Trio Taking Charge

Nicolas Kasirer.

Roger Slee.

Nigel Roulet.

Academic leaders from near and far are taking over some of McGill's most important administrative positions. The University recently announced the appointments of new deans for the Faculties of Law and Education and a new director for the McGill School of Environment.

Law professor Nicolas Kasirer, BCL'85, LLB'85, takes over a post that has been held by such legal luminaries as Sir John Abbott, F.R. Scott and Maxwell Cohen. Kasirer began teaching at the Faculty in 1989 and has served as the director of McGill's Quebec Research Centre for Private and Comparative Law since 1996. His research interests include family property law and the relationship between language and law. Co-author of the multiple-volume Private Law Dictionary and Dictionnaire de droit privé, a research project based at McGill, Kasirer also served as an editor of a critical edition of the Civil Code of Quebec.

As a member of the committee that helped revamp the curriculum - tying more closely the Faculty's teaching of common and civil law - Kasirer regards McGill's two-system program and international orientation as chief strengths of his faculty and as characteristics that encourage a big-picture approach to the field. "[This faculty has] always been the place where you don't learn the rules, but where you go to learn to think about the law and to imagine what it can be," Kasirer told the McGill Reporter.

McGill's new Dean of Education, Roger Slee, arrives here in mid-January from Australia, where he was head of the Faculty of Education and of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. Slee is also currently the deputy director-general of education at the Queensland Ministry of Education.

An international expert on inclusive approaches to education, Slee is founding editor of the International Journal of Inclusive Education and founding director of the University of Western Australia's Centre for Inclusive Education.

Known as a skilled manager and negotiator, Slee was the driving force behind the creation of the Institute for Educational Research and Policy Evaluation, an initiative that involved government agencies and all Queensland-area universities.

When geography professor Nigel Roulet agreed to sit on the search committee to find the McGill School of Environment's next chief, he didn't suspect that he would end up with the job himself. But the deans of the MSE's three founding faculties - Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Arts and Science - decided that Roulet had the ideal CV for the position.

He has plenty of experience in leading multidisciplinary efforts - he directed the Centre for Climate and Global Change Research for six years and was recently the principal investigator of two research networks investigating the role of peatlands and forests in the earth's carbon cycle. As a member of the school's founding committee in 1997, Roulet also knows the MSE better than almost anyone else.

One of Roulet's first priorities for the MSE, which has a fully-subscribed bachelor's program, will be to investigate setting up a graduate studies program, probably in partnership with another department at McGill.