A statement by Dr Arvind Gupta

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Ghoussoub

Today UBC released a number of documents related to my resignation as President and Vice Chancellor of the University of British Columbia. As a result, I am compelled to comment on the documents, their content, tone and the accuracy of what they portray.

What was published is a one-sided representation of what transpired in the months prior to my resignation.

I have spent my entire working life trying to make this country and province better. The chance to be UBC’s President was an exciting opportunity to build a 21st century university, one that is better connected to the community, and the bigger world beyond the campus. This modern version of our largest university is essential to making BC into an even better society.

As President, I made a commitment to the people of British Columbia, the Board, the students and the faculty that we would move UBC to become one of the top universities in the world.

That goal meant substantial change including a rethinking of priorities and refocusing on the academic mission. And change can make some people uneasy. If it didn’t, it would be called the status quo. So, it is no surprise that not everyone at the university embraced this vision and the required actions.

That said, the assertions in the released documents, were not based on facts or evidence given to me at any time.

Still, I attempted to work in a collegial manner which is the hallmark of every well-governed university. Unfortunately there was never any formal review of my performance, or outreach by the Board to the broader university community. This would have allowed both the UBC Board and myself to assess my first year accomplishments and the scope of the work ahead.

This summer it became clear to me, that I did not have the support of the full Board, and as such felt I had no other option but to resign in the best interest of the university. It is my sincerest hope that I with leading UBC scholars will carry on with this important work on behalf of UBC, British Columbia, and Canada.

Media Contact:

Kirk Williams

604 340 4597

kwilliams@pacegroup.com

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A few wise words from the UBC Faculty Association to the presidential search committee

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Ghoussoub

By Mark MacLean, President, on behalf of the Executive Committee

Dear Search Committee,

Thank you for meeting with us on January 12. We welcomed the opportunity to communicate some of our concerns about, and hopes for, this presidential search process.

We would like to take this opportunity to both reiterate and amplify some of the points of our conversation with you. We are convinced that the new President must be someone able to regain the trust of the faculty and university community, and have the credibility required to move forward in a responsive way to the damage our university’s reputation has suffered in the last half year. Continue reading →

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Searching for a president after disappearing another: The UBC conundrum

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Ghoussoub

By Professor Leah Keshet

In August of 2015, the UBC Faculty Association (UBCFA) sent some strongly worded letters to the administration and the Board of Governors, seeking open and full disclosure of the causes for termination of Professor Arvind Gupta’s presidency. This appears to have had no tangible result, to date, and the whole affair remains buried in secrecy. UBC is yet to comply and reply to scores of Freedom of Information requests. We, the faculty, have not been able to ascertain what happened and what is being kept from the university community. Unfortunately, it seems the UBCFA has chosen not to continue advocating for disclosure of the facts.

Continue reading →

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Humbled and Proud

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Ghoussoub

04_OC_Medal_smallAll I could think of when the phone call from the Governor General office came was the friendly face of the immigration officer who signed my residence papers more than 36 years ago. I hadn’t applied for a refugee’s visa, yet I was technically a refugee.

A civil war had started back in my country of origin as I was finishing my graduate studies in Paris. I was already on a postdoctoral position in Canada, awaiting the winds of war to die down. They eventually did, but only 16 years later. And when I finally decided that waiting was futile and proceeded to apply to become a Canadian permanent resident, there were tons of complications to overcome. For one, I didn’t have a home country to apply from.

Continue reading →

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Jennifer Berdahl and Margot Young for the presidential search committee

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Ghoussoub

“This leaves me asking whether, as a faculty member, I am a “serf”—one of the humble toiling masses—whose opinion is unimportant, or who is deemed too primitive to engage in an informed dialogue about the course of the university’s future.” That’s what one senior colleague wrote after the announcement of the sudden departure of Arvind Gupta from the UBC presidency. But there are now signs that the faculty at UBC want to claim their university back. The presidential search process is a first and important step in that direction.

Continue reading →

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UBC Faculty Association response to the report by Honourable Lynn Smith

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Dear Colleagues:

The Honourable Lynn Smith, Q. C., completed her fact-finding process last week and presented the parties with her report. We thank Professor Smith for her fair and impartial process and for producing a high quality, nuanced report, a public summary of which is attached here. Summary-of-Process-and-Conclusions-Final

Continue reading →
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Shared governance hits rock bottom at UBC, by Professor Stephen Petrina

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Ghoussoub

The Board of Governors’ rejection this week of the Faculty Association’s request for accountability in President Gupta’s resignation marks the low point of shared or faculty governance at the University of British Columbia. It’s a shame that UBC sunk to rock bottom as it intended to rise to the occasion of its 100th birthday. Continue reading →

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Artificial Intelligence uncovers how Gupta and Montalbano became blood brothers

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Ghoussoub

In view of the sudden resignation of UBC’s president and the limited but informative statements provided by the Chair of the Board, a colleague decided to perform a computer-assisted reconstruction of the events that led to the resignation. She fed all the publicly available information into her state-of the-art computer program and added some of the known background about President Gupta, Chair Montalbano, and their associates. Here was the outcome as spelled out by R2D2. It is supposed to be funny, but if you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, you are not alone. Continue reading →

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UBC, WTF?

