something that I personally think we can try to move up, but we we know we have a lot of work to be done. And again, it comes back to you'll hear this theme over and over again, a collective collaborative action. It's not something that individual units will do on their own.

It does require us to start to think about different ways of working across the institution if we continue. But if we think about how we do our planning, we do planning for buildings, capital, we do one building at a time, and usually we think about one academic building at a time.

We're now moving to try to do a refreshed master plan for our entire campus. And within doing that master plan, we will look at how do we ensure that we develop a campus that is sustainable, that we support active transportation, we look at how we're engaged with the environment around us.

Sandra Banks

So there's so much that we could talk about this, but I'll come back to this is going to require us to work collectively across multiple units if we're going to achieve the ambitions that we have.

All right. Well, we do seem to be seeing a bit of a theme emerging from some of the questions. So we're going to try and put a few of them together. You might recognize the question.

Lots of people online are asking about the kinds of structural changes that might be needed to make Waterloo at 100 a reality. Can you speak to the changes we might forecast for organizational change?

Vivek Goel

Yeah. So this is going to be the heart of the work that we do, but I don't want to say it's necessarily about structural change because you can change structures, but you just have a new set of silos, right?

You can move things around and create new structures, but you have a new set of silos. So what this is really about is how do we work across units, right? How do we facilitate collaboration across units? That requires communication. So requires leadership. And so that's why we start with the values

exercise. We start with the values because we need to agree on what we want to work towards and how we're going to work towards that. And I go back to the Waterloo way. And as some people have said, the university was founded on much more of a individualistic and, you know, it was in the early days, the institution of small, it was growing rapidly. Individuals could get things done and everyone knew each other.

So when you did need help, you knew who to go to. When you grow to an institution this size, that individual sort of driven model doesn't work anymore, comes apart. So it's not about structural changes and it's not necessarily about blowing up the silos. It's maybe making some holes in the silos or connections between the silos. And that's again, sessions such as this, the kinds of conversations you're having are so important.

It's about how we work across those silos. And it's not. We're inventing this, right? All sorts of organizations have figured out how to do this, as have many other universities. And so we can look at those models, but then we can figure out how to do it in a way that will be successful for the University of Waterloo.

And one of the specific questions was how do we break down silos? Or in our work across or organizational units to achieve things together?

And maybe that's a discussion that can continue on at the Staff Conference 0because it, it, it take everyone's commitment and involvement over time.

Sandra Banks

Okay. Thank you for that. There's also maybe we'll just change gears ever so slightly and talk about our our interaction with the community. And by that, I'm going to interpret that the question and we can go back to internal community if we wish.

But if we think beyond Ring Road to the community surrounding the university, the paper does highlight the importance of strong community engagement. What can we do or what might we expect the short term?

Vivek Goel

Yeah, so again, just highlight the importance of this. As I said, if we aren't seen as engaged and relevant to our local community, we won't have the support of the community.

And so it's really a symbiotic relationship and our community has done incredibly well in recent years. We're the fastest growing community in the country. And Waterloo region population last census was 600,000. It's forecast to grow to a million by 2050. A lot of that is driven by immigration. And so you can start to think about the challenges the community already facing

and will face in the coming years, whether it's with housing, with education, with health care, with transportation.

We know that we can't continue to do any of those things in the way that has traditionally been done, just not enough resources. There's not enough land to build all the houses that would be necessary. So we need innovation.

It's a great opportunity for us with all the great ideas, the students, the faculty that we have to engage with community partners around some of those big challenges and helping come up with innovative solutions.

Also go back to the question about the role of all of our employees.

Every one of our employees is a member of a community, so every one of our students, right? So we are constantly engaging with the community ourselves and how we work collaboratively. Again, with all of our employees in their engagements and the members of our community that engage with us to facilitate those bi directional partnerships, something that we can work on together.

