|
||||||||
|
Welcome Remarks & Criminology Programme Launch Dr. Daniel O'Brien It is indeed my pleasure to welcome you to the Social Justice, Social Inequality and Crime conference, and also to welcome you to St. Thomas University, and those of you who are visiting our region to welcome you on behalf of all the civic officials who love to welcome people to Fredericton - Welcome to Fredericton. We are quite delighted to participate in welcoming ceremonies. It is one of the perks of office so to speak, I get the opportunity to come and greet people and to welcome them to our fair campus. However, it is a special occasion this evening as one of the things we are attempting to do with this conference this weekend is to celebrate, appropriately celebrate, the launch of our Criminology Programme - our Double Majors in Criminology -and Gayle has asked me to take you through a 45 minute history of the evolution of the programme because she said everyone would be absolutely delighted to hear it, but I won't do that. Those of you who are involved with the introduction of university programmes know there is a natural evolution that one must adhere to in order to introduce programmes, you don't simply snap one day, come up with a bright idea that a programme is in need and then launch that programme. We are much more bureaucratized than that, and there are many pitfalls, hurdles, debates, laborious hours of persuasion and data gathering prior to the introduction of a programme. We started very gently in the mid 80s with the assistance of a senior sociology professor by the name of Dr. Abdul Lodhi, who is now unfortunately deceased. Dr. Lodhi had the original inspiration for bringing the study of Criminology to St. Thomas campus and his work resulted in the introduction of a Certificate Programme in Criminology and Social Justice, particularly interested in the link between criminology and social justice that represented his passion and preoccupation in life, and it also coincided with the humanistic heritage that we foster at St. Thomas University. So it is an interesting link. We ran that programme for a number of years merely targeting employees currently engaged in some sector of the criminal justice system and they studied with us usually on a part time basis and after a period of credit assembly they were awarded a certificate. We always felt that that was the edge of the wedge which would introduce us to the field of criminology in a more developed way, and we worked away at identifying and gave priority to how we could bring criminology into our regular course offerings and regular course programmes. We did the usual things you do at a university. We established committees, we hired consultants, we began to identify and assign priority to the field of criminology in our various strategic plans and submissions to governments, and low and behold as we began to intensify our efforts in these areas we were able to give shape to a distinctive programme. A not unimportant component of that is that we began to put money where our mouth was and we began to hire properly qualified criminologists who gave direction to the programme. Last year after a variety of false starts we finally received approval from the educational advisory authorities to proceed with the launching of a Criminology Programme, a major's programme. We have had enormous take-off at the interest level by students through their expression of interest in our criminology offerings. In fact we are almost overwhelmed by the response. We continue to extend our interest in this area of programming by launching a co-operative programme that is not quite at the approval stage but very close to approval stage and that is a an Applied Degree in Criminology which we are offering co-operatively with the community college in the Miramichi. Like all of our programmes that move from the concept stage through to the implementation stage, we have to pay credit to people who helped us shape the argument, make the good debate and make the persuasive argument for support. First and foremost we should acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Gayle MacDonald. Gayle joined us a number of years back and is our first qualified criminologist and she has been instrumental in leading us in the direction of developing this programme. We added another position a year ago and Dr. Sandy Wachholz joined us in this second position. We are fortunate in adding a third position this year in the name of Dr. Susan Reid-MacNevin. She will officially take up her responsibilities on July 1, 1997 but she is here with us this evening to show her interest and support of the programme. Critical mass at three Ph.D qualified criminologists may for larger universities seem inconsequential, but for St. Thomas University this is overwhelming, this is what we refer to as a large critical mass of talent, and we are extra-ordinarily proud that we are able to celebrate the launch with this conference this weekend, and we congratulate all of you who had a role in shaping the programme and helping us move it form the concept stage to the reality stage. I wish you good fortune over the weekend, I complement you for giving up your weekend to learn and push your own horizons, and I trust that it will be a fruitful investment. Thank you very much.
|
|||||||
 |
© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University |
|||||||
