Preparing for as many as 30,000 students by 2030, a target of Teaching Greatness, MacEwan’s strategic vision, will require more teaching space, more instructors, more programs and more support for students. What it won’t need, says Dr. Craig Monk, provost and vice-president, Academic, is a large and complex academic administration.

Last fall, Academic Affairs hired 64 new faculty members across all faculties and schools. This trend will continue over the next several years, he says, largely because of the university’s commitment to a lean and flat academic administration.

“We want to be good stewards of public resources and focus on hiring frontline colleagues who teach. That is the most impactful thing that I've seen in the period I’ve been provost,” says Dr. Monk. “It’s our ambition to still have more than 60 per cent of our programming taught by tenure-track or tenured members, even as we grow and add more course sections, and that has meant a lot of additional hiring that will continue for the rest of this decade.”

A close second in terms of impactful decisions, he says, has been changing the structure of administration in Academic Affairs that empowers “doers” and is scalable to accommodate 30,000 students.

“We need the administrative structure to facilitate the strategic vision, but we also need to make sure our decision-making process is streamlined so our resources and efforts can be focused on hiring individuals who have direct contact with students and implement the things that we decide to do rather than creating yet another plan,” he says.

Here, Dr. Monk explains why that structure matters and how it will take MacEwan into the next decade.

What will growing MacEwan’s student body to 30,000 by 2030 look like?

I have now served four different MacEwan presidents, and Dr. Trimbee’s administration is distinctive for keeping this growth mindset in the foreground. More than half of our anticipated growth is due to simple demographics; there will be many more students of post-secondary age in Alberta in the second half of this decade. We would never assume that we will attract and retain them by just throwing open the doors. We must, and will, continue to grow and develop new programs that the community wants and offer them in innovative ways. With that focus and a new School of Business academic building soon to start construction, we absolutely should be challenging ourselves to serve even more students than we would by continuing with the status quo.

How does repositioning Academic Affairs fit into reaching this growth target?

I really believe that the provost must have line of sight across Academic Affairs, and that structure is perhaps best represented as branches on a tree rather than a top-down hierarchy. By working with my colleagues, I should be able to see out as far as course delivery to an individual student. Deans and academic associate vice-presidents develop with faculty and staff the tactics to achieve Teaching Greatness. Associate deans help deans operationalize. It really is as simple as that, in theory; in practice, all the complications of a large and fast-paced enterprise are visited upon us.

I’m very proud of our vice-provost model, for example, which sees academic administrators take turns with additional responsibilities on a rotating basis. It helps with resiliency and professional development throughout the team. Rather than adding new layers of administration, this kind of approach keeps administrative structure relatively lean in comparison to other institutions.

We need to continue to hire more staff, more professors and support personnel, who work face-to-face each day with our students. Our commitment to lean administration has helped us do that each year.

How do changes announced this year fit into that model and align with Teaching Greatness?

We have seen great progress in honouring our place in O-day’min, and while that direction involves much more than emphasizing Indigenous ways of knowing, the appointment of Terri Cardinal as an associate vice-president, Indigenous Initiatives and Engagement will allow us to focus our efforts on further serving our community by positioning her to thread her work throughout Academic Affairs.

I am also excited about the development of the deputy provost role that Dr. Edvard Lorkovic will help us grow. Pursuing multi-year goals, like growing work-integrated learning at a steady pace, requires us to synchronize community connections with curriculum development in multiple faculties and schools.

We can’t expect to wake up one morning in 2027 and see programs changed when the seeds of that change need to have been planted eighteen months before. We are fortunate to have Ed take up the challenge of planning over multiple academic cycles, collaborating with other academic leaders to take advantage of successive opportunities.

How does supporting students remain at the forefront when the agenda is growth?

I started my career in student affairs, and the big change I have seen during my administrative career is that students expect, and need, a full suite of wrap-around services. The post-secondary system was never designed for demand on that scale, and the reality is that what we implemented on this campus in 2018 has already started to evolve into two separate, but complementary streams: student support services, which includes things like counselling and psychological services, and student success services, which includes things like academic and career advising.

A generation ago, that was it. But today, those are simply the cornerstones, each supporting a much wider range of services. We hope to use the next six or eight months to imagine how two portfolios might grow in tandem between now and 2030 to respond to whatever services students need next – from restorative justice approaches to engaging with artificial intelligence with integrity, for example. Regardless of which services are required, they would fit into one of those two cornerstones we’ve identified in this new model.

What are you most looking forward to with this new model?

We have a vibrant General Faculties Council to manage academic governance. What I like about the leaner academic administrative structure we have carefully chosen to complement it is an ability to scale without expanding further the base it all sits on. Rather than pulling resources to expand, we invest more in the people who work with students.

This is not a structure that requires more planners; it allows us to very clearly identify and invest in more doers – colleagues who work face-to-face with students.

Ultimately, the goal is to prepare for 30,000 students in as lean a way as possible. I'm confident this is the structure that will get us there.