And certainly during the consultations over the last year, there was lots of discussion with community members beyond the campus and well, and we heard that while they might have traditionally, especially in the early decades and you know, in the last six years relied on talent co-op and graduates from the university, they're also looking for knowledge and research, not to mobilize the knowledge and to take advantage of the research and applying it to community problems.

So the opportunities are quite, quite large. And there's a role for many of us in that.

Sandra Banks

We're doing great on time.

This may not be the last question, but I might suggest it might be the second last question, but it's about what's next for the global futures. What does the process look like for updating the elements of the five futures as society changes and involves it evolves in potentially unprecedented ways. Unpredictable, unpredictable ways.

Vivek Goel

So again, one of our immediate next step actions is around the global futures and mapping current activities. So the global futures are not they're out of isolation. They were already activities in the way we launched last fall.

The Sustainable Futures Cluster, which brought together a number of our institutes around climate, water and energy. And we also have the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics.

We have our initiative from the existing Strategic Plan and Health, Technology and Society, which has helped shaping the direction towards Health Futures.

So we'll continue to work on some of those initiatives. We're also looking at mapping other activities. We have interdisciplinary post-doctoral programs. The Provost has support for interdisciplinary programs. We have the centres and institutes, and we're examining how they're working together.

So we're going to work on mapping of what our existing activities are to identify what might be the key directions. As I said earlier, it's not for us, for me or the Provost to decide what those big directions are going to be.

Those have to emerge from the community. We're going to help create the conditions for the conversations across faculties, across academic units, around those.

And in terms of updating, I would hope that the five broad headings are going to say relatively constant, at least over the next 25 or 35 years, but that within the areas we will be constantly adapting. And I would say even from when we first articulated the five futures about 18 months ago, we’ve evolved them, based on how the world has been changing and how our community has fed into them.

So I would expect we will be constantly updating and and our webpage will be more of a living document as we move forward.

Sandra Banks

Excellent. Great to know.

Here's a question that we'll try and turn into a positive in the answer. How can we be unconventional when grants, funding and student decisions on schools is based on conventional thinking and conventional or traditional expectations of performance?

Vivek Goel

Yeah, so this is a wonderful question and is that is a big challenge, particularly in our public policy environment right now, where despite the fact that we have the strategic mandate agreements which were meant to allow for differentiation across institutions where we set out our own objectives, the bulk of our funding still is driven in a very sort of uniform manner across all institutions.

I think there is an opportunity. There's a new blue ribbon panel that's just been struck by the government on the financial sustainability of post-secondary institutions and our current board chair, outgoing board chair, Cindy Forbes is a member of that panel.

So we may have an opportunity as we work on our submission to that panel, to think about how they might identify ways of supporting more unconventional ways of doing things. But I think the challenge for us is to think about unconventional ways of doing things and unconventional ways of finding revenues, co-op education.

We do it in a different way. We have a co-op fee. We support what we do through that and so we don't rely on the government grants or the differentiation we've achieved in co-op education.

And so I think we need to again, think in different ways about how we approach some of these challenges.

Sandra Banks

Excellent. Well, thank you for that question.

That's a great one to wrap up the formal Q&A session.

Thanks to everyone that submitted a question, but most importantly, thanks for joining the discussion today and participating in this as a as an audience member.

This does conclude the program for this session of the Staff Conference, we will produce a video recording and answers to the questions that we didn't get to will be published online.

For those that are here in person, we hope that you'll stay and join us for some refreshments in the foyer, but maybe we can just give Vivek the last word.

First of all, what I would say, wrapping up congratulations, that's a significant accomplishment to produce such an important document and vision for the university.

Do you have any final words to share with us?

Vivek Goel

Well, first of all, I'd just like to thank everyone that supported us in developing this large team and everyone again for the wonderful input that we had in all of the sessions online really helped shape the paper.

And thank everyone for participating today.

And I also want to thank you, Sandra, for hosting the session, and this might be your last President’s Forum.

So thank you very much for all of your contributions to the University of Waterloo.

Sandra Banks

Pleasure. Thank you.

