Camosun College is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It’s been a long journey, and today Camosun offers over 160 programs to 19,000 students per year from over 80 countries, including more than 2,100 international students and 1,200 Indigenous students.
Of course, getting to this point hasn’t always been smooth, which makes sense: 50 years at any post-secondary institution is bound to have some rocky patches, and the college is currently in the middle of what is one of the biggest rocky patches it’s ever faced: the COVID-19 pandemic.
On this 50-year milestone, we caught up with some main players at Camosun today to look back on the good and the bad, and to see where they think the college goes from here.
Remembering the journey
Camosun has a strong First Nations heritage that it continues to celebrate. The name “Camosun” means “where different waters meet and are transformed,” and is derived from the Songhees legend of Camossung, a young girl who was walking along a river. She was hungry, but refused many foods offered to her by Haylas the Transformer. These foods, such as sturgeon and cranberries, were thrown elsewhere on the island. Eventually, Camossung accepted duck, coho salmon, herring, and oyster. She and her grandfather were turned to stone and cast into the river as guardians of these staple foods. (These two stones can still be seen at the bottom of the river at the reversing falls under the Gorge Bridge.) This story and heritage was the inspiration for Camosun’s new 50-year anniversary logo, created by Coast Salish artist and Camosun alumnus Dylan Thomas.
The oldest structure at Camosun is the Young Building, which was built in 1913 and has housed the Victoria Normal School, the Victoria College—which eventually became the University of Victoria—and the Institute for Adult Studies.
Camosun College was officially established on September 16, 1971, and very nearly avoided being called Juan de Fuca College. (According to college lore, the name was changed when they realized it could lead to awkward instances such as “Fuca U!”)
When established, the college had 980 registered students, and tuition fees were $10 per credit, to a maximum of $100 per semester. In 1979, Camosun launched its Nursing program, which remains a significant component of Camosun culture.
In 1991, an Indigenous education program was formed at Camosun; the next year, the First Nations Student Association was created. In 1994, the Camosun Chargers launched their inaugural seasons in men’s and women’s volleyball and basketball; the next year, a men’s and women’s golf team was launched.
In 1995, Indigenous artist Richard Hunt carved Camosun’s first totem pole, which can still be seen in front of the Campus Centre building at Interurban. From 2000 to 2012, Camosun broadcast the Village 900 AM radio station, which started as CKMO-FM in 1993. In 2005, Camosun announced a partnership with the Songhees Nation to improve learning for First Nations students. In 2011, Camosun announced its first Women in Trades Exploration program, which aims to give women a foothold in a traditionally male-dominated workforce.
Those are just a few of the highlights of the past 50 years, but there are many more. Today, as the college continues to adapt to online learning in the face of COVID-19, all eyes are looking ahead to when students can return to campus and the college can continue adding to this list of achievements.
The Camosun identity
As a smaller, community-oriented school, Camosun has a unique identity that distinguishes it from other post-secondary institutions.
“The thing I’m most proud of is our depth and breadth of programs,” says Camosun president Sherri Bell, who recently announced that she would be retiring at the end of the year. “We provide access to post-secondary education, from people that didn’t finish high school to those who want to upgrade from our community.”
Bell believes that the community connection that Camosun fosters creates a long-lasting impression in people’s lives.
“What I found was unique from other institutions is that there are people [who] attended Camosun as a student, started working here, their children have gone to Camosun—it’s a place that, once people are connected to the culture, keeps you very connected sometimes for almost your entire adult life,” she says.
Camosun vice president of education John Boraas says that one of the things he’s most proud of about Camosun is its role in bringing education to those who may otherwise have missed out.
“Camosun has stood very tall across the province in identifying that pathway for people who don’t have access to education, that they can and there is a way forward into post-secondary,” he says. “I’m terribly proud of the first bachelor’s degrees offered within the School of Business, and within Sport and Exercise Education; it was a real turning point for us as an organization.”
Boraas believes that the more intimate environment at Camosun brings with it a higher chance of success within a student’s educational journey, and he’s proud that Camosun students are more successful at completing their degrees than those that start at university.
“At universities across the province and the country, first-year students face class sizes of a couple hundred or even more, and here we have class sizes between, on the low end, 24, on the high end, 40. That provides a very different responsibility for the teacher, for the faculty member to interact with students,” he says.
Bell agrees, saying that even though Camosun has comparable enrolment numbers to nearby universities, its focus on smaller class sizes allows students to develop stronger connections with other students and faculty.
“We have instructors that deeply care about the individuals in their classroom. There’s a strong connection between our instructors, our students, and the size of the classes, and I think that is one of the things that really makes us unique, and why students come here first,” she says.
