Martin Singer, in his Loyola Campus office, feels Concordia’s status as one of Canada’s most vibrant universities has yet to sink in with the general population — and it’s one of his goals to make that happen. Photo by Andrew Dobrowolskyj
Shortly after beginning his term as Concordia’s provost this summer, Martin Singer was surveying the courtyard below his office window on the Loyola Campus. As trucks noisily hauled away the rubble of the just demolished circular extension of the old Drummond Science Building, he visibly enjoyed the emerging unobstructed view of the new Concordia.
“I like coming out here, because it gives me a sense of the progress that we’re making,” he says, and feels the same when he visits his downtown offices. Modern-day Concordia is here, he insists — and the public had better take note that the institution is claiming its place among the top comprehensive universities in the country. “We used to hide ourselves in little buildings, many of which don’t even have the name Concordia on them,” he says. “Now, we’re becoming an in-your-face kind of university.”
For Singer, a 33-year veteran of Concordia who served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science for the last seven years, the building spree is a “concrete manifestation” of the university’s maturing into an institution of true quality. The recent hiring of hundreds of energetic faculty members is an even more important aspect of it, he feels. “There’s a perception lag,” says Singer. “If a university started off with humble roots such as ours, it takes time for people to realize that it has made tremendous progress, it is not the place they thought it was.”
Singer considers it one of his tasks as the chief academic officer to help Concordia communicate the new reality, now that the ongoing challenges of faculty renewal and the revitalization of both campuses are well underway. He says, “That’s probably our greatest challenge now: to communicate to people effectively what we have accomplished.”
In the past, Concordia has suffered from the perception that “the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” Singer observes. With a top business school, the best fine arts faculty in Canada, one of the top engineering schools in the country and many other highly regarded programs in the Faculty of Arts and Science, “we ought to be absolutely at the top of the comprehensive universities in Canada.”
In addition to continuing to build on Concordia’s remarkable academic development, the new provost will be grooming the next generation of Concordians to take over the leadership of the university within the next five to 10 years. The hundreds of recent hires have been given the opportunity to develop their academic careers, leaving the university’s governance in the hands of people who are now approaching retirement age, he explains.
That will change soon. Singer will play a “mentoring role” in recruiting young faculty members into positions as deans and department chairs. “I will say to them: this university is up for grabs, it is your university to inherit,” he says. “We want you to do it, we expect you to do it, we demand that you do it. It’s your responsibility as a faculty member to participate in the collegial governance of the institution.”
It’s an approach Singer will bring to the university as a whole from the Faculty of Arts and Science, where he hired 200 tenure-track professors in recent years — and persuaded some of them to become department chairs. “The opportunities for people who are interested in running a department are incredible right now,” he says. “We need to cultivate that leadership. I’ve tried to do that as dean and I will continue to do that as provost.”
Frank Kuin is a Montreal freelance journalist.
