Category: Academic Life

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Academic Life

The Fallacy of Absolute Grading

There seems to be a common assumption many students, media, and parents hold. It’s an assumption that’s flat out wrong, and only those who don’t understand how academic institutions work hold it. It runs wild in the media, in parents’ minds, and is abused by many for cheap political gain.

That assumption: that a grade percent, standing on its own, means something.

The Vancouver Sun recently posted an article entitled “Want to go to UBC? You’ll need an A average”. In the article, UBC’s associate director of enrolment states “I wouldn’t have got in with my grades 20 years ago, but if 20 years ago the cutoffs had been what they are now, I would’ve worked harder and I would’ve got in.” He’s assuming that higher admission grades means one has to work harder to be admitted.

Now, I’m not sure if Arida is deliberately giving the Sun what they want to hear here, but he’s not being exactly truthful. Fact of the matter is, your grade percentage is irrelevant. What does matter is where you fall compared to your peers.

UBC tries to admit the best students it can. The province tells UBC how many domestic students it has to admit. So, UBC takes in as many applications as it can, sorts them from best to worst, and takes as many as they can.*

That’s it. A cutoff average is just UBC’s estimate to get a desired class size. It’s not some magical metric of difficulty of transferring to UBC from high school. That metric is the percentage of students admitted from the applicant pool. Counter to the picture the Sun paints, the trend in BC has been more students being admitted to university, and less students graduating from high school.

Our high schools have bumped the curve to the right, while provincial policy has shifted the z-score to the left. Despite students now needing 6 more percentage points, it’s actually easier to get in. That’s the fallacy of absolute grading.

* This is a simplified model. UBC takes in the applications and modifies them according to broad based admissions, province of origin (Alberta students get a boost), and other considerations. With international enrolment UBC is free to do whatever.

Categories
Academic Life AMS VP Finance

Impeachment Petitions Being Circulated, Plus Riders

A copy of the petition currently being circulated made it’s way into my hands. There are six questions being asked:

1. The removal of Blake Frederick
2. The removal of Tim Chu
3. Creation of a $5.00 “Engagement Levy”
4. A code change to implement slates
5. Indexing all non-indexed AMS fees to CPI
6. Amending the bylaws to separate the director and officer status of executives (so Council can effectively impeach).

Questions 1, 2 and 6 were expected. Although questions 1 and 2 will come in to effect once another executive would be elected, its only real effects will be to bring out angry mobs to express their moral outrage, hopefully driving turnout through the roof for question 6, which would fix the problems we covered earlier.

Continue reading “Impeachment Petitions Being Circulated, Plus Riders”
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Academic Life

What can the endowment do for us? The Berea college example.

UBC Student Senator Alfie Lee posted this New York Times article on facebook a few days ago. I think it’s worth thinking pretty hard about. Berea College, which outwardly looks like a typical New England private school, uses it’s 1.1 billion dollar endowment for students. From the Berea website:/

Berea continues to build upon a distinctive history of 150 years of learning, labor and service, and find new ways to apply our mission (the Great Commitments) to contemporary times by promoting kinship among all people, serving communities in Appalachia and beyond and living sustainably to conserve limited natural resources….
Berea continues to build upon a distinctive history of 150 years of learning, labor and service, and find new ways to apply our mission (the Great Commitments) to contemporary times by promoting kinship among all people, serving communities in Appalachia and beyond and living sustainably to conserve limited natural resources

Now true, this college is different from UBC in a lot of ways. It’s much smaller, not a research institution, has a bigger endowment (UBC’s is about 700 million) and only accepts low-income students. Students work 10 hours a week on campus and pay no tuition. Food comes from the on-campus farm, furniture in the workshops, and crafts are produced for sale. Still though, this school is an example of what it looks like to actually live up to the high aspirations of lofty mission statements (like UBC’s Trek 2010), and using an endowment fund for this purpose. UBC’s endowment fund definitely has potential benefits to students and research. But the debates about how much to use now, how much to save, and to what lengths to go to enrich the endowment (by leasing out our land for development, for instance) are hugely important.

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Academic Life Government

Welcome to the University club

News and analysis by Tariq Ahmed, UBC law graduate and former Senator.

