I recently returned from a week away visiting northern Uganda, where an NGO I chair called The Uganda Fund ("the Fund") is active in helping the region recover from a 20-year conflict that took thousands of lives and displaced millions of people.

The death and destruction arose from a violent insurgency involving a mad militia called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA's signature atrocity was the abduction of tens of thousands of the region's children from their families over the years. The children were then forced by the LRA into service as child soldiers and sex slaves.

Those who returned or escaped face deep trauma, as well as community rejection, and the Fund's focus is to assist war-affected children and youth by helping them reintegrate into their communities, seek education and training, and overcome the trauma caused by the violence.

I visited Gulu and Pader to meet with the young people involved in our programs and to look at other possible projects. The travel was hard (many hours driving over rough roads between the towns!) but the Fund's work is going well and it was uplifting to see the progress.

The first time I visited the region five years ago, the violence was still raging and the camps for the displaced were still full. Those camps became hellish places where brutality, hunger and disease took a thousand lives a month at the height of the conflict.

With the violence over, the camps are emptying and the population returning to the land. While enormous challenges remain, at least the acute phase of this crisis has passed.

Here is a video about the Fund:

I recently had the opportunity to discuss a survey that has just come out with The Fulcrum, one of our student newspapers on campus, and to reflect on our university’s situation and reputation, as well as on the challenges ahead. Here is some food for thought for you:

On surveys and rankings…

Some surveys give the University low marks when our students are asked to rate their experience. We have spent a lot of time examining the issue, because these results are disappointing and trouble us a great deal. Every single professor, every member of our staff and everyone here in the administration wants more than anything else to provide our students with an experience they will look back on as among the best years of their lives. While the University of Ottawa is among the very best in Canada in many respects, these surveys tell us that there is still work to do. We will not turn this around overnight, but we have made a good start.

Several related factors are involved. The first is our very rapid growth in student population over the last few years—a rate of growth so rapid that our building plans haven’t been able to keep up. This has presented challenges across the campus and especially in our heavily attended undergraduate programs. Large numbers in the early years of study can also create an impersonal atmosphere in which our students do not feel that they are valued as individuals.

As far as the physical environment is concerned, we set dollars aside every year to upgrade and expand existing buildings (Lamoureux is a recent example) and we are moving as quickly as possible to create new spaces for students as well as more classrooms and labs (the new Social Sciences Tower along the canal will help a lot). We are working with the deans to prepare and sequence a five-year building plan.

We should not underestimate the importance of food services on campus, and I hope you'll agree with me that there has been a vast improvement this year, with more to come. On the academic side, we have discussed with the deans several innovative approaches to enrich our students’ learning experience, and we will continue to look for ways in which we can support our professors in providing the high quality of student experience in the classroom they are working towards.

On student-faculty interactions…

This is an example of the challenge I’ve just referred to: greater numbers of students, especially in the early years in our undergraduate programs, have meant more sections in many courses and often more students per class. Although our professors are sincerely committed to providing every student with the best possible experience, circumstances make that very difficult to achieve. Among the innovations we have discussed with the deans are greater use of smaller, seminar-type instruction as a supplement to larger classes, and strategies that would create more mentoring opportunities for students. It is up to us to provide our outstanding professors with the support and the facilities they need in order to furnish the excellent student experience they want to create.

On our environmental initiatives…

We have amazing environmental initiatives on campus, such as the ban on the sale of bottled-water and the numerous recycling and composting facilities that we have installed in the last few years. I believe that the University of Ottawa is among the most environmentally focused universities in the country. Our sustainable development team is working hard to promote new initiatives on campus, and we are witnessing a growing awareness from our community concerning what we are doing on the environment at uOttawa.  This will certainly continue to increase in the coming months, as we continue to invest in a better environment for all.

On our university’s reputation…

I hope that my responses make it clear that the University of Ottawa takes survey results into consideration. We know that there is work to be done to improve the student experience, especially at the undergraduate level in the larger faculties. As I have emphasized, we are developing an understanding of the issues and we are creating plans to address them as quickly as possible.

That being said, reports and surveys about universities in Canada are hotly debated, because they do not always take into account the complexity of the university environment.  We will never be able to provide at our university the same kind of experience a student can have on a small, rural campus that focuses heavily on one-on-one engagement. On the other hand, we have all the advantages of a bustling, dynamic urban setting with a highly diverse student population, along with professors and scholars that have achieved worldwide recognition and play a leading role in their fields. My number one objective is to improve the quality of the student experience right across the campus: to combine world-class scholarship with excellence in teaching to produce a campus experience that will truly create lifelong memories of the excitement of learning.

This Saturday, the uOttawa Gee-Gees football team will have a chance to show that they're the best in Ontario, as they play for the 103rd Yates Cup, the Ontario University Athletics championship. This will be a great occasion for the whole University community to come together in support of our student-athletes, who are making a great name for uOttawa this year, and spur them on to their fifth Yates Cup since 1907 and their first since 2006. Action starts at 1 p.m. at Frank Clair Stadium.

Tickets: http://www.geegees.ca/node/64

I hope you’re following our fabulous football team this year. We’ve had only one loss so far, giving us one of the best records in Canada. We are in the playoffs, and heading for a possible national championship. Congratulations to coach Jean-Philippe Asselin, QB Brad Sinopoli and the whole team on a terrific effort. We’ll be there to cheer you on as you close in on the Vanier Cup!

We are celebrating the 30th anniversary of our CO-OP program this year. With the third largest program of its kind in Canada, uOttawa offers hundreds of our students a terrific opportunity each year to combine classroom learning with real-world experience preparing them for their careers. CO-OP placements give students a chance to apply what they’ve learned while taking on responsibilities and seeing for themselves how their ideas and energy can make a difference in the lives of others. We are especially proud of our CO-OP Student of the Year, Noam Lightstone of the Faculty of Engineering. Noam has received two NSERC awards. He is a model student and a skilled musician who has put his knowledge of biomedical mechanical engineering to use in four work terms. Congratulations to Noam, and to all those uOttawa students whose talents and hard work make our program so popular among our partners.