Echoing the sentiment of the Faculty Association earlier this week, the Graduate Student Society of UBC has asked that UBC's Board of Governors adopt a number of reforms to begin the process of making the Board more transparent.
In an open letter to acting chair Alice Laberge, the GSS suggested a variety of reforms, all of which are grounded in making the Board more transparent and accountable. They range from requiring all board members be given publicly available, university-issued email addresses to all meetings being disclosed to the public.
“The pressure the GSS can put on the Board directly is probably fairly limited,” said GSS President Tobias Friedel. “We are asking to be able to present on the recommendations we make at the next board meeting and to answer any questions the board members may have.”
Friedel notes that more than half of the board members are appointed by the provincial government, which “leaves the option to escalate the conversation to the next sized level and advocate to the provincial government to rethink their choices for their appointment.”
“I don’t get the impression that the GSS wields a huge amount of power in that situation,” said Maayan Kreitzman, representative for the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability on the GSS. “At the same time, like any student organization -- the AMS, the GSS -- I think … when the GSS is strong and sensible it can improve that dynamic.”
The AMS has released a statement in response former President Arvind Gupta’s sudden departure, as well as the ensuing side-scandal involving the chair of the Board, John Montalbano, being accused of breaching academic freedom.
The statement released by the AMS did not call for Montalbano’s resignation, as some societies such as the Faculty Association and the Canadian Association of University Teachers, had done.
The GSS also asked that “closed agendas of the Board … be disclosed to the public.”
According to both Friedel and Kreitzman, there had been very little communication between the Board and the GSS over recent years.
"It seemed like the GSS had only has pretty limited interaction with the board in the last three years,” said Kreitzman.
Friedel confirmed that the extent of his communication with the board chair has been one phone call, and one letter written in response to a letter that the GSS wrote to them. According to Friedel, “this is one of our concerns.”
When asked if he expects that the Board would adopt the reforms, Friedel said “I am fairly optimistic -- I don’t believe any of those asks are outrageous. Some of those asks are really more reaffirmations of stances that should be fairly self explanatory and are just being pulled into question by recent actions of the Board.”