Depending on how deeply buried in the library you’ve been for the last few weeks, you may have heard about Premier Campbell’s trip around the province waving his magic wand and turning everything short of a high school into a “university”. If you want to play catch-up, check out the premier’s media gallery for confetti-filled photos and cut-and-paste news releases that go beyond the recommendations of Campus 2020 report, which included only three new teaching intensive “regional universities”.

Pretty well any media coverage that’s done more than simply reprint part of the government press release has done a good job of going behind the photo-op to look at what (if anything) these changes mean. Of note are The Vancouver Sun, the always great Vaughn Palmer, the Victoria Times Colonist (bonus points for referencing Spinal Tap), the Georgia Straight, and Macleans On Campus.

I don’t really have much I can add to the pieces, but the idea of studying welding or hair-dressing at a university seems counterintuitive to me. I have a great respect for trades and colleges in general, but don’t know that these are programs reflect the culture of research and inquiry typically associated with universities in this part of the world. I’d be interested to know what kind of support these announcements have from students at these institutions since there seems to have been little mention of that so far. A few quick and cursory Google searches yielded little beside a supportive statement) from the UCFV student union and a letter from a student at Malaspina who is against the new name complaining that “VIU sounds like a serious infection”.

What’s also a little distressing is the degree to which these universities to-be have allowed themselves to become pre-writ publicity for the Premier. The current Emily Carr, Kwantlen College and Capilano College webpages have even more beaming Gordon Campbell that the BC Liberal website. The University College of the Fraser Valley and Malaspina deserve props for doing things in a much more non-partisan manner. Though perhaps the former group is just getting a head start on the buttering-up since they’ve come to realize how desperate they’ll be for more money!

Despite what Facebook says (apparently there’s already a University of the Fraser Valley network – cart, what are you doing there in front of the horse?), these new universities have yet to come into existence. Last week Bill 34, the University Amendment Act, 2008 was introduced in the legislature and is at first reading, release here. There are few things in here that are probably of little interest to anyone but a nerd like me, but I’ll mention them anyway, behind the jump:

  • The creation of a new tier for the renamed schools: “special purpose, teaching university” (“SPTU”).

  • What’s interesting is that these amendments will give the government the authority to designate other schools as SPTUs by Order in Council, so other such sprees could occur on a whim (hello University of Spuzzum!). This is different from the “Old Four” (UBC, SFU, UVic and UNBC; but not TRU which has its own act) whose existence is specifically enshrined in the University Act (“the Act”), meaning changes are tougher to make.

  • Chancellors at all universities (including UBC) will no longer be elected by the convocation (which is mainly made up of alumni), but rather “appointed by the board on nomination by the alumni association and after consultation with the senate or, in the case of the University of British Columbia, after consultation with the council [of senates]”. This may allow for some administrative convenience (UBC has been without a Chancellor for months), but seems to send the message that alumni have little place in guiding their alma matter (well except for phone calls at dinner time asking you to donate money).

    [extremely nerdy Peets-esque side note: Section 17 of the current Act says that “[t]he chancellor is to confer all degrees”. Ms. Morgan-Silvester’s term doesn’t start until July. Section 13 sets out that “[t]he president of the university holds the office of vice chancellor”, but doesn’t set out what duties (if any) a vice chancellor is to perform, while explicitly saying what the chancellor is to do. I could see arguments going both ways, but I’m left wondering if the degrees that are to be granted at this Spring’s congregation are even valid by law…]

  • Composition of the SPTU senates will be significantly different than at the “Old Four” (though they share the same BoG structure). Among the changes, SPTU senates will have fewer faculty members, far fewer students, far fewer alumni, but the addition of support staff and a non-voting board-appointed member seats. Seems a little surprising that given the mandate of a “teaching university” there’d be a desire for less input from teachers and students in deciding academic matters!

  • There are also some differences in the responsibilities given to SPTU senates. I won’t list them all, but the general theme is a shift to less senate power and more board control. I think there’s room for relief that the “traditional” university senates were not reformed in such a way.

  • The differences between the intended functions of the “old four” and “special purpose, teaching” universities becomes clear. Traditional universities currently have a wide mandate under the Act to “provide instruction in all branches of knowledge”, to “establish facilities for the pursuit of original research in all branches of knowledge”, to “provide a program of continuing education in all academic and cultural fields throughout British Columbia” and so on. SPTUs, on the other hand, have no such freedom or mandate. They are to teach only what and where the government tells them, and again this can be changed on a whim.

