A Message from Our Vice-Provost & Dean

York’s Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) was established in September 1963 and opened its doors to York’s first graduate cohort of just 11 students one year later, in 1964. This past year we have celebrated our 60th anniversary and, with it, a remarkable history of meaningful and challenging graduate research and pedagogy. 

York was the first university in Canada to offer a PhD in women’s studies and the first to accept doctoral dissertations written in an Indigenous language. Knowledge creation for a better world has always been at the heart of what we do. 

We continue to lead both in our commitment to engaged research and in the values at the core of York as a university: excellence, equity, access, sustainability, diversity and decolonization among them. These values guide the research that is conceived and created in collaboration between students and supervisors and – equally – the inclusive approach to graduate education and research that shapes that research, with an emphasis on engagement, collaboration, depth of thought, expanded conceptual horizons and broken boundaries. 

^{A photo of Alice MacLachlan}

_{Pictured from left to right: Tokunbo Ojo, Associate Dean, Students; Alice MacLachlan, Vice-Provost & Dean; Cheryl van Daalen-Smith, Associate Dean, Academic.}

As we look forward to the next 60 years of graduate education at York, we face multiple challenges and possibilities; these range from the need to decolonize how we conceive of intellectual property, acknowledging Indigenous rights to data sovereignty, to the rapidly changing technological landscape of artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

We are adapting to these, even as we rise to meet the needs of a changing graduate student population whose devotion to research and professional development is matched by other commitments: to their families, their communities, the world we all share and the problems we all face. The challenges and possibilities presented are vast and, as we face them, I am encouraged by the incredible innovations and new pedagogies already emerging in graduate studies: from experiential education, like the Cross-Campus Capstone Classroom for graduate students, to professional development, such as our new Scholarly Skills virtual brown bag series, to best practices in supervisory relationships and pedagogies, as collected and supported by the FGS Supervisory Support Hub.  We remain committed to both scholarship and scholars, as evidenced by our nationally award-winning Graduate Wellness Consultation Service.