Piece of Mind

It can get quite lonely for faculty representatives on the Board of Governors. I have written before about the latent disparity in status between the elected and the appointed. But there is also the occasional dreadful feeling: what if no one cares? What if your colleagues on the faculty do not find issues of land development, faculty housing, collective bargaining, flexible learning, faculty industrial engagement, district energy, and the international college, among others, worth thinking about, let alone dealing with? I was therefore comforted to see that eight faculty members at UBC-Vancouver have declared their candidacy in the election for the two slots available to them on the presidential search committee. Surprisingly, the faculty at UBC-Okanagan will have an equal number of representatives on that committee. Both are already known. One is an uncontested candidate for the election there. The other is one of the four Governors chosen by the MRCC to represent the Board on the search committee. Continue reading →

I was not surprised to receive some push back on my last blog. I have also had a chance to revisit some of the issues I raised and the way they sounded. They are important, and it is certainly my responsibility as a member of the university community to bring them to the fore. Continue reading →

Ever since Stephen Toope announced the date of his resignation from the presidency of UBC, I and a few other members of the Board of Governors have been struggling with some tough questions. Should this administration stop, or at least slow down, its relentless pace in land development and large-scale capital projects? And if not, how far should they go in committing the incoming administration to a vision of campus they may not be willing to adopt? Continue reading →

“Your post was so highly elliptical that individuals involved will be pissed and onlookers will be puzzled,” wrote one friend. The latter part of his statement got my attention. A few other personal emails, Menzies’ comment below, and Wakefield’s column in the Ubyssey confirmed to me that my last post was –uncharacteristically– elliptical, which led different people to read it differently. Some even read in it the opposite of what I had meant. While my former Jesuit teachers would have been proud of this rhetorical powerplay, I have decided to give it another chance. This is unfortunate because larger issues of university governance seem to be heating up lately, such as those ably raised by Elly Walton’s in, “Are universities as open as they should be?” and by Alex Usher who seems to have missed many points in “Time for a New Duff-Berdahl?“. I shall try to get to the issues they raise as soon as I can. Continue reading →