President Steenkamp: The way forward

Royal Roads University is an amazing place and there's a lot that excites me about taking on this role as president now. But more than anything else, it's the role that we can play together in addressing the biggest issues of our time.

Right now we see an unprecedented convergence of big, tough challenges. The existential threat of the climate crisis. The disruptive transformation of our economy and our workplaces. The rise of narrow nationalisms and attacks on civil society, and the values of equity, inclusion and diversity. And all of this while Canada has taken some long-overdue steps towards reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

Issues like these don’t lend themselves to easy solutions. They demand transformative leaders who can think and act across disciplines: the kind of leaders who come out of Royal Roads. We're a small university, but we are small in numbers only. The kind of leaders who come out of Royal Roads make a big impact throughout Canada and all around the world.

Our faculty and grad students are at the very forefront of research in these areas. We're in a unique position to identify key interventions – those critical real-world actions that unlock much bigger change. The coming years are going to be very exciting ones, both in what we teach and in how we teach it. We're going to find innovative ways to deliver education so that learning really is lifelong.

We'll be making reconciliation a way of life as an organization, and what that means is close constant collaboration with our Indigenous partners. We'll take the insights and the innovations developed right here and bring them to the national and the international stages.

My goal as president is to see Royal Roads University not only creating the leaders of the future but also playing a key role in shaping the future itself.