Tag Archives: UBC

UBC Board of Governors’ response to faculty questions on Gutpa’s resignation … “run along now, it’s none of your business” [updated]

In his response to questions raised by the University of British Columbia Faculty Association regarding last week’s departure of UBC president Arvind Gupta, UBC Board of Governors chair John Montalbano offers the equivalent of a pat on the head and a cheery “run along now, it’s none of your business.”

Montalbano and the UBC Board of Governors continue to operate in secret, striving to keep the public as well as university faculty, staff, and students ignorant of the rationales and actions of the highest governing body of this (when I last checked) public institution.

In his response to UBCFA president Mark Mac Lean, Montalbano said the board recognizes in the absence of “concrete information” there will be speculation on the circumstances of Gupta’ departure as president. While he stated that “the rumours or speculations that have been publicly raised have contained numerous inaccuracies” he offered no clarifications nor did he offer any explanation about what transpired to end Professor Gupta’s presidency after only one year, or what caused this leadership crisis.

In his letter, Montalbano declared that the Board acted “in accordance with” the University Act and UBC Policies; that the Gupta’s departure was not a failure in governance; and that the Board acted responsibly and with every consideration for fairness.

Oh, okay, if you say so …

Montalbano writes, “The university is place of open dialogue and transparency,” but not when it comes to the Board of Governors.

Invoking “non-disclosure agreements” and the always dodgy “this is a personnel matter” excuse for the Board’s failure to be transparent and accountable to the university community and the public about the departure of the president of a university with 60,000 students, 15,000 faculty and staff, and a $2.1 billion budget, puts a lie to any rhetoric about UBC as a place of open dialogue and transparency.

In essence, Montalbano’s letter is a statement that he and the UBC Board of Governors are accountable to no one.

Have a question for the UBC Board? Be prepared to be treated like a mushroom.

Read Montalbano’s response to questions present by UBCFA President Mark Mac Lean:
UBC Board of Governors Chair Response to UBC FA on Resignation of Arvind Gupta

UBC Faculty Association: Gupta resignation a failure in governance

The UBC Faculty Association statement on the recent resignation of UBC president Arvind Gupta describes the situation as “a failure point in the governance of the University.”

In a message to UBC Vancouver faculty, UBC FA President Mark Mac Lean said “we need to understand this failure and the Board must recognize that we cannot move on until we do.”

Gupta’s “sudden and immediate resignation” last Friday and the UBC Board of Governors lack of transparency on the reasons behind Gupta’s departure has produced much skepticism and speculation about the leadership of the university.

Mac Lean was very positive about the new directions of university under Gupta’s leadership, which included budget decisions “designed to move resources into the academic units and to mitigate the impacts that high growth rates of student numbers are having on the entire university. As a result, significant amounts of money are set to move from non-academic operations to support research and teaching.”

Mac Lean echoed comments made by Prof. Jennifer Berdahl on her blog that Gupta viewed faculty as colleagues and wanted UBC to be a university where “faculty are supported and valued unconditionally.”

He added that “contrary to some of the public speculation since his resignation, [Gupta] had a serious plan well under development to achieve the goals he set for himself and the University, and faculty were at the heart of his plan.”

Let’s hope that the UBC FA, along with others, will be able to pry some answers out a notoriously secretive Board of Governors. The UBC FA’s questions include:

The Board of Governors must explain what transpired to end Professor Gupta’s Presidency after only one year. What caused this leadership crisis?

Does Professor Gupta’s resignation mean the Board no longer supports realigning the University’s resources to better support the research and teaching missions?

We have in progress searches for a Provost and VP Academic, a Vice President Research, and a Vice President External and Communications. Those who fill these positions must ultimately hold the confidence of the President they will serve. What will happen with these searches now?

President Emerita Martha Piper has considerable experience as a past UBC President, but should she hire three key Vice Presidents for the next President of UBC?

Arvind Gupta: Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns …

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” Donald Rumsfeld

This past Friday the University of British Columbia Board of Governors announced that Arvind Gupta had resigned as president of the university. The announcement was shocking because Gupta had just completed the first year of his five-year term.

There very few knowns, a lot of unknowns, and perhaps even more speculations about Gupta’s “resignation.”

The announcement raises many questions as it came after an unscheduled Board of Governors meeting and Gupta was not quoted in the news release nor has he commented on his resignation. The past year has seen a wholesale shakeup of top administrators at UBC and now former UBC president Martha Piper has named as interim president (starting in September).

That giant sucking sound you heard the past few days is of speculation rushing in to fill to fill the vacuum in the UBC president’s office.

