Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey
Three years into his overarching strategic plan for the university, President Stephen Toope appeared before faculty and students at his annual town hall meeting to tout UBC’s accomplishments and defend “Place and Promise.”
Following opening remarks, Toope answered questions from Peter Klein, the director of the School of Journalism and former 60 Minutes producer. The conversation covered a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the affordability of on-campus housing to UBC’s policies on animal research.
Toope identified housing as “the biggest challenge that UBC faces going forward in terms of recruitment and retention both of students and faculty.”
He said that the university has taken steps to address the chronic shortage of affordable housing on campus, including the establishment of a student housing endowment fund to subsidize the construction of new residences.
In February, the Board of Governors established the “eventual goal” of housing 50 per cent of the full time undergraduate population on campus. UBC currently houses at 29 per cent.
Transit Woes
Toope also spoke to the strained relationship the university has with TransLink, as a major transportation destination with no real municipal status or representation.
“There’s no one at TransLink who represents UBC, even though we’re the second largest transit destination in the Lower Mainland outside of the downtown core,” Toope said. “So there’s a structural governance problem there that I’ve been raising and I’m going to continue to raise.”
As for negotiations about bringing a Skytrain all the way to campus, Toope said he was unhappy with TransLink’s consultation process and that nothing short of a light rail line would adequately serve UBC’s commuter population.
“We’ve been pushing for real rapid transit,” he said. “Not just an enhanced bus route, which we don’t think will solve any of the problems at all.”
Access Copyright
Klein also asked Toope to address recent changes to copyright licensing. During the summer, Access Copyright (AC), a national copyright licensing agency, announced that it would greatly increase the costs to universities to gain access to copyrighted materials.
UBC opted out of AC, claiming that the cost was too high and that the extra expenses would be passed onto students.
“[AC] was going to enormously increase the cost of copyright materials,” said Toope. “We got quite concerned about this because it’s a direct hit on our students. We have no provision in our budget to just suck up those [extra] costs.”
Toope apologized for the inconvenient timing, but maintained that the university had no choice.
“We were frankly being held hostage—I use that term intentionally—and we decided we had to push back,” he said. “I know that it’s very hard. We’re trying to do everything we can to find support mechanisms.”
Animal Research
STOP UBC Animal Research, a group which has waged an aggressive PR campaign against the university’s allegedly secretive animal testing practices, held up protest banners at the town hall meeting. On this point, Toope was conciliatory.
“Have we told the story as well as we could about that? I don’t think so. Have we released as much information about that as we could? I don’t think so.”
He did say that the majority of animals tested are fish and rodents and that UBC is not testing on dogs or cats.
Regarding a recent Freedom of Information request by their organization, Toope maintained that a balance needs to be struck between giving information openly and keeping researchers at UBC protected.
“We’re working hard to figure out how to be more forthcoming around basic information of most research.”
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Excellence in academic medicine and dentistry, as in all fields of research and innovation, depends on a work environment characterized by intellectual curiosity, relentless critical inquiry, and a passion to advance scientific knowledge and improve clinical practice. Such an environment also depends on academic freedom — the right of academic staff to teach, study and publish regardless of prevailing opinion, prescribed doctrine or institutional preferences, and the freedom to express critical opinion about workplace institutions and broad public issues.
Academic health sciences professionals in Canada, unlike their faculty colleagues in all other disciplines, typically do not have effective protection for their academic freedom.
The Olivieri and Healy stories, along with similar cases in Canada6 and the United States7, 8 illustrate the fragility of academic freedom for clinical faculty, a term we use here to refer to health sciences professionals, generally with medical and dental degrees, doctorates, or both, who hold simultaneous appointments at both a university and a teaching hospital or other university-affiliated health care institution.
