On January 1 of this year, Lane Trotter replaced Sherri Bell as president of Camosun College. Trotter is stepping in while the COVID-19 pandemic continues, but if he’s worried about it, he’s not letting it show: when we meet to chat on a chilly morning in late January, Trotter seems comfortable and confident in his new position. As students wander past us in the main courtyard of Lansdowne, we talked about his approach to the job, the role of student governance in post-secondary, classic rock, and more.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
You’re coming on board and taking over presidential duties during a worldwide pandemic. How does that make you feel? Are you nervous about that?
Well, the last two years have been challenging for everybody. I was at Langara for eight years, and the last two before coming here we were dealing with that challenge. So coming to Camosun, it’s learning what’s the culture of the college, what are the needs of the community? But fundamentally, what I have found, is following the advice of Dr. Henry’s been pretty good. I think we’ve been lucky in this province relative to other jurisdictions and while we may not be perfect, I think we’ve done very well, and that’s because we have a high vaccination rate. I’m double vaxxed and boosted, and we continue to encourage people to get vaccinated. Some have asked me about, well, should we mandate vaccination, and I think you need to be very careful on weighing those risks. But when we’re looking at over 90 percent of people vaccinated, we’re almost at that… I don’t want to call it herd immunity because that’s not quite the right term and I’m not a medical doctor, I’m an academic doctor. So if we follow the advice and we have this current wave happening, it’s how do we reduce the risk? And what we know about people who are tending to be in hospital are people who are unvaccinated or there are other medical issues that they’re having, they call those co-morbidities. So we’ve been pretty safe.
The other issue is that in a structured environment like education versus unstructured environments, in particular the home, the transmission rate in post-secondary has been incredibly low. It’s probably been the lowest in the system, across all areas, so we’ve been lucky, and we’ve been able to deliver education. So, does it make you nervous? Yes, because you always want to make sure you’re keeping employees and students safe. But I think we’ve done okay.
You mentioned to me you have a student-governance background. When and where?
College of New Caledonia, 1983, 1984, something like that. I had a chance to work on student government and see things from the students’ side, and I did that for two years before finishing CNC and eventually going to UVic. I wasn’t involved in student government at UVic; I was focused on my studies getting done.
That’s an interesting perspective that you bring to the presidential position.
Sometimes we forget: why are we here? Students. First, last, we’re here for students. As we’re taking a look at how we support students, it’s what are their needs? What are the things we can do to help improve things? And looking at the pandemic right now, it’s made it a lot more challenging for students. There’s a report on the BC Centre for Disease Control’s site talking about the impacts of online learning. Now, we’ve had online learning for a long time, but that social isolation that has come has really impacted young people, so that drives the need for in-person learning. In the end, what we’re doing is we’re offering an opportunity on the college side for everybody. And so, again, for me, seeing it from the other side, from when I was in student government, are we doing the best that we can for students? And that’s always what we have to ask, every single day. How do we increase our graduation rates? How do we make sure we have supports for students? How do we make sure we make it easy for students? And I think if we come back to that as our guiding principle, I think we can’t go too far wrong.
Students air their grievances to us, so we hear a lot about student debt, we hear a lot about the cost of textbooks, tuition rates. What do you plan on doing to make life easier on students who might be experiencing financial strain?
First, I can relate to the student-debt issue very clearly. When I was at UVic, I had one course, and this is more than 30 years ago, 35 years ago, I spent $160—I still remember it—on a textbook that we cracked once. $160. Even now, that’s a large amount of money for a student; back then, that was a… I still have that book. I’m like, really? So that’s why I think the province’s initiatives on open textbook has been really good. The more that we can do with that reduces the cost for students.
The actual largest cost for students isn’t tuition. It’s living costs. We do keep our tuition affordable but that’s why we also look at making sure grants, bursaries, trying to get more of those, working with the province. One of the things the province did for at least the provincial part of student-loan debt is keeping it interest-free. When I graduated from UVic, I had a debt load of, imagine this, $16,600. They say right now the average debt load when you graduate is about $25,000. My interest rate was 10.5 percent. That took me 12 years to pay off. So for our students, I absolutely get it, and we’re not going to be trying to gouge our students, that’s just not going to happen.
