In conversation with Alan Davis, KPU’s longest-standing president

World maps of all shapes and sizes line the walls of Alan Davis’s office. As Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s president, he has travelled all over the globe to attend business conferences and meet with national academic leaders and politicians.

This year marks Davis’s 13th year as KPU’s president, making him the longest-standing president in the school’s 44-year-long history. But all things must come to an end, and this summer, Davis will say goodbye to his time as president, something he has yet to fully come to terms with.

“It’s been a blur,” Davis says. “I’m having dreams about it — things are coming up and people I work with. When I wake up, I’m like, ‘What was that all about?’ So it’s starting to have an impact.” 

As president, Davis is “responsible for everything” from organizing senior leadership, policies, and processes and overseeing the institution’s financial health, to making sure the university fulfills its mission of providing students with skills and strategies for learning excellence and holistic development. He also works to empower and motivate people, helping them to better support KPU. 

“In the end, if we’re a strong institution, then we’re better able to fulfill our mission, which is to teach students,” Davis says. “Student success is what we’re all about.” 

Aside from his internal duties, Davis is also the face of KPU, so he has an external role to play in and around the university community, whether that be greeting and congratulating students at convocation ceremonies or attending local events. 

Davis was first inaugurated as KPU’s president in 2012, just four years after then-B.C. premier Gordon Campbell announced Kwantlen would evolve from a university college into a polytechnic university. 

Some of the administrative structures Davis came into reflected those of a smaller institution rather than the large-scale one Kwantlen had become — a school with four campuses and more than 13,000 students at the time. This was something Davis knew he had to change, so he looked towards his past experiences for ideas. 

Davis grew up in England and studied chemistry at University College London. In 1972, he moved to Canada to complete graduate studies in chemistry at Simon Fraser University, which led him to a 12-year teaching stint at the University of the Fraser Valley. He followed his time teaching by working within university and college leadership across Canada, including the Open Learning Agency, which is now TRU Open Learning, and Athabasca University. 

In 2008, Davis packed his bags and years of knowledge to head to Upstate New York, where he’d landed his first presidency position at the State University of New York Empire State College, which he describes as a “somewhat alternative, adult-focused” institution. 

“It’s very famous in higher education for being quite radically different,” Davis says. “You could take people — mid-career or late-career — and not have them start from scratch, but [instead] value what they already have learned through experience and work. It’s a great place.”

While Davis was in New York State, his children were still living in Vancouver, so when the presidency opportunity at KPU opened, he took it. 

“I missed Canada and I missed my kids …. I remember doing a decision grid … and it just tipped in favour of coming to KPU, so I did, and it was an epic journey. I drove across the country with my dog,” he says. 

“My career, both originally as a college instructor and then moving into teaching university systems, seemed to align with this notion of Kwantlen, which had been a college and was now trying to get onto its feet as a fully recognized university.” 

When Davis arrived, KPU only had two vice-presidents (VP) — one academic and the other in finance and administration — who ran everything. He says it was a challenge to run the institution due to the lack of people in positions of responsibility, as everything was complicated and spread out across campuses. So, Davis worked to build KPU’s administration.  

Now, the university has six VP positions — academic, administration, human resources, external affairs, students, and Office of Equity and Inclusive Communities — among many other executive and associate VP positions. 

Expanding KPU’s executive team set the stage for one of Davis’s main goals during his presidency — to build capacity and set the university up for success. This mission has been demonstrated through various initiatives, including working with Indigenous communities, which Davis says has been “slow and important work.” 

Davis helped establish an associate VP Indigenous leadership position to reach out to communities and work with Indigenous people to find ways to decolonize administration processes. This has led the university to waive tuition fees for Indigenous students part of the First Nations KPU’s campuses reside on and launch the xéʔelɬ Pathway to Systemic Transformation Framework, a plan and commitment to advance truth and reconciliation at the university.  

In response to the murder of George Floyd, a Black man whose neck and back was knelt on for more than nine minutes by a white police officer in the United States in 2020, Davis launched a university-wide task force on anti-racism. 

By 2022, the task force made 64 recommendations to address systemic racism at the university. Davis immediately implemented six of these recommendations, one of which was creating the Office of Anti-Racism and a respective VP position. 

A year later, KPU created its first-ever accessibility plan, which was informed by the experiences of students and employees with disabilities, “to address identified barriers and challenges to disability justice and inclusion,” KPU’s website reads. 