Is Gupta’s exit connected to the shake up of high level executives in the university?

Charlie Smith speculates it might have something to do with the departure of Pierre Ouillet who was UBC’s Vice President Finance.

Smith has also offered that Gupta’s departure might be related to his inability to squeeze more money out of the provincial government or because transit referendum or because Christy Clark or because fundraising in general.

Jennifer Berdahl‘s suggestion that Gupta is out because he lost the “masculinity contest” among UBC’s administration seems to have a lot of popular support based on attention it’s getting in the twittersphere.

Berdahl is the Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and Diversity in the Sauder School of Business at UBC. She wrote on her blog:

I believe that part of this outcome is that Arvind Gupta lost the masculinity contest among the leadership at UBC, as most women and minorities do at institutions dominated by white men. President Gupta was the first brown man to be UBC president. He isn’t tall or physically imposing. He advocates for women and visible minorities in leadership – a stance that has been empirically demonstrated to hurt men at work.

Berhdahl describes her positive working experiences with Gupta, but doesn’t offer evidence to support a claim that the masculinity contest theory applies to him in this circumstance.

There’s no denying that higher education is rife with workplace harassment, bullying, and mobbing. (The journal Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor recently devoted an entire issue to this topic.)

When work is a “masculinity contest,” says Berdahl, “leadership does not earnestly seek expert input, express self-doubt, or empower low-status voices.” I’ve got no argument with her on this point. Indeed, in my dozen years on the faculty at UBC, I’d say that there has been no leadership at the faculty or university level that has earnestly sought input from anyone (much less experts), expressed self-doubt, or empowered low-status voices.

The standard operating procedure at UBC is akin to that of the British Empire of old. The king or queen makes a decision and then the shit then flows downhill. There might be an occasional “walk about” to see how the courtiers, knights, or peasants might react to this or that, but UBC is a top-down organization, run like an empire, or at least a corporation.

As Justin McElroy points out, whatever it is it’s no ordinary resignation.

McElroy’s exchange with Neal Yonson, who is editor of UBC Insiders, raises some interesting questions and offers up some possible explanations, that while speculative, aren’t tabloid fodder, and focus on the relationship between the BoG of the president’s office.

They make some good, if self-evident, points:

Gupta and the BoG didn’t see eye to eye;
After an 18 month transition from Steven Toope to Gupta, UBC is now facing another leadership transition after just one year and that will have deleterious effects on a multiple fronts, both internally and externally;
Numerous current upper administration jobs are filled with people who are new or in interim roles;
BoG’s move to bring in known quantity Piper might steady the ship administratively, but Piper is not student-friendly, especially on the tuition front;
UBC capital projects are in a holding pattern.

McElroy and Yonson say that despite the lack of external dissent, there were internal “hints” that Gupta’s honeymoon was over, but university presidents always have their detractors and I don’t think the lack of “charm offensive” on Gupta’s part was key to his failure as president.

What they might not know is that this spring and summer there were rumours on campus that Gupta was in serious trouble with the BoG. I’m not enough of an insider have any substantive knowledge of those rumours, but I heard a university administrator opine that the BoG certainly wanted David Farrar, who left the position of Provost and Vice President Academic in June, to stay close at hand. Farrar was the third Vice President to vacate office under Gupta.

There are still lots of unknowns and UBC would be greatly served if the BoG and the university administration acted in more open and transparent ways. (Don’t hold your breath because as Yonson points out this is a board that wants to keep the public ignorant by operating in secret.)

If blame must be laid, there’s no getting around the fact that the UBC Board of Governors made a mistake in hiring Gupta.

If Gupta resigned of his own accord, then the BoG erred in hiring someone with no traditional higher ed administrative experience and for whatever reason (barring extremely personal reasons) could not handle the job.

If the BoG forced Gupta out, then they erred by making a non-traditional hire and then not giving Gupta a sufficient amount of time or the support to bring his vision to fruition.

‘Reclaiming the School as Pedagogic Form’

Institute for Critical Education Studies
Faculty of Education
University of British Columbia

Public Lecture
‘Reclaiming the School as Pedagogic Form’

Dr. Jan Masschelein
(Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

May 12, 2015
12:00 – 2:00pm

Scarfe 1214
(Education Building, UBC Vancouver)

In my contribution I will use the word ‘school’ to refer to a specific pedagogic form i.e. a concrete way (including architecture, practices, technologies, pedagogical figures) to gather people and things (arranging their company and presence) so that, on the one hand, it allows for people to experience themselves as being able to take care of things, and, at the same time and on the other hand, to be exposed to something outside of themselves (the common world). It is a very specific combination of taking distance and (allowing for) re-attachment. As a consequence, the term ‘school’ is not used (as is very often the case) for so-called normalizing institutions or machineries of reproduction in the hands of the cultural or economic elites. There is reproduction and normalizing, of course, but then the school does not (or does no longer) function as a pedagogic form.

