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.

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Question Period!

Hey gang!

I'm working on the new version of the site, and I'm wondering what you want to see out of it. Final decisions will rest with the editorial board but we're open to suggestions.

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Note to our readers

Hi everyone: I just recieved an email regarding the new Voter Funded Media system:

Only 15 people are registered to vote. Needless to say this is bad for democracy, because I can get my three roomates and brother to vote and sweep the contest. Now then.

As approved by AMS council, VFM is now running on a continuus model that offers smaller prizes for media on a monthly or bi-monthly cycle

From VoterMedia.org (Mark Latham's site) here are registration and voting instructions:

Email your UBC campus-wide login ID (not password) to
mark[at]votermedia.org. I forward them to UBC staff, who usually upload them Mon
Wed & Fri mornings. You only need to register once for the whole year of
periodic contests. (Better do this by April 27 if you want to vote in this
contest period ending April 30.)

Log in at www.vista.ubc.ca.
Click on "VOTE - VoterMedia". You vote once in each contest period.

While this registration process is a bit cumbersome, it'll only cost you one email. Of course we'd love if you choose us, but check out all the other worthy media too. They're listed at Votermedia.org/ubc. Any prize money we win will be chiefly dedicated over the coming months to transitioning into a new and more dynamic blogging platform.

In other news, I've written about 5000 words in the last 30 hours. And still one thesis to go. Sigh.

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Historical review of SDS

A historical polemic by UBC alum Mike Thike

Do you know who the man in this picture is? If not, you probably lack a lot of knowledge that would be helpful in understanding the current activist climate at UBC. With Trek Park, the “Lougheed Affair”, and the recent Knoll Aid 2.0 RCMP confrontation, tension within the AMS has risen beyond reason. I think much of this tension is due to radically different perceptions of politics, history, and the role of student activists in society. While I can’t expect to convince SDS-UBC and The Knoll’s most strident critics of their value, I do hope that history can help us to find some common understanding and lead to more constructive dialogue.

The man in the above picture is Mario Savio, the most prominent student leader at UC Berkeley (and in America) during the 1960s. He is standing on a police car. Inside the police car is Jack Weinberg, an activist and former Berkeley graduate student. In September 1964 the Berkeley administration had decreed that students on campus would not be allowed to promote political or civil rights causes through fundraising, passing out pamphlets, tabling, or other means. At the beginning of October, Weinberg was tabling for a civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equity. The police asked him for I.D., he refused, and they arrested him. A host of sympathetic students then surrounded the police car with Weinberg inside it, and did not move for over a day, at one point repelling an attempt by police to reach the vehicle. By the following evening, the students had negotiated with the university administration an accommodation for political activity on a portion of the campus, and the waiving of charges against Weinberg.

This incident sparked the birth of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and propelled Mario Savio onto the national stage. His is now one of Berkeley’s most honored alumni.

How about this picture? This is a community garden being planted in Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969. People’s Park was built on land owned by the university originally intended for student housing but left to deteriorate after development plans changed. In April 1969 a number of community members began constructing a park on the land, without the university’s blessing. The park lasted for a month before police moved in to dismantle it under the direction of newly elected governor Ronald Reagan. The ensuing conflict resulted in the death of James Rector, shot by police while sitting on the roof of a nearby cinema. Today People’s Park is a Berkeley landmark.

The parallels with recent history at UBC are obvious, and these iconic moments of the 60s are close to the hearts of SDS-UBC’s founders. Students for a Democratic Society was, after all, the largest student organization of its time. The Port Huron Statement, written in 1962, was the founding document of the SDS. It is a comprehensive manifesto, spurred by continuing racial inequity, social inequity, the wealth disparity between the United States and much of the world, the threat of nuclear holocaust, and the Vietnam War. The document called for a renewed participatory democracy and a redirection for universities. Some paragraphs from the section on students are worth quoting:

If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable", bureaucracy as "just circumstances", irrelevance as "scholarship", selflessness as "martyrdom", politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."….

Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more "tolerant" than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institutions, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system -- as opposed to its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth" -- is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.