Clinical faculty are more vulnerable to attacks on their academic freedom than nonclinical academic faculty for several reasons. First, clinical faculty have dual appointments: at universities, where academic freedom is given some recognition, and at health care institutions, which lack a strong tradition of recognizing the value of dissent and criticism. Second, unlike non-clinical faculty, who typically derive their income from the university payroll, clinical faculty secure the major part of their income from a practice plan or alternative funding arrangement that is independent of both the university and the health care institution. Thus, clinical faculty find themselves in third institutional context, in which their academic freedom can be put at risk. All other academics must deal only with the university. Finally, in Canadian universities most clinical faculty are legally excluded from membership in the bargaining units of faculty associations — which, in Canada, unlike the United States, include virtually all other academic staff. In their affiliated health care institutions, clinical faculty are virtually the only group with no collective agreement to protect their rights.†
The magnitude of the problem
Major initiatives are necessary to guarantee the academic freedom of clinical faculty, as they are in all other fields of inquiry, to foster creative and innovative work. Over the past five years, CAUT has received dozens of complaints from clinical faculty about violations of their academic freedom in relation to their clinical and research work.
Testimonials from leaders in academic medicine indicate that physicians who present formal complaints to CAUT represent a small proportion of those who have suffered harassment, curtailment of academic advancement, or job loss as a result of their academic, or clinical viewpoints; their unwillingness to provide authorship on publications to undeserving colleagues; and their criticisms of institutional leadership and direction. The intense personal anguish of the situation, a desire to avoid becoming mired in the consequences of harassment, and a fear of adverse publicity if complaints become public, are all strong disincentives to lodging formal complaints.
Finding a solution
1. Strengthen the rules governing academic freedom for clinical faculty
The rules, both formal and informal, that govern the working lives of clinical faculty are set out in a broad collection of written instruments — mission statements, guidelines, policies, affiliation agreements and employment contracts—that establish the norms of professional life at universities and health care institutions. Few such documents contain strong statements regarding academic freedom. An unequivocal commitment to academic freedom in these documents is important both to establish a legal and policy basis for faculty rights and to foster a culture of institutional respect for academic freedom. That said, we are well aware of the limitations of these sorts of statements.
2. Ensure security of appointment and security of income for clinical faculty
To be effective, declarations of the right to academic freedom require additional protections. Security of employment, including security of income, is key to the exercise of academic freedom. Measures to protect the security of employment of clinical faculty should include eligibility for tenure with the university. Security in respect to relationships with health care institutions and funding mechanisms is more complex. To provide such security there must be established rules; the appointment or privileges to practise must be of renewable, limited terms and must be terminable only for just cause. The rules should specifically include protection for academic freedom such that the exercise of academic freedom cannot provoke non-renewal, variance or termination.
3. Ensure access to natural justice for clinical faculty
To deal with conflicts involving the rights of individuals, fair and effective dispute resolution procedures are essential. These must be based on a set of legal principles deriving from “natural justice.”9 These principles include the right to be informed of allegations, the right to a hearing in a timely manner, the right to disclosure of evidence, the right to legal representation, the right to present evidence and to challenge the evidence presented by others, the right to know the reasons for any decision rendered and, most important of all, the right to an independent, unbiased external arbitrator. Universities, health care institutions and clinical funding plans must ensure that clinical faculty have access to dispute resolution procedures characterized by these principles. Virtually all other faculty members at Canadian universities have such access.
4. Strengthen the representational organizations of clinical faculty
The courts represent the pinnacle of natural justice within our society, but even there we are all aware that lack of resources may seriously compromise the likelihood of obtaining justice. Disputes between clinical faculty members and their universities or health care institutions pit individuals against organizations with substantial resources, expertise and power. For this reason, even effective mechanisms to adjudicate academic freedom disputes are, alone, insufficient to ensure that clinical faculty are treated fairly. Unless a clinical faculty member has meaningful representation, rights on paper are difficult, if not impossible, to enforce.
To ensure academic freedom, clinical faculty need to join or create effective organizations that represent them in their relationship with universities and university-affiliated health care institutions. These organizations should be characterized by a democratic structure, financial viability and independence, a legally enforceable collective bargaining relationship with the institution, the exclusion of persons in managerial positions, participation in the broader academic staff community, and intimate familiarity with academic freedom issues. Where membership in existing certified faculty associations or the creation of new certified faculty associations is not possible or feasible, clinical faculty should create robust uncertified associations. Such associations would be similar to faculty associations at non-unionized universities that negotiate collective employment contracts and enjoy access to automatic contributions to faculty representative organizations and independent grievance arbitration mechanisms.
