The Thunderbird Gazette

This year on Insiders we’ve tried to stay away from ranty edit­or­i­als but this time I can’t resist.

I was brought into this com­merce fee thing inno­cently enough, when Alex told me about a CUS meet­ing where they would be dis­cuss­ing the fee. I was happy to stay out of it and let him deal with it all until I got a mes­sage say­ing that he couldn’t make the meet­ing and could I please go take notes in his place? So I went, and got my first taste of the CUS.

From the begin­ning, the pro­cess behind run­ning the ref­er­en­dum has been poisoned and as is widely acknow­ledged, is an ini­tit­at­ive of the Dean, not the CUS. Most, if not all, of the info the CUS went on appeared to have come in the form of “Dean Dan said…” and the CUS blindly trus­ted any­thing that was said. I under­stand that Dan is a pop­u­lar fel­low. I had the pleas­ure of work­ing with him on a uni­ver­sity com­mit­tee con­sid­er­ing NCAA mem­ber­ship. He’s cha­ris­matic and per­suas­ive. But it doesn’t mean he’s neces­sar­ily on your side.

So as far as the com­ments Dean Dan made today, we had given Dan an out­line of what we sug­ges­ted we would like to see him talk about. That being said, Dean Dan is obvi­ously in a pos­i­tion where he wants, you know, he is per­son­ally inves­ted in this and we really wanted him to share the inform­a­tion that he shared with us two Fri­days ago. So he shared that inform­a­tion with stu­dents as well. He went on to share his own per­sonal biases as well.

Con­nor McGauley, incom­ing CUS Pres­id­ent
From March 1, 2010 CUS meeting

Recog­ni­tion by the CUS that the dean was (obvi­ously) biased in favour of the ref­er­en­dum occurred even before the ref­er­en­dum was offi­cially approved. Des­pite this, the blind trust remained. The CUS has con­tinu­ally encour­aged his dir­ect involve­ment in the ref­er­en­dum as an inform­a­tion source, includ­ing an FAQ released for “con­cerned stu­dents” dir­ectly from the fac­ulty, hos­ted on the faculty’s web­site. Thing is, in the haste of mak­ing this ref­er­en­dum hap­pen, no one bothered to enforce any sort of bound­ary between fact and opinion.

The CUS elec­tions admin­is­trator has done a good job by cre­at­ing this site. And the CUS deserves credit for provid­ing a num­ber of for­ums where people on both sides can air their views. How­ever, allow­ing for two sides of a debate is not the same as the pro­vi­sion of unbiased inform­a­tion. The blind trust in the dean, and the encour­age­ment of his involve­ment, has res­ul­ted in a situ­ation so muddled that at this point no one, prob­ably not even Dean Dan, could pos­sibly extract the fac­tual inform­a­tion from the over­abund­ant con­jec­ture and pos­tur­ing mixed in, all of which is pos­ing as inform­a­tion. As a res­ult, the encour­age­ment of every­one on all sides to have voters “get informed” has become a noth­ing more than a plat­it­ude advoc­at­ing for what has truly become an impossible task. Although it is clear to every­one that this is not a CUS-initiated ref­er­en­dum, due to their will­ing­ness to under­take this ref­er­en­dum in a delib­er­ate ploy to under­mine gov­ern­ment policy, the bur­den falls on the CUS to ensure the ref­er­en­dum is run respons­ibly. Encour­aging fac­ulty med­dling that muddles the debate and makes access­ing fac­tual inform­a­tion next to impossible is irre­spons­ible and fails the voters.

Of course, maybe the CUS never saw them­selves as an arbiter of unbiased info. After all, they’re not unbiased: they took a “yes” stance.

I think to not take a stance fails to do a respons­ib­il­ity that I believe that we all have as elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives and if you as a leader can’t stand up and vote and make a decision on this, then maybe you should think about not being an elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ive, because that’s what you’re elec­ted to do – to make decisions on behalf of students.

Laura Sil­vester, out­go­ing CUS Pres­id­ent
From March 1, 2010 CUS meeting

On any given day, taken in isol­a­tion, I would prob­ably agree with that state­ment. But the con­text was a dis­cus­sion on whether or not the CUS should take a “yes” stance on the fee. Sim­ul­tan­eously decid­ing to hold a ref­er­en­dum – whose pur­pose is so that the com­merce stu­dent body can make this decision – while also pre­sum­ing a duty to make that decision on their behalf is plainly condescending.