These are paragraphs that I feel are even more apt today (maybe substituting “Guitar Hero” for “the Twist”) than they were fifty years ago.

It would be easy to look at the current SDS movement as playacting at activism, blindly aping its predecessors, but that would be doing a great injustice to the students who have devoted great portions of their lives to causes they see as vitally important. While the 60s is a source of inspiration for activists today, and a source of ideas on how to build a movement, there are many reasons to believe that the political situation today calls for a renewed student movement.
As the Vietnam was a catalyst for many far-ranging social changes in the 60s, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have given new life to activist movements around the world. Students across the US have formed the “new SDS”, declaring

As Students for a Democratic Society, we want to remake a movement – a young left where our struggles can build and sustain a society of justice-making, solidarity, equality, peace and freedom. This demands a broad-based, deep-rooted, and revolutionary transformation of our society. It demands that we build on movements that have come before, and alongside other people’s struggles and movements for liberation.

Together, we affirm that another world is possible: A world beyond oppression, beyond domination, beyond war and empire. A world where people have power over their own lives. We believe we stand on the cusp of something new in our generation. We have the potential to take action, organize, and relate to other movements in ways that many of us have never seen before. Something new is also happening in our society: the organized Left, after decades of decline and crisis, is reinventing itself. People in many places and communities are building movements committed to long-haul, revolutionary change.

SDS-UBC was formed out of discussions last year about how to recover from the bitter decline of the Social Justice Centre. We felt that a new direction under a new banner was necessary, and the resurgent SDS offered both an inspiring legacy and strong allies. Members of SDS-UBC traveled this spring to an SDS conference in Washington State.

The Knoll is older than SDS-UBC, but it has and continues to be the platform for activists at UBC to communicate and discuss current and core issues. Although never perfect, The Knoll has, I think, given substance to the activist work on campus, attempting to explain and justify our actions, among its other functions. In as much as this is successful, it demonstrates the intellectual autonomy of its authors. Nobody is blindly acting out a script from Berkeley in the 60s.

So what are we to make of the events at Knoll Aid 2.0? On the one hand, the activities around the bonfire seem more reminiscent of Lord of the Flies than a Berkeley student rally, and the attitude displayed by many towards the police and fire department seems at least disturbing. On the other, SDS-UBC is claiming police misconduct. Many claim that the attempt by students to negotiate with police was without merit. When the police instruct you to do something, you do it, especially if moments before you had been breaking the law by setting a huge bonfire in a parking lot. We can see two reasons for this group of students attempting to negotiate, however. First, it appeared to have been successful in the case of Stef Ratjen. Second, perhaps subconsciously, there was that Berkeley precedent.

It also needs to be stressed that the police invoke a different set of associations for activists than for much of society. While many would associate “to serve and protect” with the police, when many activists think police, they think “police state”. Police were the immediate antagonists in both of the Berkeley tales I related. Police and protestors regularly clash, with the police often protecting the politically powerful, not society as a while. The RCMP famously pepper sprayed activists at the 1997 APEC protests. Vancouver’s Anti Poverty Committee and the Downtown Residents’ Coalition have both had numerous encounters with police, and the Vancouver Police Department has had more than one case of brutality towards Vancouver’s homeless. The French chant, “Police partout, justice nulle part,” resonates strongly with many of us.

The actions of some students at Knoll Aid 2.0 are perhaps not to be admired or imitated, but they are also not incomprehensible and not reason to denounce the state of campus activism, or those who found themselves in conflict with the authorities. Lighting a bonfire was probably not a wise decision, and I’d be surprised if a lot of alcohol had not been consumed by many of those involved, but that does not excuse the actions of the police if SDS’s allegations are true. I hope people can step back from these recent events and grant a little sympathy to those involved.

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Block Party, in photos.

so my day started with the RBF, who had waterguns and when not hitting each other with them (or getting yelled at for getting too close to the camera) were going to defend the KNO to the Knoll folks during their counterprotest of the Knoll.



Here's Tyler, RBF President, threatening someone.