The world is in a state of flux right now. We've come out of a global pandemic. We have armed conflicts in many parts of the world. We have the existential threat of climate change. So it's a period of time where we really need to think about where we're going as a society, what we're doing with our planet.

We're also at a stage where our sector, the post-secondary education sector, is changing very rapidly. Use of new technologies proved a lifelong learning. People want to access education in different ways.

We're also in an environment where we have declining public support but increasing public expectations for what we deliver. So it's certainly felt to me that it was a good time for us to take stock as an institution. We're still, as universities go, a relatively young institution when we started. We're just coming up to 65 and we were doing five year strategic plans.

There were laying out very ambitious goals, but it almost felt like by the time a plan got done, work was starting on the next plan, and we weren't really clear on where or as clear as we could be on where our longer term vision was. The other thing we have to recognize is five years is just an arbitrary number. Some people say it actually comes from Soviet era strategic planning, when that was to let the time it took to put up an industrial plant.

The five year plans for how which plants you were going to build. And then you did your next five year plan. In academic terms, it takes much longer if we're going to develop new academic programs, if we're going to move into different areas of scholarship.

You have to plan out where you want to go. You've got to recruit faculty, you got to create the programs. So five year fixed windows doesn't always make a lot of sense for the academic world.

So we chose the 35 years looking at the 100 because it had a nice ring to it. But it's really about thinking longer than just in these sort of discrete five year sections. Well, I can assure everyone it didn't take us five years to develop the vision document, but it did develop over the period of one year. Can you talk me back a little bit about the process that helped us get to this point? Sure.

So we started at the beginning of 2022. So just over a year and a quarter and we had a series of consultation sessions across our campuses. We met with students, with faculty, with members of the community, both within the university as well as externally, to just get people's thoughts about where we were as an institution we were headed. We also had the opportunity to examine much of the work that had been done already, so the previous strategic planning process was quite robust.

There were a series of white papers that had been written and consultations based on that. The plan was developed and there were task forces that followed and reported out.

So there's quite a bit of documentation from those exercises. We also, over the last few years have had some very significant  consultations and commissions or committees.

We had the Committee on Student Mental Health Wellbeing with the President’s Anti-Racism Task Force. So in that early period we were listening to community, but we were also examining all of this work that had already been done and recommendations have been made from those and many other groups and, and based on that.

Last summer we developed a discussion paper which we released at the start of the fall term, and we had another round of consultations and discussion sessions again, very broadly across the community.

We had a board retreat that was dedicated to looking at the vision.

And then in January released the first draft, so to speak, of the document we now have.

And then we did a final round of consultations with that. And over the last couple of months, we've taken it through committees of the Senate and then the Senate and the board approval last week. So throughout that process, direct engagement with well over 3000 individuals and over 100 different consultation sessions, lots of input online through email and other means as well.

So I really want to thank the community for the level of engagement that they've had with the process for the excellent input that they provided. Way more input that can appear in a document at this length.

We've got all that recorded because a lot of those are the great ideas that we want to now move forward with supporting implementation of.

So a very comprehensive and collegial approach to get to this point. I was always struck by your interest early on in the process about the importance of understanding our history, to understand how to build a vision for the future.

the University of Waterloo is really rooted in the way in which was founded. It was founded by local community leaders who saw the world changing rapidly late 1950s in many respects, similar to the kind of period we're in the height of the Cold War computer has just been discovered.

Sputnik had been launched and we were worried we were losing the space race and local community was changing very rapidly and type of industries that were here and they saw a need for a different type of educational experience, a different type of graduate, particularly in areas such as engineering.

And that founding history led to some of the core strengths we now have, like co-op and experiential education.

And out of that evolved our connections with workplaces, with industry, our connections with entrepreneurship, our philosophy around intellectual property that has created the entrepreneurial ecosystem we have now in our community.

And so that shapes what is really our unique identity, which we identify in the paper that we are a global research intensive university renowned for entrepreneurship and innovation, providing co-op and work integrated learning at scale with impact.

