Source: U4 League
Acadia, Bishop’s, Mount Allison, and St. Francis Xavier Universities announced Tuesday they have formed a strategic alliance called the U4 League, which will promote and extend the universities’ common objectives of providing students with the highest quality undergraduate education in a residential setting.
Although the institutions have traditionally competed to attract students, they believe that by collaborating they can enhance the quality of each institution to the benefit of all of their students. The collaboration will be pursued in several ways: designing collaborative programs, courses, activities, and exchanges that students from each institution can access — both on campus and abroad; implementing best practice approaches to improve the quality of university teaching; increasing the teaching, research, and professional opportunities for faculty in each others’ institutions; developing joint research activities, particularly those that boost opportunities for U4 undergraduates; pursuing joint analyses of their institutional operations to determine how they can be improved; and implementing best practices in administration by cooperating, where possible, in service delivery, technology, and infrastructure, in order to contain costs and increase efficiencies.
The alliance wants to ensure that Canada’s students continue to have the unique advantages of small-scale, student-centred, residential universities.