  • There are consequential and related changes to other acts, the most noteworthy of which is the renaming of the TRU (which is governed by a separate Thompson Rivers University Act) university council to a senate. Unfortunately for TRU students, the re-christened senate won’t have any expanded student representation. Like the SPTUs its senate will have a limited student voice with four elected students.

It will certainly be interesting to see what these changes will bring in the coming months and years and whether the government will approach the other recommendations in the Campus 2020 report with the same enthusiasm. Achieving parity of Aboriginal post-secondary outcomes by 2020, for example, will require more than a name change and some confetti.

Categories
Academic Life Campus Life Development

UBC Farm politics, elaboration of.

If you’ve voted in the current student referendum, you may have noticed that there is no question about the UBC Farm. Most people of course, wouldn’t have expected one, but it is a surprise to some. The Friends of the Farm started a campaign to get a question on the referendum ballot which would see students providing permanent funding for the Farm. A big step for sure. But this, and why it was ultimately abandoned as a funding/advocacy strategy is only one piece in the puzzle of convoluted politics that the UBC Farm is in the middle of.

Brendon wrote a good post about some of this earlier,HERE. I encourage you to read his post. There’s more back story, and some more recent developments, however.

The Farm, since its existence in its current form as a multi-use education/academic/community resource has had a tough fight for institutional legitimacy and enough funding. That’s not for lack of support from its home faculty, Land and Food Systems, but because first, it’s a strange and hard-to-define space, and second, its land is a 250 million dollar cash cow waiting to be sold. These facts produce a climate in which the Farm’s very productive, vibrant, ambiguity can be exploited in order to manipulate decisions and planning processes toward institutionally desirable outcomes. This attitude, which seeks to dissect out various “uses” and what fraction of land each occupies so that the rest can be cashed in to real estate development is patently against the desire of most students, faculty, and community members. Let alone against the spirit of UBC’s much-vaunted mission statement, Trek 2010.

So what’s going on? There’s a few levels of really important people in this political scene. There’s the very convincing folks in the UBC treasury office that have converted UBC’s brass that a large-endowment strategy is the best direction for the institution. Thank Byron Braley and Terry Sumner for that. They in turn have influence over people like Nancy Knight, UBC’s VP Planning, who have alot of power in determining the planning processes and baselines from which consultations are formulated. She in turn informs by the Board of Governors, which, being populated by business-type appointees, is disposed to like alot of money. Then there’s president Toope, who seems genuinely well-meaning, but either doesn’t know too much about it or doesn’t have too much real leadership. On the other hand, there’s some folks at Vancouver City Hall and the GVRD who have some ideas about local food systems and see the UBC farm as a boon. In the same type of vein are the residents of the University Neighbourhoods who see the farm as a community amenity and green space. Then there’s the academic and student community, whose support will be the most important ultimately.

UBC’s desire to sell off the Farm land is no secret. But here’s a few incidents to put you on your guard about the manner in which it’s trying to manage this:

  • Way back in 2005 the VP Academic & Provost and the UBC treasury office paid for a report to be written about how much land would be necessary for the UBC Farm to function. This study, which was thought to be a positive step in solidifying the Farm’s uses of the land, has never materialized. It was researched and written long ago by Erik Lees, but since its completion, has been suppressed. Very good sources tell me that this report was revised more than seven times (rewrite #7 was due in July 06, and hasn’t been seen since), and looks very different now than it did originally. If I can say “now” at all – it doesn’t technically exist. It doesn’t take a political scientists to realize that the UBC administration is suppressing this document, even though (or especially because?) they themselves commissioned it, since it does not jive with their vision.
  • UBC a few months ago the Campus and Community Planning office released some Requests for Proposals (RFPs). These are basically calls for consultants of various kinds to carry out a technical study. One of the RFPs was to do land-use planning in the “academic precinct” in South Campus, which includes the Botanical Gardens nursery, animal care facility, TRIUMF, BC Research, etc. In the terms of reference for the RFP, the UBC Farm’s land was not included in this precinct. While this may seem like a low-level technical item, it’s important, and it’s nefarious. Technical studies and reports are what decisions are typically based on. When a political decision (like determining that RFP ‘s peopgraphic scope for the “academic precinct” in Sounth Campus should exclude the farm) is made by some anonymous person in the CC&P office, it’s almost impossible to be accountable. In this case, it was too “low level” for the Provost or the Dean of LFS to know anything about, but such a thing could turn out to be tremendously important. Deligitimizing the Farm as an academic learning space is a strategy that is being used here.
  • Communication dissonance. Last year, when the results of the Campus Plan’s extensive online survey was published, the UBC Farm was the single most mentioned topic. This month, when I attended an all-day campus planning design workshop, one of the instructions in the booklet was to retain a couple acres for a teaching and research farm. The base-line set for these creative workshops will materially guide their results, and the resulting options we’re left with. And there’s a clear dissonance. While data can be clear from consultation, it is up to Nancy Knight and the C&CP office to summarize and present it. I’ve heard considerable spin in these summaries before. The level of reasonable baselines can only be really established through popular sentiment, which some of the planners hope to slyly ignore.