When you take a look at our cost of tuition versus, say, other sectors of higher education, we’re pretty affordable. And we want to keep it that way, because we’re open access, we’re that first chance for that first-generation learner to get into post-secondary to explore where they want to go. We’re the chance for marginalized groups to look at what do they want to explore and what are the supports that they need. On the debt issue, we need to try to keep it down so when students graduate, they don’t start going out to work and then they’re weighed down by a debt that makes it impossible for them to find their dream.
The other piece to that is we as a community sometimes send mixed signals to government. We want services at a low or zero cost, but we don’t want to pay the taxes. So how do we talk to the government about that? And we need students. We talk to government all the time, but we need the voice of students there, because government really does listen to students, and so that becomes important to say: how do we continue to try to keep education affordable, or more affordable? And we need students to be working with us in that.
What does that look like? It’s one thing to just say “we need students to work with us,” but how can they actually do that?
I think the first thing is through student government, and student governments working together to speak to government to say, okay, great, we like that it’s 2 percent per year, we’d like it to be free like some other jurisdictions but that means then government has to allocate more money. We talk to government all the time about that, and government’s actually pretty responsive at the provincial level. Keeping in mind, people say, well, the federal government should do something about it, well, federal government does transfer money to the province, but education is a provincial matter.
So we need to continue to let government know these are the challenges that we have, that the colleges are here for everybody, we’re not just for an elite group, we’re here for everybody and we need to make sure that we keep it affordable so that when a student does their one or two or four years with us that they can get out, they can get that transfer to another institution, get that first job, do a career change, and they’re not saddled down with debt.
Let’s talk about environmental issues. We hear a lot about environmental concerns at the college from students, particularly with single-use plastics. How much of a priority for you, coming into this job, are environmental issues?
I think the college has done an incredible job with this. The board is looking at a climate emergency: how do we as an institution deal with that? So what are the practices we follow for sustainability? How do we reduce our footprint? One of the ways we’ve done that is moving over to LED lighting, so, less electrical draw. As we move over to electric cars, we’re going to see a bigger demand on the grid, and that means how do we reduce it so we’re not damming more rivers, we’re not—god forbid—putting in nuclear power? So we’re moving forward with things like LED lighting, making sure that the buildings are following net zero or making sure that we insulate buildings appropriately. With respect to recyclables, paper, making sure that we can recycle it, looking at composting, on plastics, we can do our part to that, but the one thing is that when we have plastics, if they’re going into garbage… If you look around us, we have different types of recycling bins. We need everybody to, rather than throw it on the ground, put it in the recyling bin.
I noticed on the Camosun site, it said that you have given papers and presentations on many topics, one of which was academic freedom. Tell me a bit about what that means to you.
Academic freedom and higher education go hand in hand. I can get into all the technical stuff and you’ll probably be bored to tears, but it goes back to the creation of what’s called the German Humboldt research university model, and you had a concept called lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit. I’m not German and I’m probably mispronouncing those names, but lehrfreiheit was the ability of the teacher to teach the materials based on their research and transmit that information to students, and lernfreiheit was the ability of the student to learn unimpeded from the teacher. Germany used that in the 19th century to drive for economic development. That then modelled a change that was adopted in western universities in the United States, in the UK, and the rest of the world, where academic freedom came in as the ability for the researcher to ask difficult questions, to pursue the truth, regardless of where it went, and not have to worry about consequences.
The obligations that went with that was when you were publishing those papers you could show that you had done your research, that you could show that you had your research materials on that. It wasn’t a blank cheque to say or do anything, because in some circles there’s a belief that academic freedom means that as an academic I’m learned about everything. So academic freedom as we’ve looked at is that ability to make sure that we can pass on knowledge from one generation to the next generation and not have to worry about external factors coming in to say, “Fire that person because they said something we disagree with.”
Which you see happening more and more.
That is one of the challenges that we do see, and so what’s the balancing act on that where you have academic freedom and, in some cases, you have individuals who have been terminated for publishing their research? That’s not what it was about. But there are areas in academic freedom, within a Canadian context, within our charter and within the laws that we have, that we absolutely comply with, and that’s around hate speech. It doesn’t say as an academic I can start spouting off nonsense. So that’s a responsibility piece. It’s trying to find a balancing act, and also making sure the focus is on education for students.