It turns out the protection was necessary: Jasmine was on the scene right quick, hurling insults and accusations and stripping signs from "protesters" and tearing them in half.




The KNO folks took this in stride, and held up their banner while chanting "Peaceful Protest" as Nate tried to calm the situation down, and Jasmine got in a shouting match.


A sampling of their beliefs.

Controversy over, I wandered a bit and sampled the delights of the carnival:

A bull rider.


A little faux-gladiator action.


Outgoing Ubyssey Letters and Copy Editor Levi Barnett and incoming News Editor Justin McElroy square off in the Bungee Run.


a little kebab action with the RBF.

I spent the rest of the evening either backstage (as ACF Alumni) or in the media pit, so here are some selected shots.


one of the sponsors of the event.


probably the worst photo ever of Brian Sullivan.


Becca Coad, getting signed by Torq from Stars


Mitch Wright, getting signed by Amy from Stars.


Stars threw flowers into the crowd... I caught someone after they caught one.


He's making a heart with his fingers.


Jeff Friedrich, Mike Duncan, and the always lovely Nancy Toogood.


Anna and Emily from AMS Events.

As always, I've got more photos up here: my Flickr page.

How was your day?

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quickie update.

Looks like Kwantlen won't be leaving the CFS just yet.

Steve Lee, KUSA Director of Finance, had this to say (via MSN): "one major complaint was the high amount of stuff - free food, donuts, candy, isic cards, buttons - that the cfs was giving away.
when we put forward a set of rules to the judge last month it did not include a provision to ban the giving away of free food or other similar items - which we usually have banned from distribution during our regular ksa elections so that a campaign is about ideas not about who can give away more stuff."

More information about the CFS vs Kwantlen case can be found here.

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Good luck on exams everyone!!

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An Open Letter to the AMS

Sometimes in times of crisis it's important to look at the big picture. So that's what I'm going to attempt here. Make no mistake - the AMS has as fundamental a crisis as it can realistically expect to face. Since it has mandatory membership its very existence is not at stake, but its ability to make a positive change for students, either by lobbying or by campus presence, is very much at risk.

The AMS' credibility is shot. The Lougheed and Bonfire Affairs have pretty much turned the AMS into as much of a joke as possible. Students generally used to be fairly ambivalent; it's safe to say that the tide has turned. Students on all sides of the political spectrum have some serious grievance or other against the Society, and students in the middle are completely and entirely alienated by the insane and fractious factionalism that makes the U.S. House of Representatives look downright civil by comparison. Indeed, the only unifying belief is that the AMS isn't worth students' time. Not only has the AMS lost respect of students, it's also lost the respect of those with whom it needs to have a productive relationship - the media, the University, various authorities, and the community at large. And so much time will have been spent on damage control, diverting energies from worthwhile reforms.

The root cause is the unnecessarily bitter factionalism that's driven a wedge within the society. What began as an ideological cleavage has rapidly descended into the poisonous, petty politics of personal vendettas. While tempting, there's no need to blame anything else.

There's an upside - the AMS is still a relatively healthy society, and students have many reasons to appreciate it. It's still in good financial shape, just passed a transformative referendum, and was on its way to becoming the centre of campus discourse once again. Moreover, the AMS has an opportunity this week, with a Council meeting and the Block Party, to take the first steps to make it right.

There are some relatively easy steps to take. My rules:

1. A joint statement, signed by all the AMS execs. State what you agree on, and the areas that you can work on together to improve students' lives.
2. Don't suppress debate - you're not going to agree on everything. But, when there's a disagreement, and it's intractable, put it aside for a couple weeks. A month. Take a cooling-off period, and spend this Council meeting looking for common ground. If people are disagreeing on something fundamental - move on.
3. Let the exec do its job. That's hugely critical at this time. And let the exec speak for the AMS.
   
4. Circle the wagons. You don't have to become mindless cheerleaders, but make it known when you support each other. Again, find common ground.
5. Pay attention to words. No ad hominem remarks about who's sleeping with whom, or that people don't respect democracy, or are reckless. If a word gets a negative reaction from someone - drop it. Antagonizing people gets us nowhere.
6. No gossip. Scandal and gossip are fun and as "fun" as things get for student politicians, but right now, they're adding fuel to the fire.
   