As my good friend Rona says, I’ll support the endowment next time it lowers someone’s tuition. In the meantime, I’d like to see one of the best places at UBC continue to thrive. The next few months of consultation in the Campus Plan process will be critical to send a clear message about this. Please participate with your eyes open. Here’s the campus plan website, which will tell you how to do so.

Categories
Academic Life Government

Budget "cuts" are a pretty good idea.

As Tim mentioned below, the BC government had decided to reshuffle this year’s post secondary education money, as reported in the Vancouver Sun. The result is that universities lose out on a percentage or two of funding and smaller colleges and professional schools get a boost. UBC specifically is losing 8.7 million dollars from its general operating budget, and SFU about 4 million. In today’s Ubyssey, the AMS VP External Stef Ratjen has a letter condemning this decision (click!). And she makes alot of good points. Thing is, if you step out of the reactionary mindset of a UBC student that’s just been shafted, this decision makes a whole lot of sense. To get a few things straight: this isn’t a cut to post-secondary education, it’s a redistribution from what the schools were told to expect for this year. Since the budgeting work for the coming fiscal year is mostly done on the basis of those expectations, it is a bit of a shock. As it says in the article, UBC (and all schools) are still getting more money than last year, event after the redistribution.

The Campus 2020 vision laid out ambitious goals in terms of accessibility and especially aboriginal participation in PSE. This shift in funds is strategically targeted in a way that makes sense with that. In the Sun article it says that the money is for recruiting aboriginal students and increasing programs that are relevant to the current job market. Colleges and professional schools are better positioned for those purposes than we are, as a big research-based institution. They’re not as costly to attend, and the less centralized location and more direct application to the job market makes them more accessible to non-urban communities. Campus 2020 doesn’t just talk about UBC and SFU – it’s a more holistic document. And to really address accessibility, funding a diversity of more “practical” programs is a good approach. We need to get off of our high horse and realize that UBC isn’t the be-all and end-all of higher education. If we don’t have infinity resources, others benefiting from funding will sometimes result in UBC losing out a bit. And I can live with that.

The troubling thing is that knowing UBC, the shortfall probably won’t come out of things students would care the least about. Expensive institutional constructions projects? check. Good and improving quality of education? Still missing.

Categories
Academic Life Government

Financial Aid and Tuition


I have been meaning to post about this for quite some time now, being heavily subsidized by a european government to study one of the most expensive programs in a college (medical) for a registration fee (covering a half year buspass as well as heavily discounted warm lunches) of 200 Euros (300 CAD) a semester.

See this NY Times article which reports ivy league colleges (Brown, Harvard) and Stanford following a wider trend of waiving tuition for lower income students.


While relieving some of the financial load of lower income students solves part of the problem, cost of living is an unaccounted factor which seems at times deemphasized when talking about the whole issue surrounding tuition.

In Canada and North America in general, the trend is for lower income students to borrow money from the government or a private source, and pay it back afterwards with interest. The trend is similar here in Germany, but with some key differences.

By German law, parents who make over a certain amount are required to support their children’s cost of living (housing, food, school registration fees). Yes, children have the right to sue their parents, and some even do. Tuition has been a non-issue until two years ago, when some regions implemented tuition as high as 400 Euros (600 CAD) per semester.