Tell me a bit about your approach to the job in general. Sherri, for example, was very personable, all about the relationships, whereas other presidents have had different approaches. What’s your approach in a nutshell?
I think that’s a difficult question because what I think it is may be totally different than how other people perceive it. I’ve been told that I’m very approachable, and I try to be. I like to do walkabouts. It’s a little cool right now, but I like to do walkabouts. I want to get to know the community, and walkabouts is one of the ways to do it. It also lets me start learning the culture, and lets me start to get to know the people and what are people’s aspirations. Because while I was president for eight years at Langara, so I have experience, and five years senior vice president before that at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, and ten and a half years before that as a dean at BCIT, so I have experience, but every institution’s unique. For me, the only way you get to know the institution is to meet the people and the students. So the opportunity to speak with you this morning is fantastic because it’s how I learn, as well. As you’re asking me these questions, it also lets me know what’s being talked about within the student community, and those are the things that then I can pay attention to and look for.
The one thing that I ask for, with anybody, if people disagree with me, tell me why. That’s how I learn. All I ask for is civility. You don’t have to like me, you don’t have to agree with me, but we need to be civil in how we engage in our discussions. Especially in the academy or in higher education, so we can look for common solutions, to deal with these tough questions, and some you’ve already raised, around tuition, around how do we deal with the environment. So, if we can’t be civil with each other, then how do we solve issues, because I learn from what I don’t know. Help me learn what I don’t know. Or correct any errors in some of my assumptions. If we can do that together, we’re all going to be further ahead.
Another tough topic: reconciliation. I know this is important to you, it was very important to Sherri. You hear people talk about it, but what’s it really look like to you? Day to day here on campus, what does it really mean, as opposed to just saying “It’s important to me.”
It’s not a checkbox. First, I think we have to expand that to say not just reconciliation, but truth and reconciliation. And the reason we have to do that is that given what we just found out coming out of Williams Lake, what we found out last summer coming out of Kamloops and other provinces, we’re going to find a lot more in the next couple of years, and, again, unless we talk about that and unless we’re absolutely honest, we’re not going to make progress because the only way you can move forward is by addressing what has happened.
Camosun has been a leader for the past 30 years in Indigenous education. So I’m going to be learning a lot over the next couple of years. I’d like to be here for a while. And I’m not going to be the expert. I think I’ll take my lead from working with Indigenous leaders here, with the 11 First Nations, with the Metis community, with the urban Indigenous community, about how do we move forward?
We need to work on our Indigenization and ways of knowing and build that in, and we also have to talk about what has happened. How do you justify unmarked graves for children? It’s reprehensible, it’s wrong, and how we move forward is we need to address that and we need to recognize that happened, because if we don’t recognize it, it will happen again. We humans are very malleable, very fallible, so we need to talk about things.
So what do I see Indigenization looking like? I think I’ll take my lead from the Indigenous community, but it means that when somebody who is from an Indigenous background comes to this college, they feel very comfortable. It doesn’t feel like an alien experience. But that should be for all our learners. It should be welcoming for all our learners. And, again, going back to that issue of academic freedom, this is a topic that for faculty who are talking about this, they should be able to speak about it freely, so that we can engage in honest conversations about what’s happened and how do we address it?
What, for you, are going to be some challenges going into this job? What’s kept you up at night?
The biggest challenge is always getting to know the culture. [Management consultant and writer Peter Drucker] says that culture eats strategy for breakfast. So you can come in with your best plans, your massive strategy, but if it’s alien to the culture of the organization, it’s not going to be successful. So it’s learning the culture. It’s also what are the things that are included or not included, because people will say, “it’s this,” but it’s not really that. And it’s how do you accidentally step into areas where people say, “That just does not fit within our culture.” You can say there are commonalities across our society, yes, and across institutions, yes, but every institution, at least the ones I’ve been at, has unique things, so that’s what I have to spend the next little while learning and taking the time to do it appropriately.
Is it difficult coming from Langara, BCIT, and coming to a new institution?
Yes, you’re drinking from a firehose and learning about the institution, but then you’re also looking at what are the things that the institution values, what are the things that everybody who has been here for a while just knows, but somebody coming in who’s new just doesn’t? You have to take the time to do that before you start saying, okay, we’re going to change this, we’re going to change that.