Put differently: schools are particular ways to deal with the new generations and to take care of the common world that is disclosed for them. If education is the response of a society to the arrival of newcomers, as Hannah Arendt formulates it, and if schools are particular ways of doing this, ways that are different from initiation and socialization, ways that offer the new generations the possibility for renewal and the opportunity of making its own future, i.e. a future that is not imposed or defined (destined) by the older one, ways that imply to accept to be slowed down (in order to find, or even, make a destiny), ways that accept that education is about the common world (and not individual resources), then we could state that the actual ‘learning policies’ of the different nation states as well as of international bodies are in fact threatening the very existence of schools (including school teachers).

To reclaim the school, then, is not simply about restoring classic or old techniques and practices, but about actually trying to develop or experiment with old and new techniques and practices in view of designing pedagogic forms that work under current conditions, that is, that actually slow down, and put society at a distance from itself.

Jan Masschelein is head of the Laboratory for Education and Society, and of the research group Education, Culture and Society at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). His research concerns the public and societal role of education and schooling, the role of the university, the changing experiences of time and space in the age of the network, the educational meaning of cinema and camera, the architecture of schools and architecture of the learning environment, a pedagogy of attention, the notion of ‘pedagogy’, the pedagogical role of teachers and social workers. His book, In Defense of School (with Maarten Simons) is available at http://goo.gl/NN4XeD.

First Peoples, Palestine, and the Crushing of Free Speech – Steven Salaita in Vancouver

First Peoples, Palestine, and the Crushing of Free Speech

Monday, January 12 at 7:30pm
SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street, Segal Rooms; Vancouver, BC
Facebook EVENT

Wednesday, January 14 at 5:00pm
Coach House at Green College, UBC; 6201 Cecil Green Park Road (off NW Marine Drive, opposite Chan Centre and Rose Parkade)
Facebook EVENT

A talk by Professor Steven Salaita, who is at the centre of an international protest against academic censorship.

Salaita, author of six books and many articles, was “unhired” from a tenured position in American Indian studies at the University of Illinois when donors pressured the university because of Salaita’s tweets on his personal Twitter account about the Gaza massacre last summer.

Because this action is widely recognized as part of a broad effort to silence voices for Palestinian rights and justice, and as one incident in the long history of colonial treatment of indigenous peoples, the case has attracted international attention.

Salaita’s books will be available at this event.

“Steven Salaita & Academic Censorship“: an interview on Voice of Palestine

Info Session: Critical Pedagogy & Education Activism – UBC Masters program launches July 2015

Next information session:
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
BC Teachers’ Federation
4:00 – 5:30pm
100 – 550 West 6th Ave.
Vancouver

Application deadline: January 23, 2015
Program begins: July 2015

Download poster PDF
More Information: pdce.educ.ubc.ca/CPEA

BC’s teacher surplus, is it more than a math problem?

In today’s issue of The Province, columnist Michael Smyth drops some startling numbers about teacher supply in British Columbia (“Let’s all do the math on BC’s teacher surplus”).

There’s no doubt it’s tough for new teachers to find full time positions in the province, it’s tough to even get regular work as a teacher-on-call (TOC) in some districts. I know this from personal experience as professor in UBC’s teacher education and because the guy who cuts my hair received his BEd from UBC four years ago.

Here are the numbers, according to Smyth:

number of people currently holding a valid BC teaching certificate: 69,400
number of full-time-equivalent teachers in the public school system: 30,101.

Of course, as Smyth points out, some of the folks in the first group are not in the public school classroom, but are employed educators, either as administrators in public schools or as teachers in independent schools, etc.

Anyway you cut it, there is a oversupply of credentialed teachers in relation to available jobs in BC. This is circumstance BC educators and teachers educators have been aware of for many years, even as provincial universities have continued to graduate about twice as many BEds per year as there are province-wide vacancies (about 1,800 teacher education grads per year for about 900 teaching vacancies per year). In 1999, there were 5,000 active TOCs and a British Columbia Teachers’ Federation survey indicated that on average TOCs work worked about 73 days per year (40% of the school year) and earned about $11,000.00 per year (20% of average teacher salary).

The Invisible Hand

Smyth brings up the teacher supply issue in the context of the latest round of labor tensions between the government and the BCTF, asking “when there’s a surplus of workers, why would any right-minded employer offer premium wages when they’re swamped with resumés and job applications?”