If the parents’ income falls below a certain income bracket, the German Ministry of Education (link in German) chips in, to be paid back post graduation, in chunks determined by how much the graduate makes entering the job market. In instances when the graduate is yet again below a certain income standard, they are waived these repayments and thus have their education paid for fully by the government.

By the way, the Ministry of Advanced Education in British Columbia has been mumbling about similar repayment policies for a while, and this has been regarded as controversial by some.

While Germany’s system is by no means perfect, it seems to allow for greater accessibility towards advanced education. I’ll follow up with some numbers and stats later, but it creates some interesting social attitudes.

For one, there is a very relaxed attitude about university. Whereas UBC felt like a factory that churned out one graduate at a time, colleges here seem like a stroll through the park, with time to smell the roses so to speak. In classes, there are almost never any assignments – only a final exam. There is much less pressure in general to finish on time. This take it or leave it atmosphere has its pros and cons.

The pro is that it seems like students that are self motivated are allowed to thrive. They are not bogged down by assignments which confine the degree to which they want to steer their learning within a semester. I have met the most brilliant people during my short stay here, who in the truest sense of the word are intellectuals.

Unfortunately, for the less motivated, it has been suggested that it takes them years and years to finish even their undergraduate degree. This was the social argument from the conservatives behind the introduction of tuition fees.

I am no economist, but I expect one to say something about Canada having the advantage of individuals entering the job market at an earlier age and thus spurting the economy.

I would argue that this might be true only because German men are still required by law to either receive military training or finish a year of civil service after high school.

While Germany’s education system is by no means perfect, its financial aid network seems to me much more equitable, allowing students to pursue the field of study of their interest, instead of having to worry about whether this degree will lead towards a job which will allow them to pay off their debts. Thus, it seems to me that over here, we enjoy a social safety net which better separates academic interest from the pressures of economy than in Canada.

Categories
Academic Life Campus Life Development

UBC Farm: Why they aren't taking a referendum question to students this March

Due to a hole in WordPress, this post’s author is misattributed. The follow was written by AMS VP Academic ’07-’08 Brendon Goodmurphy.

Most students know by now that the future of the UBC Farm is shrouded in uncertainty and controversy. This year strong student supporters of the Farm (particularly Friends of the Farm), wanted to hold a referendum question asking students to increase their student fees to support the farm’s programs and development. The hope was that a passed referendum would show UBC just how much the community supports the farm, and would help secure the farm’s future. But the current political situation within UBC and the region has made some supporters of the referendum question if now is really the right time.

Find out why behind the jump…

A brief history of the UBC Farm:

When UBC first decided to build market housing on campus, they ran into some concerns and push-back from the community (students, faculty, staff, residents in Vancouver and the UEL). So, the GVRD stepped in and said that there would be some regulations and guidelines for how UBC could develop that market housing community. Those rules were all outlined in the Official Community Plan (OCP). Of course, the Farm sits in the middle of prime land that the University ultimately wants to sell to developers. After public outcry over the farm in the development of the OCP, the farm was slated for “future housing reserves” – meaning that they weren’t going to develop housing there right away, but it would be set aside, and we would come back to it later to make a decision (that date is supposed to be 2012).

Of course, this stamp of “future housing reserves” also gave UBC an excuse to not invest in the Farm, and refuse to help build its research capacity and refuse to see its value as a community amenity. In fact, when some market housing residents worked with the farm to create a community garden, UBC denied the proposal and said it wasn’t allowed! UBC has been actively impeding any development of the farm for many years, so that they can more easily deny the farm’s importance in 2012 when the issue is up for consideration.

The current situation:

To understand the current situation, you have to understand some local politics. UBC would like to make changes to the South Campus Neighbourhood Plan – they would like to densify the neighbourhood (add more units, make more money). This requires a change to the OCP, which requires approval from the GVRD.

However, the community has some allies in the GVRD who have an interest in a) preserving the farm, and b) seeing UBC become part of the City of Vancouver. Both of these fit into policies that the GVRD already has (for the farm, they are worried about food security and how quickly farmland in the region is being depleted, for governance, they GVRD would like all electoral areas to become part of a municipality). Therefore, some elected officials at the GVRD were saying to UBC: “We’ll let you densify the South Campus Neighbourhood, if you promise to deal with the farm issue and do a governance review.”

