Listening as Stephen Hawking reads the speeches of Martha Piper, it is clear that the interim President of the University of British Columbia needs to begin cleaning house by canning the top of Public Relations, along with her speech writers and handlers.
When MacLean’s calls out your Public Affairs Office as a PR “disaster,” when when the Ottawa Citizen says you’ve sunk deep into “damage-control” mode, when faculty and indie media analysts elaborate, it’s time to actually do something.
When your speech writers reduce the lot of your faculty, staff and students to “university watchers,” it’s time to act.
When the best your hired PR specialist and handler, Susan Danard, can do is assure the world that there will be no “departure costs [$]” to faculty and students from President Gupta’s resignation , it’s time to make a major shuffle.
Instead, with this legitimacy crisis of administration well into its second month at UBC, it’s business as usual. Admin are now wont to party like it’s UBC @ 99. So when UBC announces a leadership transition, it really means that just one staff member quietly walked off campus and otherwise it’s business as usual.
The crisis of legitimacy is deep at UBC from the top levels of management, including the Academic Executives and legal counsel, through its deans and down to its middle managers, the associate and assistant deans, who are appointed at whim.
But you’d never know it. It’s business as usual for UBC @ 100. Time to clean the house of PR and admin President Piper.
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