Top priorities
As a community college, Camosun places great importance on attempting to create local connections and improve the student experience, as well as aiming to continue to innovate in applied technology. Camosun vice president of student experience Heather Cummings says that Camosun is focused on adapting to shifting climates within local industries.
“We’re one of the biggest contributors to the labour force and economic development in the area, and with this pandemic we’ve seen complete shifts in industries,” she says. “Our priorities are to continue to work with government and make sure that people can come to Camosun and get the training and the learning that they want for whatever the future industry is.”
Cummings also says that Camosun is focused on the mental health of its students.
“Mental health, quite frankly, is a priority that I should mention,” she says. “We’re hearing so many calls about supporting the mental health of our community members, so we will continue to look at our overall college mental health strategy and see what we need to do to support everyone,” she says, adding that some good has come out of the pandemic with the move to online services. “We have shifted a lot of things to become more responsive, so with the counselling service there’s now a rapid access counselling model: students are seen within 48 hours versus waiting three or four weeks.”
Bell says that Camosun continues to prioritize working with Indigenous students and communities.
“I think the work that we do both with our Indigenous students and also supporting faculty and students in understanding Indigenous culture is something that we have, I think, done really well. There’s also the support for non-Indigenous faculty, staff, and students to understand our collective colonial history and what actually occurred in Canada at residential schools,” she says. “We continually look at how far we’ve come and where we have to go, because the work that we’re doing now, I would like to believe will continue for years to come.”
Standout moments
Throughout its history, Camosun has had many highlights that have shaped the lives of those involved.
Boraas says that the college has been active and instrumental in creating a robust roster of services for the community.
“From the beginning point, we were certainly one of the first community colleges established in the province, and that was the hard work of community and the school district, and so we have sort of a proud role in breaking ground for the college movement,” he says. “But then it’s the identification of the programs that we would have, and being one of the first colleges in the province to deliver nursing education, and the partnership that we’ve had with local school districts from the very beginning.”
He says that over the time he’s been with the college, the proportion of First Nations students registered in full post-secondary programs has skyrocketed.
“We have the longest-serving Indigenous Advisory Council in the province,” he says. “I’ve been here for 22 years and change, and when I started, 80 percent of Indigenous students were in Access programs; today, 80 percent of Indigenous students are in post-secondary programs across all of our schools. Huge change; I’m proud of our Human Rights Tribunal support for guaranteed seats for Indigenous students.”
Cummings says that some of the standout moments for Camosun include the continued success of the Chargers teams and Camosun’s involvement in creating educational opportunities.
“We’ve hosted sporting events like the national volleyball championships a few years ago; we’ve won national and provincial awards,” she says. “[Also,] I think about when they started that former youth in care grant through the provincial government, and last year was the year we learned that we were the top in the province for supporting the largest number of former youth in care students to achieve their post-secondary dreams.”
Bell says that one of the things she’s most proud of is Camosun’s role in creating job opportunities through applied, hands-on learning programs.
“We’re the second-largest trades program in the province. We offer our community so many opportunities, and we just keep adding programs based on the need and the changing times,” she says. “The great majority of programs have an applied nature and are very connected with the community, so, yeah, it’s an amazing institution, one that I’m incredibly proud to be president of.”
Growing pains
Of course, the road to the 50-year milestone hasn’t always been smooth. There have been moments when tough calls have had to be made; Boraas says that administrative decisions can be difficult when considering all the many factors that come into play.
“You do your best to make decisions that create pathways or programs or services that are the most important, particularly in a climate where we’ve dealt with budget cuts,” he says. “I’m not sure I’ve always gotten it right in terms of what I’ve chosen to cut or keep. The learning process along the way is real. Our relationships with community agencies are so important to us, and yet we’ve had to find ways to reduce the amount of money we provide to them. All of those are kind of those moral-dilemma moments where you feel like you’re doing the wrong thing, but I don’t see other options. Those are certainly the kinds of things that cause me to lose sleep at night.”
Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) executive director Michel Turcotte says that there have been some rough times over the years but that the CCSS has a strong working relationship with the college.
“When the Liberals were the government in BC, there were significant cuts to the post-secondary system,” says Turcotte. “They were not increasing funding to those institutions, and this forced tuitions to go up and colleges and universities to do things that students and student societies did not approve of in order to keep the lights on and to pay salaries and those sort of things.”
Turcotte says that mutual compassion between the college and the CCSS was invaluable.
