Tim Vine is a self-proclaimed “jack of all trades, master of none” with a firm handshake, a closet of candy-coloured dress clothes and a “bizarre motley crew” of experiences. He holds an MBA and a PhD in political science, and was almost an accountant before becoming a hospital CEO “in the nick of time.” Now, he is the 26th president of King’s. I sat down with him at the end of August, seven weeks into his tenure, to find out if he has what it takes. 

Marlo Ritchie: What made you decide to come to King’s? 

Tim Vine: Well, have you been to King’s? Like, it’s kind of an amazing place. I was working in healthcare in rural northern Ontario, and one of the things that I was starting to notice in my professional life is that I wasn’t fully engaged in the way I wanted to be. There was a bit of a lack of forward-lookingness and hopefulness and I kept feeling like the vitality of young people and the future was missing from what I was doing. And then this job surfaced at King’s and I thought maybe this is a place where I can make a contribution that’s both positive, like I was doing in healthcare, but also really hopeful about the future in a way that I was struggling with at that moment. And at each stage it crystallized that this is exactly the place where I think I can be helpful in this moment and that will bring together so many of the things that I like to do. The beautiful thing about being president of King’s is you’re not only an administrator — you get to be a teacher, you get to be a scholar.

MR: Why do you think you were chosen to be president? 

TV: Honestly, it kind of beggars’ belief when I look at the other candidates. But maybe I was chosen because of that unique set of skills that I come with and my deep appreciation for the life of this place. I think about this place as being one that is about narrative: it’s about learning narrative and how to create narrative, whether that’s in the journalism school or in our humanities programs. And maybe there was an affinity there that people saw, that I kind of got the scholastic life of the place. And then some of those more practical skills around governance. The jack of all trades and master of none is something that kind of immediately jumps to mind. But I think in a lot of ways that is King’s: it’s a place that celebrates broad knowledge and sort of eschews that over-disciplinization, over-specialization in a way that I think both this community and our broader shared life together in Canada calls for at this particular moment.

MR: Some students perceived that you were chosen to cut budgets and close the deficit that we have. Do you see that as part of your role here? 

TV: I mean, possibly. I’ve been told that I’m the “finance guy”, which is really interesting because I think of myself as a political scientist. I think that there are skills that I bring, and certainly financial sustainability is a thought that I think we need to have as a community. We’ve been around for 237 years, and I think we want to be here for at least that long again. But financial sustainability is not the only type of sustainability, and I think if that’s the only thing we concentrate on, we’ve probably lost the plot. What I’m deeply interested in is getting the sense from the various constituents of the King’s and broader community to see what it is that we do, what we should be doing more of, what we might be able to be doing less of. So I think it is part of the mandate, but I take it as financial sustainability, not cutting budgets per se, and figuring out what it is that this community wants to be about and helping resource appropriately for that shared vision of the future.

MR: Do you have a plan or an approach for that financial stability and helping King’s get out of that deficit? 

TV: It’s a team effort. I think it would be hubris on the scale of Icarus if I were to come in here and say, ‘Tim Vine has got a 10-point plan after seven weeks for restoring the financial sustainability of this place.’ A lot of good people have spent a lot of time thinking about this and there were plans in place already as I came in. I think one of the things that we can do is translate from thinking about deficit reduction to thinking about the future. We have to go from a scarcity mindset to an abundance one. We have tremendous faculty. We have tremendous students. We have amazing alumni. We have a community around us that wants to succeed — I’ve yet to meet somebody who doesn’t desperately want Kings to succeed, both within our community and the broader community. And I think it’s a matter of how we harness those things. 

MR: What about Kings will you prioritize preserving, no matter the financial pressure? 

TV: So that’s a tough question that I wish I could avoid, but here we are and I think I have to answer it. And I think people ought to be asking, so don’t mistake my humor for evasion. I think our future relies on the scholastic life of the place. And seven weeks in, I don’t 100 per cent know what I mean by that, but I think it’s about excellence in teaching. I think it’s about support for scholarship. I think it’s critically about student experience: how students feel supported, how they feel in this community, what we are helping them in becoming, what formation we are offering for students to participate in. We can’t sacrifice the student experience, the quality of the education that we offer or the richness of the scholarly environment that we have, because I think, again, we’re in danger of losing the plot. 

MR: You had a focus on Indigenous reconciliation in your political science degree. How is that going to inform your work at King’s? 

TV: I like to think about reconciliation as right relationship. I think that takes away this idea that reconciliation is a thing that we do and we move on from, because it is about continued relationship. My dissertation was on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; I thought about it very much in a governmental lens, so this is a bit different. But what I hope is that it allows conversations with Indigenous communities to not start from the beginning, because I have that background. I take very seriously that I’m not in a territory I’m familiar with, and the generosity of Mi’kmaw people who have been sharing things to read with me, sharing perspectives, has been really, really interesting and important for me to understand the unique context here. So I hope that we can skip over some of the preliminaries and start taking meaningful action together on what it means for King’s to be a treaty community, what it means for King’s to be an ally, what it means for me to be those things in this context, in this time, in this place. 

MR: What do you think about living on campus where students are? 

TV: I love it. I’m so looking forward to students coming back. It’s funny you just asked that because I just saw my little boy run across the lawn and my wife with the dogs. The quad is our backyard. We are really excited to make a life and community here, to be a part of the triumphs, the tribulations. I have no doubt that I will be the villain, that young activists cut their milking teeth on for protests and those sorts of things, and I am here for it. I am so excited to see the youth, the vitality, the conversations that we’ll get into, the way that we will agree and disagree in the complexity, the full human splendor of this community. I’m so excited. 

MR: What are you most nervous about when it comes to your tenure ahead? 

TV: This is an important moment for King’s and I worry whether I’m the right person for it, frankly, whether I can bring the coherence in strategy and in execution that we need in order to chart a stable course. It’s a lot — this place has been around for 237 years. There are people who depend on this organization, not only for their futures, like students, but for their present, like our staff, our faculty. This is employment. This is a place of opportunity, but a place of challenge at the moment. So I’m nervous that I’ll fail, that I won’t be that right person for this moment in the way that I need to be to galvanize the support. But I don’t think that it rests all on me — we are a community and I have to remind myself of that. I’m speaking with the Vice President who was doing some historical research about King’s and it turns out, the King’s is always in crisis a little bit and has been since the beginning: we couldn’t get enough students in the first year. We’re here on the corner of the Dal Campus because when the Windsor Campus burned, we couldn’t raise the money to rebuild. And FYP exists because in 1970, the whole raison d’etre of the place was rocked at its very foundations as the Divinity School was moving to get coalesced in the Atlantic School of Theology. So FYP was a way of revitalizing and reinvigorating. We often have a narrative that the past is this beautiful place of nostalgia and happiness but I think the truth is a lot more complicated than that. Maybe that lowers the stakes a little bit for the present, allows for our humanity to shine through and for us to do our best in this moment. And I certainly plan to do my best.