{"id":10480,"date":"2015-10-02T15:59:29","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T23:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/?p=10480"},"modified":"2015-10-02T17:54:53","modified_gmt":"2015-10-03T01:54:53","slug":"shared-governance-hits-rock-bottom-at-ubc-ubc100-ubcnews-ubysseynews-highered-bced-ubcgss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/2015\/10\/shared-governance-hits-rock-bottom-at-ubc-ubc100-ubcnews-ubysseynews-highered-bced-ubcgss\/","title":{"rendered":"Shared governance hits rock bottom at #UBC #ubc100 #ubcnews #ubysseynews #highered #bced #ubcgss"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Board of Governors’ rejection this week<\/a> of the Faculty Association’s request for accountability<\/a> 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\u00a0bottom as it\u00a0intended to rise to the occasion of its 100th birthday.<\/p>\n

Although among\u00a0the 21 members of BoG<\/a> there are\u00a08 elected by faculty, staff and students, which gives a facade of shared governance, the reality driven home in the non-disclosure scandal is that governance at UBC is\u00a0dominated by developers and investment bankers<\/a>. Silenced or muzzled, the elected faculty, staff and students have been irrelevant if not useless in protecting the best interests and being honest with the members of the University<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Equally futile in introducing even a modicum of accountability or\u00a0insight into the non-disclosure scandal is the UBC Senate<\/a>. At the moment when\u00a0we needed shared or faculty\u00a0governance most, when it really counted, the UBC Senate accepted its Nominating Committees’ recommendation to stick with status quo practice<\/a> in the search for a successor\u00a0President “instead of attempting to make significant changes at this time.”<\/p>\n

The public\u00a0requests\u00a0for accountability from faculty and librarians (FAUBC)<\/a>, from staff (CUPE)<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0graduate students (GSS)<\/a> and undergraduate students (AMS)<\/a>, are symbolic of\u00a0appeals for shared governance. And each appeal or request has\u00a0been rejected out of hand by the University. In the words of the\u00a0BoG, “personal privacy”<\/a> trumps accountability and access to information of a public body. Irrelevant is its\u00a0duty under the University Act<\/em> to protect the best interests of the University and be honest<\/a> with the members of UBC.<\/p>\n

In 2004,\u00a0the\u00a0Federal Information Commissioner expressed concerns<\/a>\u00a0that civil servants, lawyers and managers of\u00a0public bodies\u00a0in Canada were managing \u201cto find ingenious ways to wiggle and squirm to avoid the full operation of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two recent books, The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance<\/em><\/a> and The Fall of the Faculty<\/a><\/em>, document this descent to the rock bottom of shared or faculty governance. UBC is not alone at the bottom and there were\u00a0never expectations that it would be any different.<\/p>\n

But the explicit rejection by the BoG<\/a>\u00a0this week of requests for shared governance in accounting for the resignation of a President paves that rock bottom for a long stay.<\/p>\n

There is much more to say, as shared or faculty governance is by no means limited to BoG or Senate at UBC. At the lower levels of Faculties, Schools and Departments, there is\u00a0an atrophy of shared or faculty governance. Budgets, for example, have been made sacred and secret at UBC, with Deans and Associate Deans (appointed at whim<\/a>) making the budgets and centralizing more and more budget decisions while reporting less and less.<\/p>\n

In \u201cA Love Affair with Secrecy<\/a>,\u201d we are reminded\u00a0that the \u201cAccess to Information Act<\/em><\/a>\u00a0was supposed to get government documents into the hands of Canadians. Instead, it has created a state in which there are often no documents to get.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Board 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\u00a0bottom … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[554,2249,287,2251,211,1223,2273,2275,2276],"tags":[1288925,1288923,1288941,1288922,1288936,1288961,1288963,2674,1288964],"class_list":["post-10480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-freedom","category-accountability","category-administration","category-budgets-funding","category-faculty","category-governance","category-students","category-unions","category-working-conditions","tag-academic-freedom","tag-administration","tag-budgets-funding","tag-faculty","tag-governance","tag-students","tag-unions","tag-university-presidents","tag-working-conditions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10480"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10490,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10480\/revisions\/10490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/workplace\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}