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Rock of ages

Adult summer program solidifies Quest University's unique educational offerings
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GEOLOGIC LOGIC A Quest University adult summer student contemplates the basalt columns south of Whislter. Photo by Leslie Anthony

Sanding atop the Malamute, a massive rock whaleback breaching beside Highway 99 opposite the Stawamus Chief, Quest University geologist Steve Quane hectors a group of clipboard-clutching students — of which I am one — through a series of simple observations. First, of the Chief — its height, sheer face, overhangs and domed flanks; its colour, streaking, and the conspicuous dike cutting top-to-bottom through the entire formation. Next, we examine the smooth rock on which we stand, its wear patterns, swarm of striations, and polished surface.

In response to Quane's queries, oddly, utterances like "volcano" and "glacier" are as common as the expected descriptors. Here in only hour one of day one, many of us are leaping ahead — for reasons of recognition or the expediency to which we're accustomed — to give voice to the stated paradox of fire and ice that underlies "Dynamic geology of the Sea to Sky corridor," the adult-education course in which we have enrolled. The ever-smiling Quane, however, is having none of our brown-nosing or analytical hubris.

On the short hike back down, he urges us to consider other aspects of the Malamute — the direction of striations, and inclusions that inform larger patterns observed on the face of the Chief. The large dike traversing the latter, for instance, actually continues under the highway and up through the Malamute. We look closely at the border between mother rock and the material that has bisected it, running fingers over the ancient interface. In describing what we see it's again hard not to reach for what we imagine might be behind it.

It is, it suddenly seems, amazingly difficult to observe mere effects unburdened by the vagaries of cause or conclusion. But having now gathered as much as we can on the observation front, Quane steps us through the reasoning scientists would use to draw conclusions from these, helping us to self-deliver a likely geologic script. A glacier did, in fact, occupy this entire valley. A large one, over two kilometres high, meaning that the Chief — and the university campus — were beneath it. The Chief, representing the 150,000,000 year-old basement of the Coast Range, is composed entirely of intrusive igneous rocks formed some 20 kilometres below the crust. How was something that was gestated so deeply within the Earth exposed at sea level in Squamish? Three ways, it turns out: pushed up by subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate from below; helped to the surface by glaciers and water eroding material from above; and a little help from isostatic rebound (what land does once the weight of glaciers is removed).

What we come away with, however, isn't all deep-time dogma and geologic metric but the decidedly old-school idea of observation versus interpretation. The former must all come first, devoid of the latter: 10 observations may lead to one conclusion, but an 11th might change that completely. This our group has divined, through Quane's mentoring, collectively and collaboratively. This is emblematic of a learning model which has, in its short six-year history, propelled tiny Quest University to the very apex of North America's liberal-arts heap, and allowed it, for a third year now, to offer that experience in a handful of week-long courses for adults. Like Quest's regular students, these folks come from near and far, from the ranks of Quest parents to instructors at other institutions to vacation learners. Even interlopers like myself are enamoured of the institution's simple philosophy: that education, in its truest sense, comes not from providing the right answers, but from learning how to ask insightful questions.

Full disclosure: before becoming a professional journalist I was a professional student. I embraced 12 years of post-secondary education en route to a PhD in Zoology and Evolutionary Biology. It was my final year of undergrad, dominated by small classes, seminars and discussion groups, that propelled me to continue onto what I hoped was more of the same in graduate school. That promise wasn't always fulfilled, and those of us interested in such learning opportunities often found ourselves creating our own outside of the university's dust-blown halls. When, as a professor, I eventually left academia, it was as much dissatisfaction with the lack of focused learning and sheer corpulence and unresponsiveness of the system as anything else — something Quest seems to have handily surmounted with its block-plan style of learning, lack of lecture halls and small (maximum 20 students) seminar-style classes.

You'd have to be not smarter than a fifth grader to have missed the news that North America's vaunted National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) consistently ranks Quest first across multiple categories, including Student-Faculty Interaction and Supportive Campus Environment. That would be one of the big reasons that 260 new students will enter Quest this fall, a yield rate (the number who accept an admission offer) of 65 per cent — 20 per cent above the rate officials anticipated (180 students). What does this mean? Consider that the top U.S. liberal arts colleges have yields below 50 per cent and that the average for Ivy League schools is 58.9 per cent, with only Harvard exceeding Quest's value. The larger influx means the university will reach its maximum capacity of 650 students in 2014, two years ahead of schedule. Quest continues to expand on the diversity front as well: next year the student body will be 55 per cent Canadian, 33 per cent American and 12 per cent from over 40 other countries.

Quest's vision to build a new kind of university focused on excellence in undergraduate education has driven the development of a campus and curriculum "focused on producing broadly educated individuals with an informed perspective on the problems of the 21st century, and the integrative abilities to address them." Nowhere is the success of this more apparent than during graduation proceedings that include keystone presentations based on a unique "Question" that directs the final two years of every student's work. On a day last April I sat mesmerized through talks delivered with TED-like ease and confidence by undergraduates who could put most professional scientists I know to shame. Titles like An Investigation of the World Health Organization's definition of an "improved" water source: Examining Water Quality in Belize, or Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Morphine Addiction, and Modeling the Influence of Variable Tributary Inflow on Circulation and Contaminant Transport in a Water Supply Reservoir, made you think of learning outside this improved model much as skiers have recently considered the advent of fat skis: "What were we thinking?"

And while the adult program is a good bit shy of the same depth of engagement (let alone workload — there is no homework, only field trips and discussion), it nevertheless seeks in its limited way to offer a broad-stroke take on the universe. This summer's other two courses, "Infinity, certainty, and knowledge," overseen by Ryan Derby-Talbot, and "Political language, media and political thinking," led by Eric Gorham, could be seen — as adjudged by the facial expressions of participants at our daily group lunches — to have had the same tectonic effects on their minds as our geology course. Or that of the Juan de Fuca plate — uplifting.