And simply put, there's no other institution in the world that does that. Research intensive entrepreneurship and co-op education.

And so that's why we go back to our history to define what we are really known for.

What's important is in our discussions with the community, we heard quite clearly that we want to stay focused  on the differentiation that I just mentioned.

You know, we often talk about should we be more like other institutions and when we look at things like the global rankings of universities, we get asked by within our own community, by alumni by members of our board, well, why aren't we moving up in those global rankings?

We can work towards that. But that would also mean that we would work away from the things that have made us unique and different because the global rankings really drive towards homogeneity.

They drive institutions to all look alike. And so what became very clear in our consultations as we sort of said which direction should be going in our community, really resonates with we have found it to be different and we want to continue to work towards being different.

So that's the first principle that really emerges is that we continue to go back to those founding principles and what makes us strong, differentiated from other institutions.

Second principle that emerged is acting globally and locally. And, you know, again, it's sometimes I heard people feel like that there's a tension between those two ambitions.

Are we trying to be well known on the global stage? And maybe that takes us away from the local community and in the local community. Sometimes people feel that the university has not been as engaged as it could be. It's seen as a place inside of Ring Road with these big brick buildings back to the road that's removed from the community.

And in reality, we have to be engaged with our community. We have to be making a difference

in our community and we have to show  that the innovations that we can help produce can help our community be better. We can't be significant.

The global stage, if we're not making a difference locally, we can't go up with solutions to global challenges like climate change if we're not addressing them locally.

And the final thing, and perhaps most significant for the discussions here at the staff conference are a lot of the discussions about how we need to work together in a more collaborative way with stronger coordination across units across ASUs, between ASUs and faculties, between disciplines and departments.

The five futures that we talked about, societal health, sustainable, technological and economic futures, again, emerged from a lot of the conversation options that were already under way out of the previous strategic plan as areas in which Waterloo has strengths and the potential for significant impact.

And certainly there are themes within there that resonate right across the institution, engage many different academic units, many different programs. But what also became clear,

the more conversations that we had is as we want to work towards building a culture of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, the five futures have the risk of becoming silos themselves and and where the really exciting opportunity is that the intersections, the intersections of the futures, the intersections of disciplines.

And so if we take as examples, the new Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics, it cuts across all of the futures. It engages people from all of our faculties and looking for the areas in which we could have the greatest impact.

As we look ahead to the future of humanity, where we can work at those intersections. We haven't tried to predict that coming out of the Waterloo at 100 exercise exactly what those areas are going to be.

Our role as an institution is to create the conditions so that the next Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics something that gets driven at the grassroots level that is going to be bold, innovative, help address some really big challenges out there can be successful.

So first of all, the bold ideas are going to come from the community.

And as I said, we've received many ideas and we've certainly got those collected.

One of the first things we want to work on amongst the next step actions we've laid out

is creating a place for those bold ideas. So as a great institution, that's really great at doing innovation and entrepreneurship. We've created programs that support our students like Velocity and innovation and entrepreneurship.

We've got work underway on a teaching innovation incubator, but something we don't have is a place for incubating bold ideas that might come from staff. Bold ideas about how we can do things differently. So what we will be doing is again, creating some of those conditions.

And I think your next session will help get you going on thinking about how we can move forward with some of those types of developments. A place where we can not only bring the bold ideas forward, but help develop them further and then work on how we can support their implementation.

But we have laid out a few things in terms of our differentiators about where we can directions we might head in to make a difference. So if we take co-op education, we are clearly the global leader. As I said in co-op education at the undergraduate level, we've identified in the current strategic plan developing graduate work-integrated learning by 2057 can be also be the global leader in graduate work-integrated learning, just like we're the global leader in undergraduate.

So that's an example of the type of way in which we can evolve our differentiators. Staying true to our roots, but stake out a new area for us to be a global leader in.

So I think that's a really important point. And I'm still new enough at Waterloo that I can say this, that, you know, I'll sometimes ask, why did we do this some this way and not that way?

