Quest University - History

History

Quest University Canada is a private, secular, non-profit liberal arts and sciences university in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada. It was created as "Sea to Sky University" on May 29, 2002, by the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia's passage of the Sea to Sky University Act, which had been introduced as a private member's bill by MLA Ralph Sultan. The act's aim was to create a university that would "offer a rigorous and well-rounded university education in the arts and sciences with a global focus".

The university was the brainchild of David Strangway, OC, FRSC, who, after his retirement as president of the University of British Columbia, had begun to explore the possibility of creating a four-year, residential, liberal arts institution in Canada. Strangway wanted to create a university "where the student-teacher ratio was better than the Canadian national average of 30 to one, and where students could get a general arts and sciences curriculum that focused not on specific disciplines, but rather how those disciplines operated within the world at large."

A 240-acre (97 ha) parcel of clear-cut land was purchased in the Garibaldi Highlands neighborhood of Squamish, BC; the central 60 acres (24.3 ha) was designated as the campus, with the surrounding lands zoned for housing development. The fledgling university received grants from the J.W. McConnell Foundation, R. Howard Webster Foundation, and the Stewart and Marilyn Blusson Foundation, which enabled the university to begin construction on its campus and hire staff. In October 2005, the university changed its name to Quest University Canada.

The first administrative staff and faculty were hired in 2006, and began developing a curriculum and institutional policies that would shape a university that was "intimate, integrated, and international". On August 29, 2007, Quest University Canada held its opening convocation for its first 74 students, who were from four Canadian provinces, seven U.S. states, and eleven countries outside North America.

Over the next year, the university underwent a number of administrative changes. David Strangway stepped aside as president and was named chancellor; he was replaced as president by Thomas L. Wood, who had previously served for 14 years as president of Mount Royal College and three years as Quest's chief academic officer. Less than a year later, Wood was replaced by an interim president, Dean Duperron. Duperron's appointment was the result of an alliance with CIBT Education Group, but, within a month, the alliance was dissolved. The board invited Professor David Helfand, chair of the astronomy department at Columbia University in New York and a visiting tutor at Quest since 2007, to serve as interim president.

Helfand has overseen the expansion of Quest University Canada, which has grown to 430 students as it begins its sixth academic year. There are now 30 full-time faculty. The faculty come from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, and Switzerland. In addition, there are three additional academic staff working directly with students and a total support staff of 45. Visiting tutors have included faculty and researchers from the Universities of McMaster, Dalhousie, Toronto, Ottawa, and British Columbia and the Canadian Center for Human Health, as well as from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Caltech and Colorado College in the United States and the Open University in the United Kingdom.

On April 30, 2011, Quest University Canada graduated its first class, bestowing the degree of Bachelor of Arts and Sciences on 49 students.