“We may not have achieved everything, but we’ve got pretty serious plans,” Davis says. “We’ve done a lot of good work building the capacity at KPU to move ahead.”

KPU has seen countless changes during Davis’s presidency, including the creation of the Wilson School of Design on the Richmond campus in 2018 and the Civic Plaza campus in 2019. 

About 10 months after Davis came to the university, he launched KPU Day, an annual event for employees to help build a sense of community. At the first annual event, he recalls packing 1,000 employees into a local banquet hall in between classes, and while there were some logistical challenges, everyone had a great time. 

“It was this overwhelming happiness that everybody got together,” he says. “It was packed, and we had the greatest time.” 

Before his first year as president came to an end, Davis established the president’s diversity and equity committee to fulfill a promise made to a group of Kwantlen Student Association members, which he says was one of his great achievements. 

“They came in … and said, ‘We were promised this committee and nobody’s ever done anything.’ So I said, ‘Let’s do it right now,’ and so off we went.”

Davis brought brewing to the Langley campus, which is now an award-winning program, and encouraged the university’s Board of Governors to take risks on promising projects. Creating the entertainment arts program was one such project, as was launching the Zero Cost Textbook initiative, which has saved students millions of dollars, Davis says. 

“KPU is now famous for its free, online open textbooks,” he adds. “Faculty have really enjoyed working with them and developing the texts. They’ve won awards for some of the work they’ve done in writing open textbooks.” 

Davis also changed the face of convocation ceremonies at KPU. When he first arrived at the university, he recalls loading students, family members, and faculty into the Langley Events Centre for mutli-hour ceremonies lined with speeches. 

“It’s hard on people to sit there for two, three hours waiting for one person to cross the stage. It didn’t seem very student focused,” he says. 

At Empire State College, Davis says convocation was broken down into smaller ceremonies which were held on campus. After talking with the registrar’s office at KPU, which was on board with revamping convocations, he decided to implement a similar structure at the university. Now, the Surrey campus gymnasium is converted into a convocation hall decked with curtains and lights. There are fewer speeches, and the ceremonies are usually no longer than one-and-a-half hours. 

“We do about eight or 10 [ceremonies]. It’s a lot of hard work, but everyone is special and feels great. People loved it,” Davis says, adding that seeing students cross the stage is “always a treat.” 

“With some of them, I’m just blown away by, like, ‘You’re so good. I’ve never bumped into you or seen you before, and you’ve achieved all this amazing work on your way to becoming a graduate.’” 

Given Davis’s internal focus over his presidency, he says he wishes he had done a bit more work externally. 

“I think I focused my energy on building the capacity of KPU to do its mission, but that means I probably haven’t been as out and about and connected as much as I could have been. You can’t do everything. You have to make a choice,” he says. 

However, Davis did spend time advocating on behalf of KPU in regard to provincial funding. 

A preliminary report released by the B.C. government highlighted how funding is distributed between colleges, universities, and institutes in the province, which showed that KPU “gets a bad deal,” Davis says.   

“I’ve advocated many times in different ways to say, ‘Look, the amount of money we get relative to the number of students and the number of graduates is less than it should be. If we had more money, we could do our work better and we could do more.’”

While KPU hasn’t seen any success on this front, Davis says the university hasn’t gone backwards, calling it a “slow, methodical journey.” 

Looking towards the future, Davis hopes the next KPU president will be able to focus on more external work and building key relationships with the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills, local governments, First Nations communities, as well as on a federal level with colleagues by completing advocacy in Ottawa.

“The president needs to be out and about, and I’m hoping that will help KPU in terms of reputation and being connected with the community.”

Reflecting on his time as president, Davis says there are periodical big waves of optimism and pessimism, a recent one being the provincial and federal caps on international students, which he predicts will be the focus of his work until his term ends. 

“We knew exactly where we’re going, what we were doing. We had the money to do all kinds of interesting things … but now we’re going to have to tuck it away for a rainy day,” he says, adding that as international student revenue gradually declines, things will start to become tricky. 

“There’s going to be fewer students around, that means fewer instructors. There’s no getting around it — you can’t have people standing in empty classrooms.” 

As Davis turns 75 years old, he has no plans of retiring anytime soon and hopes to stay involved in higher education “for as long as anyone will have [him].” 

“I’m lucky with my health and I still have all my attributes. I will continue to work until I just can’t do it.”