Well, UBC doesn’t really like the prospect of being told what to do by the GVRD when it comes to the Farm or governance, so at the most recent Board of Governors meeting, UBC decided not to pursue the South Campus Neighbourhood densification – for now…

But to appease the GVRD, UBC also said that they are going to deal with the farm issue and the governance review right now. I told the GVRD at a recent meeting that I didn’t really believe UBC’s commitment to dealing with the governance issue – I genuinely believe they are dragging their feet, they have no interest . And the farm issue is going to be dealt with through the Vancouver Campus Plan…this is where the concerns from Friends of the Farm comes from.

Hidden motives:

Nancy Knight, UBC’s Associate VP Campus & Community Planning, has decided to ‘deal with the farm issue’ through the Vancouver Campus Planning process. That may sound like a good idea at first, but its much more complex than it seems.

The Campus Plan process is an institutional planning process, meaning UBC has complete control over that process, meaning the GVRD has no say in what decisions are made. Thus, when the farm gets addressed through the Campus Plan, we lose some really powerful allies in the GVRD who could put a lot more public pressure on UBC to “do the right thing.” For now, we as students and as members of the University community have to flood the Campus Planning process in order to save the farm. Of course, we all know that UBC isn’t that great at listening to students, and is quite selective about what it hears in consultation processes.

The point is that if the farm review is part of any OCP changes, then the broader community, including the GVRD, and the UNA residents have some sort of say in what happens to the farm. If it’s a Campus Plan process, then UBC gets the ultimate say, and the GVRD really has power to interfere. The Campus Plan is about institutional spaces – aka, learning and research spaces. Taking care of the farm through the campus plan process conveniently means that UBC can look at it primarily for its research value, and thus it’s easier justifying that it move to the bio sciences research area – the same amount of research can occur no matter where its located.

Now add to this the fact that Nancy Knight and the team at Campus & Community Planning have gotten external consultants to come in and review the “potential” of the farm. These consultants were chosen without letting the farm or the faculty of Land and Food Systems know, and it has mostly been all behind closed doors. Nancy Knight wants to have these consultants come back and say: “the Farm is very valuable, but they only need half the land and could probably move to the Bio-Sciences research area and still do the same great work.” Perhaps she sees this as some sort of compromise between the Board’s agenda to maximize the $250 million that can be made off of that area, while still preserving some sense of a farm for the community.

As long as the Farm issue is dealt with through the Campus Plan, the result is going to be cutting the area by at least half, or moving it way down to the bottom of campus in a very remote and inconvenient location, or both.

The other thing to consider, is this process to deal with the farm through the Campus Plan is only looking at the farm from a research-value standpoint, and not from a community amenity standpoint. The Farm is so much more than a research facility, it’s a place that brings students and residents and researchers and learning all together in one place. This is more than just an institutional facility, it’s a community facility, and the community should have a much greater say about its future.

Canceling the Farm Referendum

I told the Friends of the Farm that it was a big mistake to back down from the referendum now. The concern is that the political situation is too tense right now to take the risk. I say that a referendum is always going to be extremely risky. The only reason there are more backroom deals being made about the farm right now is because UBC is facing a lot of pressure from the GVRD, students and the community-at-large to save the farm. As long as UBC is facing pressure on the Farm, they are going to push back, and push back hard. The farm lands are worth over $250 million dollars in Endowment revenue. We’re up against a huge beast, and that is never going to change.

But, if we as students could come to the table and say “students care about the farm so much that we are willing
to pay out of our own pockets to develop the farm’s capacity” then we’re in a really strong negotiating position. Don’t forget, it’s UBC who has been financially neglecting and starving the farm for years, and its students who are stepping up and footing the bill.

If the referendum were to fail, then it would be a tragedy. But, as far as I’m concerned, certain people within the University are always going to misconstrue the evidence and use any referendum outcome against us. But there are also a significant number of people in the University who will take a passed referendum seriously, and that will be way more powerful than the few who discredit it.

The Farm needs a student movement behind it right now, and there is nothing better to get a student movement started than through a “Save the Farm referendum campaign.” Getting hundreds of students around campus, handing out pamphlets and saying “UBC is trying to take away our farm, we can’t let that happen” – what better way to start a genuine student-movement. That’s something almost all students can say yes to.

