About the Institution
In the 1980s, a Kelowna community group began a concerted effort, lobbying the British Columbia provincial government for better access to undergraduate university programs. Their campaign, "Getting There By Degrees", facilitated a change in Okanagan College's mandate, allowing the college to offer undergraduate degree programs to students in the Okanagan region. The college informally adopted the new name, Okanagan University College (OUC) in 1992. This name was adopted as the institution's legal name in 1995. Although the degree programs were mostly based on a new, North Kelowna campus which opened its doors to students in January 1993, the first degrees were awarded earlier, on 11 June 1991. Initially, students completed their degrees through collaborations with the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Victoria, and the degrees were granted in the names of the university collaborators (e.g., "a Bachelor of Science from University of British Columbia, at Okanagan University College"). In 1998 OUC began granting degrees under its own authority. New faculty in the degree programs continued to lobby for changes in the institution's mandate, eventually helping to establish a new community group, "University 2000", with the slogan "OU? Oh yes! Full University Status for OUC". The goals of this group were to further expand the university college's postsecondary role, principally by adding graduate studies and research to OUC's mandate. The growth of the degree programs, the expansion of the North Kelowna Campus, and the activities of this lobby created some tensions between degree-program faculty, largely based at North Kelowna, and other parts of the institution. Some faculty favoured splitting the institution into a new university and a new community college. Although OUC's initial progress had been hampered by not having a research mandate, and delays in obtaining recognition from theAssociation of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), OUC faculty had rapidly developed a solid reputation in the research community. External research funding, for example, at OUC grew from less than $1 million in 2002-2003 to $6.8 million in 2004-2 ...

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