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Ghoussoub

The UBC leadership crisis is entering its fifth week. By “leadership crisis,” I include of course the sudden and non-explained resignation of a president, but also the glaring deficiency in leadership that followed. Starting with the amateurish handling of the announcement, to the alleged heavy-handed interference with a colleague’s research work, to the power vacuum eventually occupied by PR consultants, to the valiant but somewhat simplistic efforts of the interim president to restore a semblance of sanity to the institution. To those of you who are just joining us, here is a good analysis/summary of the situation by Melonie Fullick.

meloniefullick's avatarWhiteboard Workout

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the recent events at UBC, it’s that silence can say more than words, whether you’re withholding information or telling someone else to keep quiet. That probably sounds obvious, but the university’s announcement of Arvind Gupta’s resignation—and its handling of the events that followed—reflect some problematic assumptions about who should be able to speak, when, and what should be said.

What was it that triggered UBC’s current public crisis? Gupta’s July 31 departure was announced publicly on August 7 in classic “Friday Afternoon News Dump” fashion: UBC published a news release, which was tweeted shortly after 4pm EDT. In a news release where roughly 50% of the text was devoted to celebratory prose about the incoming interim president (Dr. Martha Piper), UBC gave no explanation for Gupta’s resignation except that he had “decided he can best contribute to the university and lead…

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PR consultants, the “UBC side” and the rest of us

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Ghoussoub

CBC Radio Early Edition host Rick Cluff introduced me at the beginning of the segment as someone who has been teaching at UBC for 38 years. Yet at the very end of my interview, he announced that “tomorrow, we will have someone representing the UBC side.” The UBC side was supposed to be John Montalbano, before the latter cancelled and was replaced by acting interim president Angela Redish. Many colleagues phoned me to mark their displeasure of this misstatement by Cluff. Right after the Twitter world reacted in the same way, a classy CBC Radio producer called me up to apologize. This incident was inadvertent. What follows was not. Continue reading →

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UBC faculty to the Premier of BC: Help us out of this crisis

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Two new types of allegations came out regarding John Montalbano, since I wrote 2 weeks ago the open letter asking him to resign from the UBC Board of Governors. One deals with his role in potentially compromising the academic freedom of one of our colleagues, and is being currently investigated by former Supreme Court Judge, Lynn Smith. Another relates to alleged conflict of interest violations, a matter that the Faculty Association is currently pursuing. But the original premise of failed leadership remains unanswered. Mr. Montalbano is still on the Board (though not Chair) hoping to be sufficiently cleared by the fact-finding report to get back in the saddle. Keep in mind that the investigation deals with only one –though an important one– of the Chair’s alleged actions. Continue reading →

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What if dissent was manufactured?

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Many colleagues wrote after last week’s post, that they had never heard of rumours of a “Deans’ rebellion”. Actually, I had started wondering about this when I learned that a few of the deans are as shocked and upset by the President’s resignation as most of the faculty. Furthermore, a couple of the dozen reporters sniffing around the Montalbano-Gupta affair asked me last week, whether I had heard of a joint letter from the Deans to the Board. I didn’t and for good reasons. One of the reporters eventually confirmed that no such letter exists; only a joint formal request by the Deans to meet the president to discuss the transition after Farrar’s departure from the provost-ship. So I started wondering. What if the rumours of a “Deans’ uprising” were only rumours? What if dissent had been manufactured? Continue reading →

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Why the UBC Leadership Crisis Matters Beyond the Ivory Tower, by Professor E. Wayne Ross

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Ghoussoub

The ongoing drama at University of British Columbia may look like a tempest in a teapot, but the dispute among university governors, managers, and faculty has implications that reach beyond the ivory tower. Two principles are at the heart of the crisis: transparency in governance and academic freedom. The early August announcement that Arvind Gupta had suddenly and immediately resigned as president was startling, coming just 13 months after his term began. In March 2014, UBC Board Chair John Montalbano said “The opportunity to lead one of the world’s great universities attracted outstanding candidates, but Dr. Arvind Gupta clearly stood out as the best choice to lead this great university.”

