by Cindy Kleiman
& Michael Todd

    There's never a perfect time to be a university president. So maybe, like most things in life, you just take the plunge. Certainly Dr. Lorna Marsden -- York's new president -- would be unlikely to argue being the president of a university is a difficult job these days. Marsden has come to York fresh from a five-year stint with one of Ontario's smallest educational institutions (Wilfrid Laurier) to Canada's third largest. That in itself is a big change. The kind of close collegial approach she says she had at Laurier won't be possible in quite the same way at a large university like York, she says. "We know the students [here at Laurier] and the students know us. No matter what you do at a large university, you simply cannot achieve that," she said
in a recent interview in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

    But, like any good administrator, she sees York's size more as a creative challenge than a barrier. In a word, hard times and hard decisions (the kind of difficult decisions that university presidents are forced to make these days in times of cutbacks) don't seem to deter her from her belief in the value of universities and the important place of higher education in society.

    To call that place "sacred" might risk overstatement, but not by much. "Universities are the bastions of free speech," says Marsden. "They offer people the kind of experience they can't get anywhere else. It's important to remember the mission of universities because this is the only place where people are really allowed to think broadly and deeply, and in a wide way, about old and new problems.Thinking well is hard work. So is thinking critically."

    Marsden's remarks to the media are often refreshingly free of heavy statistics or doom-and-gloom political scenarios (although she is perfectly capable of supplying as much hard detail as any reporter could want). Somehow she seems more interested in the larger story -- which is championing the cause celebre of universities in general, and York in particular.

    Asked what are universities for, for instance, Marsden replies, "They're institutions where one can spend some time thinking about the most basic and difficult questions of life. At no other time in our lives do we really get to do that. It's a very important period." Part of her job as president, she says, is to protect the ability of people to have access to that opportunity, by spreading the news that universities -- and the kind of ideas and people they produce -- are worth preserving. "The major part of my job is make government aware just how difficult it is for students," Marsden says. "How do you maintain and create opportunity...how do you have an affordable education?" Certainly Marsden's eight years of experience as a Senator were useful in that regard (she was asked by Pierre Trudeau in 1984 to serve in the Senate, and stayed until 1992), she suggests.

    "There's no doubt my political experience has helped enormously with the job of being a university president," she says. "Politics has a lot to do with timing. For example, a bill gets into first reading: it's important to understand and persuade and work with all the parties in the legislature to make sure they have a clear idea about what it is you're thinking, why you're thinking it, and why it's a reasonable case whatever it happens to be."