The Ubyssey‘s coverage of the UBC Professor Jennifer Chan’s complaint of racial discrimination in her application to the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education has been outstanding. Jonny Wakefield’s feature article on the background and Sarah Bigam’s synoptic article on the final dismissal of the case provide models for media.
The case law assembled for this will be indispensable to future complainants on employment equity and protected ground of human rights:
- December 2009 Complaint filed to University
- 21 December 2010 BC HRT decision
- 24 January 2012 BC HRT decision
- 29 May 2013 BC Supreme Court judgment
- 19 December 2013 BC HRT dismissal
The term of the 2009 awardee of the David Lam Chair expired in December 2013. Respondents in this case (Beth Haverkamp, David Farrar, Jon Shapiro, Rob Tierney) finished or are winding down their terms. It is time for the Faculty of Education to phase in a period for reflection on racial equity within the ranks. The Lam Chair should itself should be left vacant, without a faculty member holding for two years. Leaving a Chair vacant is not at all uncommon in Universities. In Education, for example, the David Robitaille Chair in Mathematics, Science, and Technology has been dormant and vacant since 2010. With administrative terms winding down, the spring will be time for our new Dean, closing in on his third year, to ‘shuffle the cabinet’ and appoint a new administration to take affirmative action on racial equity in Education.
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