The ques­tion of what inform­a­tion was used to reach these decisions is troub­ling as well. The fact that com­pre­hens­ive FAQ doc­u­ments did not appear until essen­tially the day before vot­ing star­ted indic­ates to me one of two things. The first option is that they are delib­er­ately delay­ing the release of inform­a­tion. I don’t believe this is the case. More likely, the reason the answers weren’t ready in a more timely fash­ion is because they didn’t already know what the answers were. Which means the CUS never thought to ask these ques­tions before agree­ing to run the ref­er­en­dum. Worse still, they never thought to ask these ques­tions before decid­ing to take a stance in favour.

One of the scar­i­est scare tac­tics used has been the threat of lost accred­it­a­tion. But any attempts to verify the details around it have not been fruitful.

These doc­u­ments aren’t pub­lic inform­a­tion — not sure about you, but I wouldn’t want busi­ness schools and the pro­fes­sional com­munity know­ing all of the weak­nesses of our school when we as Sauder are still try­ing to get the credit we deserve for our strengths. Fair point that it’s hard to con­firm our “risk factor” without it.

Laura Sil­vester, out­go­ing CUS Pres­id­ent
From the “Ques­tions to Con­sider” Face­book thread

There’s an obvi­ous fail­ure in logic here. If the doc­u­ments are private so as to not have people learn­ing about the faculty’s weak­nesses, then why has the rhet­oric around the accred­it­a­tion issue has been basic­ally: “You should vote for the ref­er­en­dum because the accred­it­ors say this build­ing is our big weak­ness!“?There have been plenty of ref­er­ences to things sup­posedly said by the accred­it­ing bod­ies. It’s secret, except maybe not. Why not do some­thing to verify such a big, scary claim? Even if there was no ref­er­en­dum, if accred­it­a­tion truly was on the bubble wouldn’t you want to know?

The num­ber of things where due dili­gence was not done is so broad as to be almost everything. The one I’ll pick here is that there’s been no talk of what the other options are. The rhet­oric has been that there are no other options. Phase II has been elev­ated to a sac­red status where it’s por­trayed as untouch­able. If the res­ults of the ref­er­en­dum comes back as “no”, the FAQs state that the build­ing will con­tinue for­ward. Money will be found, and budgets will be cut. No men­tion of scrap­ping, delay­ing, or scal­ing back the build­ing plans. Why can’t that even be a con­sid­er­a­tion? Does com­merce truly believe that a build­ing will be in the best interest of stu­dents even if it comes at the expense of fund­ing the actual in-class edu­ca­tion that stu­dents are given?

Are there really no other fund­ing options? It’s known that UBC is try­ing to extric­ate itself from the province’s fin­ances which would give them more capa­city for bor­row­ing funds. At the same time, it’s also known that UBC is ask­ing the province to exempt pro­fes­sional pro­grams from the pro­vin­cial policy lim­it­ing tuition increases to infla­tion, which could include the com­merce pro­gram. Other fund­ing aven­ues are being explored which may pan out if given time, though it has been much more use­ful for Dean Dan to invoke a crisis situ­ation where all fund­ing doors are closed, and put­ting shovels in the ground is mere weeks away regard­less of what happens.

Unfor­tu­nately the video of Tuesday’s info ses­sion has not yet been put online so exact quotes can­not be obtained, but dur­ing his motiv­a­tion in favour of the fee I remem­ber Con­nor Topley say­ing some­thing along the lines of ‘I don’t have time to look into the details around other fund­ing options. I trust that Dean Dan has tried to get any fund­ing avail­able and that it’s not out there.’

Not only is that not doing due dili­gence, it’s seem­ingly advoc­at­ing against doing due dili­gence before mak­ing a decision. There’s funny/tragic exchange on the Sauder Ref­er­en­dum Face­book wall where I ask for doc­u­ments, am told it’s “not for us” to look into it by a CUS dir­ector, then told by the same per­son that I should be look­ing into the facts to decide for myself, which is pre­cisely the reason I had asked for doc­u­ment­a­tion in the first place.

To me, the bot­tom line is that the CUS has put a decision worth tens of mil­lions of dol­lars before its mem­bers based on blind trust. After that, how any­one can trust them is unimaginable.