And they said, Well, that's not the Waterloo way. And so even though for relatively young institution, we have started to get attached to certain ways of doing things, and maybe I'd like to read the quote that I like to say a lot. It’s right up here in the front.

But, you know, our founding president, Gerald Hagey, said in a speech a few years after the University was established, I cannot perceive a time when the universities will not be challenged by new requirements from society. Equally, I cannot foresee a time when the University of Waterloo will be so hidebound by tradition that it cannot adjust itself to providing education to meet these needs.

And, you know, that's my response to it's not the Waterloo way we should not ever get caught up in.

That's the way. Because then that will take us down that path of conventionality. We'll start there. So that's the way we've always done things. We'll continue to do it. That's the way everyone else does it.

So hopefully we will reinvent unconventionality. I can't again, predict exactly what that bold new innovation is going to look like. But in our first 65 years, we did many things that no other institution did.

But most of those things we actually probably did in our first 20 years. And so can we get back to those early days when we were coming up with bold new ways of doing things every few years. So it's not just what we do, it's how we do it.

I think it's an area where we have quite a bit of work to be done. As I mentioned over the last few years, we did have the Committee on Student Mental Health, which even though focused on mental health, we know that the student’s mental health is really driven by their overall experience and their overall engagement that they have at the institution.

We've also have the work that's been led by Marlee Spafford as the provost advisor. There's work on health and wellbeing, the Wellness Collaborative. So we do have a lot of activities underway on addressing student experience.

But I'll go back to the point about taking more collective action, about collaboration, about improving communications, because even when I talk about some of these things, there's not awareness of everything that's being done.

And so if we're not working in a collective manner for students, they're going to continue to have experiences that feel fragmented, that they don't feel that they are as connected with the institution as a whole as they could be.

And so, again, we could have an entire President’s Forum at some point, perhaps, that explores the work that we're doing around student experience. But I would go back to there's a collective aspect to this. Every interaction that a student has with a member of staff, with a faculty member is a part of their experience. It's not just something that happens over at the Centre or at a physical activity centre or a certain places.

Those two are obviously very interconnected because if students aren't having a great experience, they're not going to remember us as alumni.

So becoming an alumni really starts the day that someone makes their application to the University of Waterloo. The experience when they're admitted, their experience when they arrive for orientation, their experience throughout their time here is shaping what their engagement will be as an alumni with the institution. And so I think if we focus on the student experience, it will help build towards that alumni engagement that we all aspire to.

We do have work clearly to be done in this area. Again, as a relatively young institution. We didn't have a lot of alumni until a few years ago. You know, I was looking at some of the numbers.

In the early years, we were only graduating a thousand, less than a thousand students a year. And so it's only in the last 30 or 40 years that we've started to graduate large numbers of students.

So even though we're up to half a million plus alumni globally, most of them are still relatively young. And so the second part was about the financial giving.

I think we will start to see that as our alumni start to mature and get to the stages of their lives that they're able to share and give back. But we need to work on that engagement and again, work on that engagement at an institutional as well as the faculty and program level.

Without staff, without our employees, we obviously can't achieve anything.

And so first thing is going to be creating the opportunities for our employees to be involved in the initiatives that are coming forward. And the first thing that we're really going to engage in is around the revisiting of our values.

We've identified that as the first next step. One of the things in the last few months of the consultation, so I started to ask questions is how many people know current values? Maybe get a show of hands here, a few hats.

So, you know, and, you know, there's a set of values articulated in the previous strategic plan. Some people will remember one or two, but they're generally not that well. Adopted or known within the institution. We also have values that different teams have adopted, which is great, but there's not a relationship between those and the institutional values. And finally, another important reason for doing this is the President’s Anti-Racism Task Force did identify that the current set of values didn't reflect inclusion.

