For nearly a decade, the McKenna Centre has attracted established leaders from a wide range of sectors who’ve come to StFX to ponder one central question: what is true leadership – and how can we teach it?
The Director of the McKenna Centre, Dr. Mathias Nilges, is an ardent supporter of students and their creativity, and his cutting-edge approach to leadership combines the academic study of leadership with hands-on training that encourages students to direct their own path to leadership.
Dr. Nilges notes that “one of the most exciting aspects of the McKenna Centre is that it makes it possible to foster and to produce courageous, innovative projects by students and faculty at StFX, projects that make important contributions to contemporary academic, sociocultural, and political debates.”
The McKenna Centre does not exist to tell students what they should be thinking about; rather, it provides a forum for students to deeply engage with the toughest issues of their generation. In doing so, they gain an understanding of the role they might play, both during their tenure on campus and beyond.
Because leadership skills are transferable across fields and have value and utility for a wide range of endeavours, the McKenna Centre supports a wide spectrum of innovative ideas, events, projects, and initiatives from students and faculty.
Indeed, the slate of speakers, events, and initiatives in the 2019-2020 academic year has been remarkable in its depth and breadth, and the McKenna Centre is quickly becoming a nation-leading incubator for social change.
In early September, the McKenna Centre set the tone for the year by hosting the first annual StFX Shoreline Cleanup, a community event that underscored that leadership involves taking action, even in small ways. This was soon followed by the Annual Leadership Summit, which was focused around the topic of so-called “Soft Skills” and created space for students to gain a fuller understanding of the spectrum of abilities required of leaders behind the scenes, from daily diplomacy to active listening.
The range of speakers that the McKenna Centre hosted this year was broad and cross-cutting, unified by one core principle: that the speakers provoke self-reflection and dialogue about issues that are important to our students and our society. They included:
Bruce Campbell, the former Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, one of Canada’s leading policy research institutes;
Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti, and Jennifer Wenzel, whose work probes ways in which we can undertake an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables;
Tina Oh, a first-year Master of Environmental Studies student at Dalhousie who received the 2018 Brower Youth Award for her leadership in the environmental movement; and
The StFX History Department welcomed Dr. Eric McDuffie, whose research interests include the African diaspora, the Midwest, Black feminism, Black queer theory, Black radicalism, urban history, and Black masculinity. The McKenna Centre helped support the event financially.
Additionally, the McKenna Centre supported three longer-term endeavours:
The McKenna Fellowship program, which funds recent StFX graduates interested in public policy and leadership for sustainable development. Interns spend several weeks on the campus at StFX prior to engaging in two separate, four-month internships in Ottawa, either as policy analysts or assistants to senior managers in government departments or agencies;
LEAD 100, a strategic communication, media, and public relations course. All year, students have participated in this extracurricular course as a means of developing their communication and leadership skills beyond the traditional classroom; and
The McKenna Scholar in Residence program. The inaugural scholar, Dr. Adolph J. Reed, Jr., is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania whose research interests include American and Afro-American politics and political thought, urban politics, and American political development. During his time at the McKenna Centre in November, he conducted workshops, met with students, and delivered a keynote lecture to the broader campus community.
Most recently, the StFX physics department hosted the star-studded Atlantic University Physics Association Conference, organized by StFX students. The McKenna Centre helped support the conference financially. AUPAC was anchored by three outstanding scholars: Dr. K. Renee Horton, the first African American to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama in Material Science, has worked for NASA since 2009 and currently serves as the Space Launch System Lead Metallic/Weld Engineer; Dr. Donna Strickland, a Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018; and StFX’s own, alumnus Dr. Allan MacDonald, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who received the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work in a field known as twistronics.
The Honourable Frank McKenna ’70, whose efforts brought the eponymous centre into fruition in 2011, was the president of the Students’ Union at StFX during tumultuous times. The cultivation of student leadership is close to his heart, and when the centre opened, he noted that the “McKenna Centre isn’t bringing leadership to StFX. Instead, it is bringing a centre to a university which has a long tradition of leadership.”
The McKenna Centre, under the guidance of Dr. Nilges, is enjoying certainly doing just that. The activities of the centre for the 2020-2021 academic year are in the planning stages, but one thing is certain: they will all, in large or small ways, contribute to the legacy of student leadership at StFX.
