From the Principal: The renewed conversation

When I launched the Principal카지노 게임 컬렉션™s Conversation last fall, my hope was that our university would emerge from the 2019카지노 게임 컬렉션“2020 academic year with a clarified understanding of our identity, our aspirations, and values, and the contribution we wish to make to the world. With an English professor카지노 게임 컬렉션™s honest conviction in the power of language and dialogue, I was confident that by this spring all of those issues would have been brought into focus and the way ahead made clear.

That has happened, although not quite in the manner I envisaged. The Conversation did indeed help this new Principal understand better the preoccupations, vulnerabilities, strengths, hopes, and aspirations of our university community; and by providing a forum in which those things could be articulated and debated, it did, I believe, help the institution better understand itself. The advent of the COVID-19 crisis, however, brought a heightened urgency to all these questions and roughly pushed them from the realm of abstract discussion into real-time action and decision making. What are our values, according to what principles should we act, and how do we matter in the world? Suddenly life had called the question in this debate.

However much our choices and actions during the crisis have been expressive of our values, the project of the Conversation 카지노 게임 컬렉션“ the articulation of long-term aspirations and a strategy for the university 카지노 게임 컬렉션“ must still be concluded. But far from being slowed down by the COVID-19 emergency, that process has been accelerated in significant ways. With our local community 카지노 게임 컬렉션“ indeed all of humanity 카지노 게임 컬렉션“ in extremis, the university카지노 게임 컬렉션™s mission of service has been underlined: our responsibility through research and teaching to contribute to the good of humanity has been reaffirmed in an uncompromising way.

While Queen카지노 게임 컬렉션™s medical researchers have worked through their national and international networks to contribute to the search for vaccines and treatments for the disease, faculty, students, and staff from all parts of the university have found ways to contribute to the cause, whether by providing, resourcing, or fabricating personal protective equipment, by advising government on policy matters, or by probing the human, social, and cultural dimensions of the crisis. Enlisting the cooperation of physicists in Canada and around the world, Queen카지노 게임 컬렉션™s Nobel Laureate Dr. Art McDonald has created a simple ventilator to assist in widespread treatment of the disease: could one imagine a more forthright acknowledgement of our responsibility for one another emanating from a more rarefied stratum of the academy?

In that project, and in many other dimensions of our response to COVID-19, our alumni have been willing, active, and generous partners. As in the flu pandemic of 1918카지노 게임 컬렉션“1920, the broader Queen카지노 게임 컬렉션™s community has worked for the good of the community beyond our boundaries; and as in those years we have made our facilities available to shelter and sustain frontline workers.

We have been reminded by the COVID-19 emergency that the university exists to answer a noble calling and to discharge the most profound obligation imaginable: to sustain, protect, and advance the good of humanity and the well-being of the planet. Is that a Conversation-stopper? On the contrary, it gives impetus and a clear direction to every one of our future interactions.

Originally published in the 2020 Issue #2 of the Queen's Alumni Review.