So and Melanie here from OHD, along with Michael Dorr from your team Sandra, are working on developing a plan for how we revisit our values and engage with our entire community, because if they're not values that are built with the community, then we will continue to have this. Only a few people will remember what they are. But it's also important because if we want to think about that culture that we want to work towards coordination, collaboration, we start with what are the values that we aspire to?

This is actually another one of our next step items is evolving how we do planning and performance. So maybe I'll just say a couple of words about that as we address this.

The, as I mentioned at the start, we've been doing these five year plans, do a five year plan, might start a little bit of work around implementation and leadership.

But years three or four, you start thinking about the next five year plan. But then there's also lots of other plans that are done. We have an institute strategic research plan. We have plans for new capital projects, we have enrollment management plans, we have faculty complement plans.

They're all done in different places and different parts of the institution. What we'd like to work towards is what we're calling integrated planning, where we bring all these disparate planning processes together across as ASUs and faculties. And rather than doing discrete five year plans, we move towards rolling five year plan. So you're always doing a plan for the next year, a few years beyond, and every year you're fine tuning and updating and you just do that within the context of the longer term vision. And the longer term vision is not meant to be static.

We can't predict what the world is going to be like in the next couple of years, let alone 35 years out. What we've laid out is almost like a set of guardrails for how we're going to work towards that and the processes we're going to develop. So we know that that vision will constantly be adjusting as well. So every year we'd look at our plans in a much more integrated way and look at extending out by year and adjusting where we're going.

And so we can work towards that long term vision. We agree that we're working towards graduate work-integrated learning. We have a number of ASUs that need to work that into their five year or operational plans. The faculties need to consider how it's going to work in each academic unit.

Each graduate program will have to consider whether it works for them and how it'll work for them.

This is something that we've obviously been spending quite a bit of effort on in the last year and a half. We created two new roles that the Associate Vice President, Indigenous Relations, Jean Becker and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism, Christopher Taylor.

We have two senior roles that are really leading the institution's drive. We have, you know, again, look at it across all of the levels.

It's also about students as well as employees. So recruitment of students, recruitment of employees at all levels of the institution, ensuring that they're supported, feel welcome once they arrive, and that they have opportunities for growth in their careers. And so, again, it's another topic that perhaps you could devote a future President’s Forum to hearing about all the great initiatives that are being developed.

If we're going to be positioning ourselves as a leader coming up with innovations mentioned Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics and people come and visit our campus and see our big chimney, they're going to say, Well, how serious are you yourselves? Right? And so it is something that we need to address on our own campus. We do have our plans in place for 2025 and 2035 and right now we're aiming for carbon neutrality for 2050.

It's certainly something that I personally think we can try to move up, but we we know we have a lot of work to be done. And again, it comes back to you'll hear this theme over and over again, a collective collaborative action. It's not something that individual units will do on their own.

It does require us to start to think about different ways of working across the institution if we continue. But if we think about how we do our planning, we do planning for buildings, capital, we do one building at a time, and usually we think about one academic building at a time.

We're now moving to try to do a refreshed master plan for our entire campus. And within doing that master plan, we will look at how do we ensure that we develop a campus that is sustainable, that we support active transportation, we look at how we're engaged with the environment around us.

This is going to be the heart of the work that we do, but I don't want to say it's necessarily about structural change because you can change structures, but you just have a new set of silos, right?

You can move things around and create new structures, but you have a new set of silos. So what this is really about is how do we work across units, right? How do we facilitate collaboration across units?

That requires communication. So requires leadership. And so that's why we start with the values

exercise. We start with the values because we need to agree on what we want to work towards and how we're going to work towards that. And I go back to the Waterloo way. And as some people have said, the university was founded on much more of a individualistic and, you know, it was in the early days, the institution of small, it was growing rapidly. Individuals could get things done and everyone knew each other.

So when you did need help, you knew who to go to. When you grow to an institution this size, that individual sort of driven model doesn't work anymore, comes apart. So it's not about structural changes and it's not necessarily about blowing up the silos. It's maybe making some holes in the silos or connections between the silos. And that's again, sessions such as this, the kinds of conversations you're having are so important.