Sherri did an amazing job, so I’m so lucky to be stepping in. She left very big shoes to fill [laughs], which is a bit intimidating, but Sherri was one of the people I looked to when I was at Langara, and there were two others I looked to as well, we talked to each other about the difficult conversations we have internally. And so I’ve learned a lot from that, but I just need to be patient to get to know the institution, not to say I’m going to wait two years, because there are some things we do need to do, but I need to spend the time to get to know people and not just tell people what to do. That’s not my job. People say as the president what you decree is law. That’s the farthest thing… I’m a steward, and my job is to take an amazing institution that was passed on to me and, at some point, my successor, I want to make sure that I do the same for them, in a respectful manner that fits with the direction of it.
An immediate challenge, of course, is funding. That for us, as an institution, is a challenge. We have a structural deficit that we need to address. So we’re starting to have discussions about how do we do that. But that’s not just Camosun’s issue, that’s across the board. But it is one that we need to address.
The other one, longer-term, and it’s not a problem but this is one reason why I’m excited to be here, is the signature student learning experience. So let me just expand it without a lot of detail, because the detail will fill in later. When the colleges were created, we were created with education, so we’ll give you some education and you’ll either go on for further studies or you’ll get a job. In the 1980s, we started adding in co-op. Isn’t that an amazing thing? Work experience to go with learning that you have, so you get applied learning experience. So we do that, now that’s been expanded and now the concept is called work-integrated learning. So, internships, externships, volunteer opportunities and all that which can enhance the learning that that student has.
The next one that we’re now starting to look at which is going to make sure that our students, when they leave, are ready is applied research or innovation. So, in applied research, the term “research” causes so much confusion. In a college setting, we’re not talking about innovation and knowledge, that’s what the universities do, they push the boundaries of new knowledge. We’re innovation in practice. We push the bounds of existing knowledge and how do you do it better?
So the universities might say, look, we’re going to solve this problem, quantum computing, in 10 years or fusion in 10 or 20 or 30 years. What we do is we have local employers or we have community groups that have a problem, how can we help solve it? How can we get our students involved so that they can take their education, they can take their applied learning that’s come through co-op or other forms of work-integrated learning and then we apply the applied research, that innovation, so they’re combining all three together? So when they’re leaving here, they’re thinking about things they can do to make a difference, whether it’s to the environment, whether it’s to sustainable practice, whether it’s keeping our communities healthy and safe, whether it’s the creation of new jobs. So that’s what we’re looking at for the future.
So how do we do it? What does that look like? Those are some of the discussions I want to engage in to make sure that Camosun becomes that college of choice. It’s this amazing institution, and that’s what brought me back. My wife and I moved away 24 years ago with two young kids, a four-and-a-half year old, and a nine month old. And now we’re back. And there are only a few institutions that I would want to be at, and I’ve worked at those institutions. So I have to tell you, I’m very lucky to be here, and what I’d like to do is continue to build on what Sherri, faculty, staff, and students have done to make sure that, again, students are the focus of why we exist.
Tell me a bit about Lane the person. I know you’re a Mustang guy. What are you all about?
[Laughs] Yeah, I love my Ford Mustangs. Since I was a kid, it’s just something about the design and shape of a Ford Mustang. I’ve had six of them. There’s just something mystical or mythical about the car. I’m in the car, top is down, stress goes away. I just like them. Mustangs are great, I know some people would love their Ferrari or whatever; I’ll stick with my Mustangs.
So you’re in the Mustang, cruising around with the top down, what’s on the stereo?
AC/DC.
Good answer.
Back in Black. Highway to Hell.
What are some other bands in your collection?
So other bands, if you go into the ‘80s, I’ve got lots of the ‘80s music… There’s this interesting new wave versus the harder rock. But more recently, the new stuff I’m getting into is Theory of a Deadman, I actually saw them in concert, which I really liked. But if you go into my albums, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers or just Tom Petty, The Law, really old album so that’ll be obscure. Jack Green, British rocker, had four albums out, so I have all those albums. You could call it power-pop. Of course, Canadian: April Wine. Now I’m really dating myself… Tom Cochrane and Red Ryder. Some of the Aussie bands—Angel City. Then I have some Mozart and some other things; it’s eclectic. But when the top’s down in the Mustang, it’s AC/DC.