“I think the fact that we could see where they were coming from made it easier to mitigate some of the effects of those things. Like, we didn’t just get out the picket signs and go pound on the windows; we tried to engage in communication and advocacy to explain our point of view and understand theirs,” he says. “Ultimately, our job is to stand up for the student interest, and occasionally you almost have to agree to disagree, but at least you can understand the other person’s perspective, and it makes it a lot easier.”
Boraas says he always tries to reflect on how he could have improved, but he says that he does have regrets.
“I think being in education calls on us to always be curious about our successes and the things that we could have done better, the things that people aren’t happy with,” he says. “My biggest regrets are probably where we’ve had programs we’ve had to cut because of our budgets, and knowing that there were students that were displaced because of that. We’ve worked really hard to stabilize the financial picture of the college, and I’m proud of that, but getting there hasn’t been easy.”
Turcotte says that while it may be easy to feel like the college has let students sometimes, the situation is much more complex.
“It would be wrong to characterize it as letting students down. I would say Camosun was forced to make bad decisions because of the circumstances they were in. To be fair, they could have made worse decisions,” he says with a laugh. “I think the strong relationship between the student society and the college helped prevent that from happening.”
Addressing student concerns
Turcotte says that Camosun has been making strides to improve the student experience, but it’s not quite there yet.
“I think the college has started moving in the right direction in terms of trying to improve the overall experience that students have. They’ve developed a Student Experience division, they have an Office of Student Support, and those sort of things, but they still need to do a little bit more in making sure students are treated respectfully in all the faculty at Camosun,” he says. “Times have changed, and students now pay a lot of money for their education, and so they’re really passionate about being able to do well and being able to achieve their goals, and not all of those supports that help students do that are necessarily in place, nor is there always the culture in faculty that makes it possible to make sure students don’t get lost in the cracks, and they achieve the best student success as possible.”
Turcotte says that Camosun is a bit outdated in some of its policies and in some aspects of its service model.
“We don’t necessarily have tutoring services that are available for students in other areas; we also are continuing past practices in areas where it’s not possible to do makeup exams, because that’s viewed negatively by faculty or others, but at many institutions there’s the ability to do a makeup exam,” he says. “This would be very important when we have cohort-style programs where you need to complete one year or segment before you move onto the next. Let’s say you just missed the cut in one class, you’re almost out of luck for the next year, because you’re moving in a cohort, so initiatives like that would do a lot to improve [the student experience].”
Boraas says that the college is working to continue to develop support services that meet students’ changing needs.
“As the nature of being a student changes, the stress, the challenge for students is much greater, and just being a human being is more stressful right now than I think it was 40 years ago,” he says. “I think our investment in supports for mental health, for student advisors, for financial aid, for investment into student navigators, those are all things we’re trying to do to reflect a commitment to this very changed environment that students are facing.”
Moving forward
While Camosun celebrates its past, it also looks toward the future in hopes of creating further positive experiences with the community. Boraas says in the coming years, Camosun will be focusing more on enhancing the link between technology and health.
“Technology is going to be key, so we have planning underway for an expansion of technology programs,” he says. “We know that the health of our population as we all age is more acute, so the Centre for Health and Education are contemplating new programs and doing research for them right now around things like physical literacy and how we expand people’s understanding of how exercise relates to avoidance of early-onset Alzheimer’s and dementia, all of those kinds of things, so that’s happening there.”
Boraas says that Camosun is also looking into expanding its programs to match changing industries.
“Trades will continue to be a priority; we’re currently looking at the idea of a film studio on campus that would provide a different place for co-operative education or applied learning for students but also an expansion into animation, programming, different programming related to the arts industry, being aware of what industries seem to be coming Camosun’s way,” he says.
Cummings is looking forward to seeing some upgrades to Camosun infrastructure.
“We have a plan for a capital renewal project where we can revitalize some of our older buildings, and we’re hoping there will be a time when we’re going to be able to do that, like Ewing, Fisher, certainly we’re hoping to do something with Wilna Thomas sooner than later, because that building is currently empty,” she says.
Bell says that the college will continue to work on social policies and improving the student experience.
“People talk about equity, diversity, and inclusion, which we’ve done some really good work on at Camosun—we need to go further with that,” she says. “We need to keep enhancing the student experience and looking at different ways of supporting students, so that will be the work that will take place in 2022.”
Part of looking ahead into the future is considering how current events are shaping the Camosun landscape, says Bell.
“When I think about where we are right now, and what we’re dealing with, it’s time to start looking at, what have we learned from this?” she says. “There are things that have happened during the pandemic that have forced people to do things differently, so because of that, when we do finally go back to campus, we need to take that time to look at what are the things that changed that are actually worth keeping.”