What happened? Continue reading →

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The cataclysmic effect of masculinity contests on the ivory tower

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Ghoussoub

In a full-court press carefully engineered yesterday by damage control experts at the PR firm Kirk & Co, the chair of the UBC Board of Governors, John Montalbano, used two lines of defense in his effort to justify his unwise intervention with Professor Berdahl. He did so by arguing that he had started their conversation by giving her the option to stop if and when she felt uncomfortable or if she thought he was infringing on her academic freedom. The other aspects of the story (“concerns” by RBC and subsequent “follow-ups” by Sauder School folks) were carefully avoided. I will not elaborate on this aspect of the controversy, but I refer to this NY Times article to see what experts think about his approach. Continue reading →

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Prominent UBC Professor and FRSC, James Zidek, calls on Montalbano to resign

Posted on August 20, 2015 by Ghoussoub

This is a comment directed to Mr. John Montalbano regarding the announced resignation of Professor Arvind Gupta from the Presidency of UBC. In my 49 years at UBC in various professorial and administrative positions, I have never seen a situation as badly mismanaged as that surrounding the so-called resignation of Professor Gupta. Even if one grants that there was a reasonable basis for the events that transpired, clear and open disclosure would have avoided the mess that UBC now finds itself in. Continue reading →

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An open letter to Angela Redish, interim UBC president, by Mark Mac Lean

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Dear Dr. Redish,

The Faculty Association at the University of British Columbia strongly supports and acknowledges the University’s commitment to academic freedom. We particularly support and agree with your unqualified commitment set out in the Statement from UBC on Academic Freedom dated August 17, 2015:

The collective agreement confirms that members of the University have the freedom, within the law, to pursue what seems to them to be fruitful avenues of inquiry, to teach and to learn unhindered by external or non-academic constraints. Suppression of this freedom, whether by the institutions of the state, the officers of the University or the actions of private individuals, would prevent the University from carrying out its primary function. Continue reading →

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Unclear on the Concept: the UBC Board of Governors, by Elizabeth Hodgson

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Ghoussoub

The UBC Board of Governors has spoken out in the last 24 hours on its two related controversies which have made the national news. As a UBC faculty member, I am deeply distressed by the UBC Board’s apparent choices in these situations. As an academic who specializes in analyzing texts, I find the communiqués from the Board in the last day even more frustratingly wide of the mark. Continue reading →

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Canada loses again

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Ghoussoub

By Nancy Reid, Professor, University of Toronto and Officer of the Order of Canada

This was the subject heading in an email I sent to an American colleague, on learning of Arvind Gupta’s sudden and unexpected resignation as President of UBC. My colleague had been hired into a senior administrative post at a Canadian University, and also had a short-lived tenure: “I was told they wanted to bring someone in from the outside to make changes, but it turned out that what they really wanted was the status quo”.

While those closest to UBC are understandably concerned about the reputation of the university, the presidents of major research institutions are influential leaders for the whole country.  I was not alone among my U of T colleagues in being very enthusiastic about the appointment of President Gupta to lead one of our great research universities.  And I am certainly not alone in my disappointment with the recent events.

Are you a creative, imaginative, and interested in meaningful change? If so, senior university leadership in Canada is probably not for you.  And the Conference Board of Canada reports: “Despite a decade or so of innovation agendas and prosperity reports, Canada remains near the bottom of its peer group on innovation”. Hmmm.

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Open letter to Martha Piper, by UBC Professor Leah Keshet

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Dear Dr. Piper,

A recent email from you, which is still in my inbox, closes with the UBC motto “Tuum est”. My understanding is that this means “It is yours,” as in UBC belongs to us (the faculty, the students, the staff, and yes, even the administration).

At the moment, I feel this motto is misplaced. Just as misplaced as the offhand remark “we won’t miss a beat,” by the BoG Chair in describing the “Leadership transition” – ouster – of President Gupta, who was a mere 13 months into his term when this “resignation” took place.

I do not feel UBC is mine, or belongs to me after the recent unexplained and trivialized events. Like other faculty members, I am demoralized and in shock. I am not ready for the cheerful upbeat sugary words of celebration, nor am I “looking forward” to meeting and working with any president other than President Gupta.

You were a fine and respected UBC president in your time. Why spoil such a solid legacy by stepping into the hornet’s nest, which has obviously stalled Dr. Gupta’s reforms, eventually driving him out of his post?  While you have likely good intentions to help UBC in its time of need, this is not the time to “get on with the celebrations” before a proper housecleaning, a return to the principles of shared governance, a pledge for transparency and accountability, and the full reinstatement of Arvind Gupta as our UBC President.

Sincerely yours,

Leah Keshet, Professor, UBC

 

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An open letter to John Montalbano, chair of the UBC Board of Governors

Posted on August 13, 2015 by Ghoussoub

Dear Sir,

I have been a faculty member at UBC for 38 years, and I have served this great university in many other functions, including six years on the Board of Governors (2008-14), three of them on the Board’s Management Resources Compensation Committee (MRCC). I was elected by the faculty to the presidential search committee, which eventually chose Arvind Gupta, after evaluating hundreds of files during an eight-month deliberation period. You were also a key member of that committee, as Chair of the Board.

Last Friday, I read your joint announcement with the Chancellor, informing the world that President Gupta has decided to resign after only 13 months on the job. This news took many of us by surprise, as would be expected. What was not expected is that you, the Chair of the Board, were also “surprised” by this resignation, at least according to the Vancouver Sun. Continue reading →

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