🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2i0t75$huc@nntp.ucs.ubc.ca>, felawka@pcch01.triumf.ca (Larry
Felawka) wrote:

> In article <1994Jan24.050816.2210@bogomips.ee.ubc.ca>, jmorriso@bogomips.ee.ubc.ca (John Paul Morrison) writes:

[munch]

> |> One day little girl, you will wake up and realize that the world
> |> doesn't work on any of the silly, stupid little principles you think
> |> it does.

[crunch]

> All right, you condescending big mouth, I call your bluff.  Please give us a
> reasoned rebuttal instead of this crap.

I'll attempt to make some more detailed comments.

Please note that what I am going to write will probably sound like a
vehement defense of the UBC administration. That's not quite what I mean. I
do mean to counter many of Ms. Horsman's arguments, which I believe are
misdirected. There is a lot to criticize about how the UBC administration
does things. I have done a lot of it myself. However, heavily ideological
tirades such as Ms. Horsman's tend to obscure more than they reveal.

In article <2ht6u1$c5s@nntp.ucs.ubc.ca>, leon@chem.ubc.ca (Nancy Horsman)
wrote:

> 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.

Assuming, of course, that (a) the entire institution can have an opinion,
and (b) "in-for-a-quick-profit" businesses are the ones Ms. Horsman charges
UBC with caving in to later in her piece and DO actually threaten "people's
economic, social and legal lives." There certainly are those at (or
formerly at) this institution, Ms. Horsman included, who hold this opinion
and are willing to state it.

> 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.

First, the threat to budgets and jobs is not fundamentally the
responsibility of the UBC administration. Salaries make up 80% of the
expenditures of the University. That same amount of money (more than $250
million last year) comes directly from the provincial government, and that
allocation has been declining in inflation-adjusted terms for more than a
decade. What else could happen?

As well, most research funds go through portions of the administration, but
are very specifically earmarked through grant applications and the like for
departments and individual researchers. The amount available from the
federal National Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the Canada
Council, and most especially the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council has also been going down in most cases.

The "massive building program on the south campus," was, first of all, a
20-year plan, which I would agree was misguided, but which has also been
largely discredited by the people within COUP and others. Campus Planning
and Development has been considerably chastised, and no such program is
currently underway. Those who observe aerial photos of the region, however,
might note that the great majority of it, except for a fringe of trees
visible from the roads, is already built upon by B.C. Research, Discovery
Parks, UBC's research farm, TRIUMF, and miscellaneous old storage and
disposal facilities.

> 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.

These are very nice rhetorical statements, but I do not see exactly what
they mean. Is Ms. Horsman charging that the funding cuts at the University
(again, largely by the province) are pushing tenured faculty info fearing
for their jobs on ideological grounds? That if they state "controversial"
opinions, they will be fired, and if they kowtow to the "corporate
environment of fear" they will keep their jobs? If so, that is a serious
charge indeed.

How is the academic campus "bankrupted" and what in the world is 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.

Littering is not a new thing; not having money enough to clean it all up
is. Once again, funding is dropping. One of the ways the academic,
intellectual core (i.e. the Library, faculty salaries, etc.) has been saved
from being as severely affected by cuts as the raw numbers of provincial
allocations would imply is by delaying maintenance, cutting back on
cleaning, and making do. That is starting to show, and now the academic
areas are being affected too.

But it comes down to money. Lots of it. If Ms. Horsman has a suggestion for
where it should come from -- while keeping in mind that it is much more
difficult to convince all those donors contributing to building brand new
buildings (with better plumbing!) to give money to fixing sewers; and that
quite a lot of money has been given to fund endowments for academic chairs
(salaries) and scholarships, preventing them from being affected by budget
cuts -- I think many would welcome it.

> 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.

Ms. Horsman may state it extremely here, but there is a point under the
vitriol. Although UBC is no longer the smallish institution it was in the
days of Norman MacKenzie, the current administration has done very poorly
in making contact with the campus community and seeing what kinds of
impacts their decisions are having on real people.

Their priorities may not be the best, but they are not evil people. I know
them. I do not like all of them, but it would not be fair to accuse them of
subsuming UBC's priorities to their own private greed. They have good
intentions, but different opinions than many. That, in a large academic
environment, is unavoidable in many ways.

It's interesting to note that Bruce Gellatly, the Vice-President Finance
and Administration, and the man largely responsible for keeping track of
where the money goes, has been in his position since the 1970's, when, by
Ms. Horsman's apparent estimation, things were rosy here. Many other
administrators (though not those in the most senior ranks) have been in
such positions as long, and several have been at this University for many
decades. What has changed since things were good is that there is, once
again, a lot less money available.

> 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.

And was effective. See my comments above.

> 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.

I'm not comfortable with what happened there, but the issue here is
fundamentally the same as that in the Clayoquot protest. I may agree with
what the protesters are saying, but part of the point of such a protest is
that people are INTENTIONALLY and PUBLICALLY breaking rules in order to
make a point, and that they must be willing to take any consequences. The
sentences handed down to Clayoquot protesters were unduly severe. As far as
I know, no one on the south campus went to jail, or was even tried for
anything. But they did make their overall point about the now-pretty much
defunct South Campus Plan, even if they did lose the individual battle over
the NRC Machinery Research Centre.

> 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.

So I guess this discussion, facilitated through the University's computing
equipment and, in my case, in a building leased from the University by the
student society, will be censored as soon as it appears?

> 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.

Let me state again: as of this writing, the "tracts of market housing and
industrial research facilities" (incidentally the purpose for which the
University Endowments Lands were originally granted around the turn of the
century) are NOT IN THE WORKS. They were in the South Campus Plan. People
around the University, myself included, thought that the plans were
ill-conceived and needed severe re-working. This is now happening, and a
public consultation process for the whole thing is being set up by the UBC
Board of Governors.

I know that it will be charged that the public consultation process will be
a smoke screen for the inevitable wished of Dr. Strangway and his cronies
(most of whom will retire within 3 years, by the way). The process will not
be perfect, but those on the Board, including those elected by faculty,
staff, and students, are serious about making it work.

> 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?

Yes, they can, but they will have to integrate that saving into the broader
sociopolitical context. How will decisions be made about the balance
between post-secondary education funding and health care, social services,
and primary and secondary education? How will the deficit-cutting frenzy
spurred by the Reform Party and others affect this money? How will the push
from the corporate world for more "relevant" education be met by those
defending academia?

Universities are not and cannot be isolated from the societies which create
them. Citizens in general must come to realize what the universities' role
in their lives is, and the universities (in the broadest sense of everyone
affiliated with them) must see that society is demanding more from them for
less. Somehow we must all work together to find the compromises needed to
accomplish these goals.

Simple attacks will not help. Conditioned intellectual effort -- what
universities are supposed to be here to foster -- will be required.

:=:=> Derek K. Miller  
     <dkmiller@unixg.ubc.ca>              -------------------------------
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