All Posts Tagged With: "mount allison"
Mount Mansbridge
CBC News The National anchor named new Mount Allison chancellor
My roommate joked with her friend today about how they wished they were back graduating at Mount Allison University this school year. While I’m sure the small Sackville, N.B. school has its fair share of nostalgic charm, I wasn’t sure what would cause two professionals to want to return to their alma mater.
The answer? Peter Mansbridge.
Graduating students at Mt. A will bow before Mansbridge to receive their diplomas next May, CBC News and Mount Allison reported Nov. 9.
According to a press release from the university, Mansbridge’s appointment was endorsed by the school’s Board of Regents.
Mansbridge’s duties as chancellor, as with at most Canadian universities, is to preside over convocations and act as the public face of the school.
Mt. Allison president Robert Campbell said in the release: “It will be wonderful to have a national figure with his public stature help take the University’s message of excellence to an even wider audience.”
Though Mansbridge is in the homes of Canadians across the country, it is left to be seen how he will fulfill his role of public outreach.
Mansbridge will serve as chancellor until December 2013.
Canadian universities have historically chosen established or famous chancellors. Other selections of celebrity status have included former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson who served at Carleton University from 1969 to 1972 and Robert Borden at Queen’s University from 1924 to 1930.
- photo by gorbould
Mount Allison students ask for higher fees
With nearly 80 per cent of the vote, students say yes to a new “green fee”
According to The Sackville Tribune, Mount Allison students have overwhelmingly voted to raise their own student fees by $10. For the planet, that is.
In a recent student referendum, nearly 80 per cent of students voted in favour of the hike, the proceeds of which will purportedly go towards reducing carbon emissions both on and off-campus. The new fee will probably bring in between $20,000 to $24,000 every year.
The so-called SAC Green Investment Fund will fund carbon offsetting projects in the city, which could include solar and geo-thermal projects, installing higher-quality insulation in some buildings and partnering with local business to develop tree nurseries.
According to the group, priority will be given to projects that reduce the most carbon in the shortest period of time.
Student council president Mike Currie says some of the council’s representatives have already met with a number of municipal officials to discuss potential coordination.
“My conversations with town councillors and other members of the community have been very positive,” he says. “Although this is the first project of its kind that we are aware, the town has stressed that it is possible that we will be able to leverage the fund to work on joint projects of even greater impact.”
The environmental fund will be governed by an all-student committee that will solicit project recommendations from university staff and faculty, town representatives, university administration, and local climate change experts starting this fall.
Getting started as an artist: Newfoundland’s Christopher Pratt
How did Pratt go from engineering student to respected, professional artist?
Christopher Pratt is arguably one of Canada’s greatest living painters. His distant, clinical landscapes are at the same time modern and wholly timeless. I’m certainly no art critic, but when I saw a retrospective show at Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-arts, I was awestruck. Here was a real artist. Someone who belongs very much to a place (Newfoundland), but speaks, through sparse rural depictions, to a certain universality. That doesn’t do him justice though. You have to see his work (and I mean wall upon wall of it) to really understand its force.
But how did someone like that get a start in life? How did he go from being a pre-engineering student to a respected, professional artist?
The answer is simple. He saw that a life in art was entirely possible in his own environment. And this wasn’t easy. He grew up in a place where there were, as he says, no art galleries, no professional artists and no understanding that one could even make a living through painting of all things.
But Pratt persevered. He did a year of engineering, then switched to pre-med, then finally settled on an Arts undergrad… until he dropped out a year and a half later. In fact, his educational record does not show any sign of the committed professionalism he’d later develop as an artist.
One thing that kept him going were his artistic inspirations. Alex Colville, for example, the well-known artist, taught him briefly at Mount Allison in New Brunswick. And the image of Colville – his paintings showing the world over – who could “live in a little house, have a family with three or four kids and walk to church every Sunday” was indelible. It showed Pratt that it was possible to become a serious artist while staying close to one’s roots. You didn’t have to be brash, or urban, or complicated.
It was possible to make a career quietly, keeping to oneself and working on one’s art.
