Thursday, May 31, 2012

Governor General of Canada calls upon the country's universities to democratize knowledge

[Announcement from Comm-engagedscholarship listserv]


Dear community-engaged scholarship colleagues,

As opening keynote speaker of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (the largest gathering in Canada of scholars in these fields), the Governor General David Johnston called on universities to "democratize knowledge."  A video of his speech (and a panel on community-engaged teaching, research and service that followed it) can be viewed at http://bit.ly/KI1p6X. Here's a link to the text of his speech:

In his speech, the Governor General said "Today, I want to talk about a dream of mine - a true democracy of knowledge.  What exactly is it?  To democratize something is to make it accessible to everyone. A democracy of knowledge, therefore, deepens and broadens knowledge so that it’s available to all citizens in a given society and, beyond them, to all societies throughout the world. When I speak of knowledge, I speak about something specific. Knowledge is the next-to-highest state on the progressive spectrum that moves from data through information and knowledge to wisdom — with wisdom being the ultimate plateau from which knowledge is applied to govern all aspects of a society."

The Governor General began his professional career as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University in 1966, moving to the Law Faculty at the University of Toronto in 1968. He became dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario in 1974. In 1979, he was named principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, and in July 1994, he returned to the McGill Faculty of Law as a full-time professor.
In June 1999, he became the fifth president of the University of Waterloo, a position he held until being appointed Governor General in July 2010.

Thanks,

Rahma Osman
CCPH Program Assistant

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