It's about how we work across those silos. And it's not. We're inventing this, right? All sorts of organizations have figured out how to do this, as have many other universities. And so we can look at those models, but then we can figure out how to do it in a way that will be successful for the University of Waterloo.

And one of the specific questions was how do we break down silos? Or in our work across or organizational units to achieve things together?

And maybe that's a discussion that can continue on at the Staff Conference 0because it, it, it take everyone's commitment and involvement over time.

As I said, if we aren't seen as engaged and relevant to our local community, we won't have the support of the community.

And so it's really a symbiotic relationship and our community has done incredibly well in recent years. We're the fastest growing community in the country. And Waterloo region population last census was 600,000. It's forecast to grow to a million by 2050. A lot of that is driven by immigration. And so you can start to think about the challenges the community already facing

and will face in the coming years, whether it's with housing, with education, with health care, with transportation.

We know that we can't continue to do any of those things in the way that has traditionally been done, just not enough resources. There's not enough land to build all the houses that would be necessary. So we need innovation.

It's a great opportunity for us with all the great ideas, the students, the faculty that we have to engage with community partners around some of those big challenges and helping come up with innovative solutions.

Also go back to the question about the role of all of our employees.

Every one of our employees is a member of a community, so every one of our students, right? So we are constantly engaging with the community ourselves and how we work collaboratively. Again, with all of our employees in their engagements and the members of our community that engage with us to facilitate those bi directional partnerships, something that we can work on together.

And certainly during the consultations over the last year, there was lots of discussion with community members beyond the campus and well, and we heard that while they might have traditionally, especially in the early decades and you know, in the last six years relied on talent co-op and graduates from the university, they're also looking for knowledge and research, not to mobilize the knowledge and to take advantage of the research and applying it to community problems.

So the opportunities are quite, quite large. And there's a role for many of us in that.

One of our immediate next step actions is around the global futures and mapping current activities. So the global futures are not they're out of isolation. They were already activities in the way we launched last fall.

The Sustainable Futures Cluster, which brought together a number of our institutes around climate, water and energy. And we also have the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics.

We have our initiative from the existing Strategic Plan and Health, Technology and Society, which has helped shaping the direction towards Health Futures.

So we'll continue to work on some of those initiatives. We're also looking at mapping other activities. We have interdisciplinary post-doctoral programs. The Provost has support for interdisciplinary programs. We have the centres and institutes, and we're examining how they're working together.

So we're going to work on mapping of what our existing activities are to identify what might be the key directions. As I said earlier, it's not for us, for me or the Provost to decide what those big directions are going to be.

Those have to emerge from the community. We're going to help create the conditions for the conversations across faculties, across academic units, around those.

And in terms of updating, I would hope that the five broad headings are going to say relatively constant, at least over the next 25 or 35 years, but that within the areas we will be constantly adapting. And I would say even from when we first articulated the five futures about 18 months ago, we’ve evolved them, based on how the world has been changing and how our community has fed into them.

So I would expect we will be constantly updating and and our webpage will be more of a living document as we move forward.

That is a big challenge, particularly in our public policy environment right now, where despite the fact that we have the strategic mandate agreements which were meant to allow for differentiation across institutions where we set out our own objectives, the bulk of our funding still is driven in a very sort of uniform manner across all institutions.

I think there is an opportunity. There's a new blue ribbon panel that's just been struck by the government on the financial sustainability of post-secondary institutions and our current board chair, outgoing board chair, Cindy Forbes is a member of that panel.

So we may have an opportunity as we work on our submission to that panel, to think about how they might identify ways of supporting more unconventional ways of doing things. But I think the challenge for us is to think about unconventional ways of doing things and unconventional ways of finding revenues, co-op education.

We do it in a different way. We have a co-op fee. We support what we do through that and so we don't rely on the government grants or the differentiation we've achieved in co-op education.

And so I think we need to again, think in different ways about how we approach some of these challenges.