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               The University of B.C. in Crisis

There are few safe places today to  ask  questions  of  those  in
power.   But  surely one such place in a corporate environment of
fear and distrust if the "academically-free" university campus.

A major public institution like the University of B.C. should  be
one  of the most outspoken critics of the "in-for-a-quick-profit"
businesses that threaten  people's  economic,  social  and  legal
lives.

However, the issue of the human environment is not a  concern  at
U.B.C.    Instead,   the  men  at  the  top,  adopting  corporate
practises, have intimidated faculty, staff and student  alike  by
threatening  job security, department budgets, research funds and
tuition fees, even while they rush ahead with a massive  building
program on south campus.

Fear can be worked on, as all corporate missionaries  know.   The
David   Strangway   administration  at  U.B.C.  has  successfully
educated even tenured faculty in the psychology of  deficit-fear.
The administration has thus freed itself to bankrupt the academic
campus and to build a corporate technology at U.B.C.

The main campus is now pot-holed, littered, dirty.   Plumbing  is
in  disrepair;  classrooms  and  desks  are dilapidated.  Women's
washrooms in  heavily-used  buildings  are  unsanitary;  drinking
water  in older buildings often tastes rank.  Students mirror the
administration's contempt for the  teaching  campus  by  dropping
garbage everywhere.  The grey, square buildings of U.B.C., washed
by rivers of litter, give the campus the general appearance of  a
warehouse district on the edge of decay.

Within the atmosphere of fear and distrust at U.B.C., the  campus
population broods.  Anonymous hate letters are directed at women;
misogynist comments  appear  in  undergraduate  publications  and
attend  undergraduate  events  (Vancouver  Province, December 19,
1993).  Bitter, angry jokes about the Strangway greed proliferate
on campus and are now finding their way into the community.

These are the images of oppression at U.B.C., the  signals  of  a
human  malaise  that  is  present  wherever corporate development
touches.

As the Strangway administration moves to sell out the last of the
campus   lands   (The   Greater   Campus   Plan,  1993), only one
active protest has occurred.  That one was a sit-in  last  summer
by    local    residents     and     community     and    student
environmentalists.  Their reward for a  long  and  often  tedious
three  and  a   half   months   of  protest   was   a   writ   of
injunction  served  by the University, viciously punitive in  its
charges.

The message of the current administration has  been  made  clear:
there  will  be  no  questions  asked  at  the University of B.C.
Further,  the  traditions  of  thought  and  enquiry  that   have
characterized  the  University's  75-year  history  as  a  public
institution are to be forgotten.

The planned south campus development - tracts of  market  housing
and   industrial   research   facilities  -  will  re-direct  the
University's function from a public one to  a  private  one,  and
will thus effectively shut down all moral enquiry.

Can faculty and students yet act to save the academic program  at
the   University  of  British  Columbia,  or  is  fear,  and  its
accompanying denial, too deeply-entrenched?

Nancy Horsman

January, 1994