7. Run a kick-ass Block Party. Channel your energy there, and give students an amazing send-off to the year. Be relevant!
   

But first, it'll require one side to "blink." In every intractable dispute, some party needs to be the first to stand down. Or at least take a step towards it. Please - do it. I'm not calling for a homogeneity of ideas, just a cooling-off period, and a focusing of the ideological cleavage in a productive way. Diversity of ideas breeds good policy and debate, but that can only happen if you find common ground to channel it. Mark my words - nothing constructive will happen this (exec) year without some consensus. The next few years of the AMS, and the student movement at UBC for the near future, depend on you.

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B.C. PSE budgets are actually being cut

Last week, the Vancouver Sun broke a story about the Campbell government's decision to deviate from the expected funding levels for post-secondary institutions by redistributing some money, boosting health care and trade training in some colleges and cutting university funding. I wrote a post saying how reasonable this was with respect to strategic development of PSE in B.C. Well, it seems that that wasn't the whole story. As Erin Millar reports in her excellent Macleans article it tuns out that this budget change isn't just a re-allocation of money from some types of undergraduate programs (full-time student seats) to higher priority programs, but an actual cross-the-board reduction from the expected levels, as well. That means that UBC, among other institutions, are experiencing a reduction in per-student funding, but also a reduction from the expected level of base funding.

How much exactly isn't clear: according to a statement released by UBC President Stephen Toope, the clawback is 4.5 million for UBC-O and 11.3 million for UBC-V. He points out that UBC's budget is still increasing compared to last year, but by 5% instead of 8%. According to the Confederation of University Faculty Associations (CUFA), the numbers are actually higher than that. They estimate 12.4 million less in base funding (from the cross-the-board 2.6% cut) and an additional $5 million less from the reduction in full-time student seat funding, bringing the total cut to $17.4 million for both of UBC's campuses. System wide, CUFA estimates the cuts are worth 40-60 million.

In any event, this is bad news for UBC, which is already struggling to deal with its own structural recurring deficit through program cuts. Such an announcement right before the start of the new fiscal year, after all the budgeting for the university had already been completed is rather a shock. There's been no word about how exactly UBC will absorb this shortfall, though other colleges have already announced layoffs. Even more worrisome is that the government seems to be attempting to spin this as a redistribution only, when it in fact seems to be an cross-the-board reduction from the expected levels by 2.6% AND a FTE redistribution (though still an increase from last year). What's the point in sending the universities letters with the expected funding levels on which to base their budgeting if they don't abide by them?

A group of students and professors from across the province have formed a group called "Coalition Against Funding Cuts" to draw attention to all this. Check out their facebook group HERE for more info on what's being done.

Perhaps universities and colleges have expanded to to much too quickly in a manner that's just unsustainable. If tuition hikes (which we have experienced in the last five years) and great economic times (which we've also experienced in the last five years) aren't enough to satisfactorily fund the province's post-secondary education system, maybe there's something wrong with the size or character of the system in general. I haven't researched exactly how universities and colleges have expanded in the last 20 years, so I don't know, exactly, but I know that just hiring faculty with regular promotions costs more money than the university actually has - a major contributing factor to UBC's own deficit. A sobering thought.

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Updates on the Arrests

Edit/Update: Here are some more details from the CBC website, a video and an eyewitness account from Blake Frederick, elected Senator and student. We will write a more thorough analysis as more details become available.

Update 2: A judge will determine around 1pm today (Saturday April 5) at the DTES Criminal Court whether the five or more arrested students will be criminally charged or if they will be released. More updates to come.

Update 3: Youtube clip (anonymously submitted), and another Youtube clip of the bonfire and VP External Stef Ratjen being detained . Here you can keep yourself updated on the rest of the media's coverage.

Update 4: Another Youtube clip of the students being arrested. There is an individual on a bicycle who seems to have been plugged from the crowd and arrested. What did he do to be arrested?

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