Categories
Academic Life Issues

Sterling example of effective advocacy – Universities Allied for Essential Medicines

Students spend alot of time agonizing over how to be effective advocates for change. Emma Preston, a founding member of UBC UAEM, and this year’s BC Rhodes Scholar, tells of how this group made the university fall head over heals for them.

Billions of people, primarily in poor countries, lack access to lifesaving medicines; millions more suffer from diseases for which no adequate treatment exists. Universities can change this. Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) is a hands-on student organization that focuses on changing university policies in order to increase access to essential medicines in developing countries (http://www.essentialmedicine.org/). Our mission is two fold. Firstly, to urge universities to ensure that biomedical end products, such as drugs, developed in campus labs are accessible in developing countries, and secondly, to facilitate and promote research on neglected tropical diseases, or those diseases predominantly affecting people who are too poor to constitute a market attractive to private-sector research and development investment. University scientists are major contributors to the drug development pipeline. At the same time, universities have an avowed commitment to advancing the public good. As members of these universities, our fundamental goal is to hold them to this commitment. With a small but committed group of students, representative of the diverse student body at UBC and with some key supporters in the local and international community, we weren’t afraid to think big.

The UBC chapter of UAEM has been active for over two years and is part of a growing global movement of students dedicated to making research and science more globally responsible (http://ubcuaem.wordpress.com/). This past November, UBC announced it self as the first university in Canada to commit to providing people in poor countries with easier access to its innovations, stating that “ensuring global access to discoveries and technologies developed at UBC is an important element in achieving the TREK vision. UBC technologies have the potential to generate significant societal impacts, and our technologies relating to the advancement of health, the protection of the environment and the promotion of sustainability have the most obvious benefits for a global society.” The press release noted Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) as “catalysts” for the decision (http://www.uilo.ubc.ca/global.asp).

The UBC Chapter of UAEM (pronounced “you-aim”) was founded in 2005 by Patricia Kretz, currently a fourth year UBC medical student. Initially, the group consisted of a small number of concerned students meeting at random locations about once a week. A mixed bag of grad students, law students, med students and undergrads, we met everywhere from coffee shops to basements to the west atrium of the Life Sciences Institute. It soon became clear that when it comes to understanding access to essential medicines there are many difficult concepts, jargon and acronyms to familiarize oneself with before anything starts to make sense. There is no doubt that there is a steep learning curve. To address this concern and reach out to the greater student body, UAEM UBC held its first “teach-in” in the fall of 2006 at UBC’s Medical Student Alumni Centre. The aim of this afternoon was to go over the basics of intellectual property, licensing and patent law, the neglected tropical disease research gap, metrics (a.k.a. how a university measures its success), and what university students can do to address these issues.

Another key element in achieving our goals was communicating with UBC faculty and administration. One aspect of this was collecting signatures for the Philadelphia Consensus Statement (PCS), a document that was drafted at the UAEM international meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2006. In a nutshell, the PCS is a document that outlines UAEM’s main goals and ‘signing on’ acts statement of support for these goals. In addition to a number of caring and dedicated faculty, UAEM was fortunate to gain the support of a number of big name global health/humanitarian ‘celebrities’ such as Paul Farmer, Jeffrey Sachs, James Orbinski and, a proud UAEM UBC signature, Stephen Lewis. In this regard it was very helpful to be a chapter of a larger international group and emphasized the benefits of being a multidisciplinary student group in which everyone could use their unique skills and contacts to their full potential.

With a member base and support from the local and international community, we received support from the Alma Mater Society (AMS) and eventually became an AMS club. We also established an advisory board consisting of a diverse array of individuals who had acted as mentors along the way including a journalist, physicians, a number of faculty members and representatives from the University Industry Liaison Office (UILO). With their support and the help of one of our more politically involved members, Gina Eom (of UBC Insider fame), we were able to arrange a series of meetings with President Stephen Toope, VP Research John Hepburn, University Industry Liaison Office (UILO) President Angus Livingstone and Technology Transfer Officer Barbara Campbell.