That’s a fair question, but then again, if we’re looking to the good old invisible hand of the market to provide us with some explanations, how does one explain the fact that BEd students keep flowing into teacher education programs when job prospects are so bleak?

One one hand we could argue that Adam Smith’s metaphor for a self-regulating marketplace is not all it’s crack up to be, but more important is the fact is that many people are highly motivated to become teachers. When I graduated with an education degree in 1978, the job market for teachers was similarly poor. I worked as a substitute teacher, went to grad school, and ultimately had to move hundreds of miles away from home for my first full time classroom position.

Symth says that it’s “insane” for BC universities to train teachers the province doesn’t need, but another way looking at what’s happening is that provincial universities are (and have been) merely responding to a market demand for teacher education programs. Remember, post-secondary education in BC has been subjected to a steady stream of neoliberal economic policies from the governing BC Liberals, which has marketized every area of the public sector.

Do we need to allow for more “self-regulating behaviour of the marketplace” or do we need a centralized “five year plan” for the teacher labour market? As usual that kind of dualist thinking doesn’t help much because reality is much more complex.

The Finland Option

I appreciate Symth’s suggestion that British Columbia “should do what Finland did: drastically reduce the number of available spaces in university education programs.”

About six years ago the Faculty of Education at UBC embarked on a remake of it’s teacher education program, using the title CREATE (Community to Reimagine Educational Alternatives for Teacher Education). The “new” teacher education program has been in place over year now, and while there have been changes within the program, its basic structure and length look quite familiar. There are topical cohort programs with specialized emphases (e.g., arts-based; problem-based learning; IB, etc.), various streams for practica, but it remains, for the most part, a one-size-fits all model (post-baccalaureate, 12 month BEd program, with a 2 year option for elementary teachers).

At the beginning of the UBC CREATE endeavour (circa 2006), the social studies education faculty proffered what amounted to a “Finland option,” which was motivated in significant ways by the oversupply of socials teachers (as well as the increased number of part-time sessional instructors in the program). In short, we outlined a program where preservice social studies teachers would earn a masters degree, emphasizing advanced coursework in history or geography along with education courses necessary for an initial teaching license (essentially what is known in the US as a Master of Arts in Teaching program). At the time we had five full time faculty members ready and willing to put together a world class program working in collaboration with other departments; the numbers of students in social studies education would have been drastically reduced, and standards increased. This proposal was apparently too creative and was given no serious consideration.

Other proposals that would have dramatically re-structured the UBC approach to teacher education, such as adopting a 4-year undergraduate teacher education program, were also rejected.

Curriculum change in universities is a deliberate process to say the least, but I think this case illustrates what happens when the bottom-line rules. To say that the UBC budget is opaque is an understatement. Whether we’re dealing with the “historical budgeting” approach of the past or the decentralized budgeting of the present, budget messages to faculty are always muddled, muddy, mystifying and obfuscated. UBC always facing cuts on the academic side.

But there’s more to the story. We can’t contemplate improving the quality teacher education programs without also considering the financial contexts internal and external to the university. When it comes to program form and content there are the sometimes competing interests of government regulation in teaching profession, views from the profession itself, and from scholars of teaching and teacher education. And to complicate matters university faculty have less and less control over the academic content of courses and programs, with the demise of shared governance and university administrators increasing desire to commodify learning (see UBC’s Policy 81, for example).

Ten years ago the UBC teacher education enrolment was in the 800 per year range. Last year there were 935 applicants to the program and 632 were admitted.

Does that mean we’re headed in the right direction?

J. L. Turk: Protecting Academic Integrity When Universities Collaborate with Industry

2013-2014 CHET Seminar Series (University of British Columbia)

“Protecting Academic Integrity When Universities Collaborate with Industry”
By James L. Turk, Executive Director, Canadian Association of University of Teachers

February 25, 2014

CAUT Begins the Process Toward Censure of UBC re: Policy 81

The University of British Columbia Faculty Association announced today that,

At its meeting on March 14 & 15, the CAUT Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee considered UBC’s Policy 81 and all of the associated documentation. Following that consideration, the committee voted unanimously to recommend to the CAUT Executive that it bring a motion to CAUT Council in early May to begin the censure process of the UBC Administration. If they approve the recommendation, the Executive would bring a motion to Council that “CAUT will censure the UBC Administration at its November 2014 Council meeting unless the University ends the policy that the University may use, revise, and allow other UBC Instructors to use and revise a faculty member’s teaching materials, unless the faculty member specifically prohibits such use.”

CAUT’s procedures relating to censure are available here.