1. How will you promote a balance between UBC’s plans for campus development (Gage South, etc) and the demand for student housing?
UBC has a target of housing 50 per cent of the student population on campus. However, UBC has been pushing to designate Gage South, which is the heart of student activity on campus, as “non-academic.” Students have strongly opposed this and the proposed plan for market housing in this area, and would like to see it designated as “academic.” This does not contradict UBC’s development plans by any means, as student housing is still allowed in academic lands and staff and faculty housing can be moved elsewhere by transferring density of other areas, such as Wesbrook Place.
2. What do you think of UBC’s restructuring of the summer term? Does more work need to be done on developing the summer term system at UBC? Why or why not?
The summer term definitely needs more development. One of the main reasons UBC is encouraging more market housing on campus is to support the existing businesses on campus all year, especially over the summer when there [aren't] many students around. Also, there’s a trend towards 12-month contracts for student housing. With this, it would be absolutely beneficial to students and UBC if the summer term was developed to its full potential. The current work of the VP Academic’s office in this regard should continue.
3. How should the AMS approach its relationship with the UNA?
Specially during the discussions around UBC governance, building on the existing positive relationship with the UNA is essential to the AMS.
4. Should students have a right to access professor evaluations?
There’s obviously a lot of demand from students to be able to access professor evaluations, but the main arguments against releasing them include privacy issues and the fact that these evaluations are created to provide feedback to the professors to improve their teaching and releasing them would discourage this. I believe that UBC should look into the current teaching evaluation (especially since it’s not currently used effectively) and develop a new system which has two components: one that aims at providing feedback to the professors with the other directed towards the needs of future students.
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