While we initially met with some valid resistance, the potential of what were proposing and its implications with regards to the Trek 2010 goals of global citizenship were hard to deny. Barbara Campbell emerged as our UILO champion and we were incredibly fortunate to have her dedicated support and commitment. We soon realized that you can’t use a one size fits all global access strategy for all technologies developed at UBC. Developing necessary guidelines and applying global access principles requires a lot of hard work and time on the part of the technology transfer officers at the UILO. As such we were very excited to find that the ideas behind these principles have already influenced the licensing of three new UBC technologies: a peer-to-peer software technology with applications in medical school curriculum delivery, an E. coli vaccine technology, and a new less-toxic formulation of antifungal and anti-Leishmania drug Amphotericin B.

While are starting to see the fruits of our labour in full ripeness, there is still a lot of work to be done. We are working towards developing undergraduate and medical school curriculum on neglected tropical diseases and starting a fund to finance research on these abandoned ailments. We are also in the process of starting chapters at other Canadian universities. As much as ever, we are welcome new members and support within the UBC community with open arms. If you are interested in attending our next meeting or in just finding out more information please don’t hestitate to contact us at: ubc.uaem@gmail.com

Categories
Academic Life

UBC Faculty Association has a bad week: part 2

Israel Boycott debate re-opened

Also in the September’s Faculty Focus newsletter (click!), is an article calling on faculty and UBC to open up a debate on an academic boycott of Israeli academia. The article is authored by some familiar faculty members, including the head of the undergraduate biology program, Martin Adamson, and Arts AMS councilor Nathan Crompton. Citing the hardships of Palestinians in having access to higher education, they say that the idea of a boycott cannot be condemned offhand, and must be discussed.

The idea of academic boycotts is not new: they were undertaken against South Africa and Russia by some groups of academics in the 90s. In recent years, academics in Europe and the UK have often attempted to intellectually boycott Israel through their universities and professional unions. These attempts never seem to last very long, since they tend to be ignored, revoked, and renewed with boring regularity. Last May for instance, the UK’s largest lecturers’ union UCU passed a motion to encourage the discussion of an academic boycott on Israel, urging members to “consider the moral implications of conducting ties with Israeli academic institutions,” and calling on the EU to freeze funding of Israeli research. You can find out what I thought of that HERE, and I would have similar feelings about UBC participating in such a boycott. Specific to this article, I thought it was a bit silly that the authors frame the article as a call for “discussion” of a boycott against Israeli academia, instead of actually endorsing such a boycott, since clearly that is their intent.

The reason this particular article in Faculty Focus is interesting is that UBC’s president, Stephen Toope has expressed himself in the most strident terms against any such academic boycotts of Israel. In response to the (UCU) motion last May, Toope joined the wave of university presidents across Canada in condemning their action, saying in a statement that “The threatened boycott of Israeli universities by Britain’s University and College Union is a dangerous and unsupportable attack on the core values of academic life.” I heard president Toope and SFU president Michael Stevenson express themselves similarly in person, when they both spoke as honorary co-chairs of the semi-annual “Stretch Your Mind” conference of Israeli academics at the JCC.

UBC Hillel’s director, Eyal Lichtman, has already responded to the article in Faculty Focus, in an email, stating that

any such boycott would be an affront to academic freedom, of course, but when it targets the society with the highest per capita rate of academic publications in the world, the consequences to the advancement of science and other research is incalculable … The singling out of Israel, where academic and press freedoms are the freest in the Middle East, is a disturbing sign and therefore an indicator that Israel, amongst nations of the world, is being singled out for attention based on premises that must be considered anti-Semitic.

The anti-semetism card is pretty heavy-handed here. The article we’re talking about wasn’t written in a confrontational or hateful manner by any stretch. But even more annoyingly, Lichtman’s response wasn’t even shared with Hillel students, but rather sent to outside strategic people (not sure exactly who) – one of whom was so good as to forward it to a buddy of mine. When I asked Hillel staff for further information on this reaction, and why it hadn’t been shared with students, I was greeted with stony silence and the statement that “it’s out of our hands”. I wonder whose hands it is in? or what there is to be in anyone’s hands? When I asked further, another staff member said it wasn’t a secret, but just not a “public strategy”. This is, after all, meant to be open discourse, and this bugs me. This type of overreaction, coupled with annoying non-public strategies does damage to those (and I count myself among them) who want to discredit attempts at intellectual boycotts.

Some background:

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