Conclusion
Universities and affiliated health care institutions must make strong declarations of rights pertaining to academic freedom, provide security of appointment and income, allow access to dispute resolution systems characterized by natural justice, and permit clinical faculty to form powerful representational organizations. These steps are necessary to maintain the ability of clinical faculty and the institutions where they work to advance the boundaries of scientific knowledge and improve clinical practice.
natural justice – good one! unfortunately there’s no such thing as the noble savage.Justice isn’t natural and nature isn’t just. We override nature to get to justice,which is why we need law, otherwise it’s just dog eat dog. If you think humans are naturally just, you should read about Rwanda.
Dr. Toope admits UBC has failed to provide information to the public about its animal research and even says UBC must be more transparent. Yet, UBC has refused to provide ANY details about its animal experiments in response to numerous BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act requests. Why?
tl;dr version:
because at this stage, it’s better to not disclose info that could harm the lives of researchers.
LONG VERSION:
Researchers, if they’re doing their jobs right (they better be at a world top-40 university such as UBC), would have gone through the ethics boards, seeked approval for their experiments, and whatnot. Once UBC finds a way to disclose info on animal research without threatening the lives of these researchers, nothing’s going to change.
It’s not like the selected animals will be changed, as (like I said above) ethics board would have approved the process beforehand.
It’s not like the tests will be changed, as (like i said above) ethics board would have approved the process beforehand.
Er Grace, the problem is that moral absolutists see no harm in harming others as long as their own goals are advanced. It’s a kind of moral sociopathology. We see this in the radical pro-life movement in US, in the animal rights movement and in extreme religious groups. After all if I am 100% right on a given issue all the time, what’s the point in dialogue?
It’s a small step from there to say that another human’s life is less valuable than your absolutist goals. And as we know the animal rights movement is not above discarding human life in favour of their personal certainties.
It’s all a bit funny (and sad) because every animal on the planet is eating other living things every day just to stay alive. At least animal research has a point to it beyond dinnertime.
And plants have feelings too btw.
Panama,
we as human beings have AWARENESS, and this is what sets us apart from other animals. It is a fallacy that those who oppose the use of animals in scientific inquiry care less for human beings: rather, the call for human-based approaches to human maladies is an appeal for a higher, more reliable type of investigation, one that is being shown to have a heightened level of effectiveness as we go forward, and that shows a heightened sense of the deepest humanity.
so if humans are different to animals because of AWARENESS, that would argue that monkeys are not the same as humans, which defeats your point that we are all basically the same.
You seem to be saying that we should experiment on humans not animals. The Nazis would agree with you there – let’s cut out the middle monkey and go straight to the gypsy, jew or homosexual.
Typical of absolutists – sacrifice millions of humans to save animals who wouldn’t be there in the first place if they weren’t bred for research. It’s such a pointless blind alley. It’s like being against electricity.
“Disagree with me and that means you’re a Nazi”
no – disagreeing with me doesn’t make you a nazi but experimenting on humans was a nazi speciality – much kinder than experimenting on animals.
What about bacteria? Can we do research on them, or is that immoral too? Plants? Sponges? Where do you draw the line between “OK to do research on” and “NOT OK to do research on”?
It seems ambiguous to me to draw the line at animals versus everything else, since it’s “animal research” that is being targeted here and the difference between what we would classify as an animal and it’s closest non-animal cousin is very minute. Then again, this line is ambiguous no matter where you draw it, and that’s exactly the point. We have to come up with some barometer for why animal testing is justified for every single experiment we do and follow the three R’s. But if the question is whether animal testing should be done for sake of alleviating human suffering, well, human beings have AWARENESS, like you said, and that awareness makes human maladies and human suffering more significant than that of other animals.
If a heightened sense of humanity to you involves stopping all attempts that can make a difference to the life of a cancer patient or a person with Lou Gehrig’s disease that involve animal testing, then I respectfully don’t want to have any part of it. If you believe that animal research doesn’t provide insight into the pathology and potential treatment of disease, please, pick up an issue of Science, or Nature, or Nature Medicine, or Cell, or Cell Stem Cell, etc., etc., etc., and look for yourself.
As a cancer researcher, I have to tell you I’d absolutely be thrilled if I could effectively target cancer in a way that didn’t involve the destruction of mice. But having studied it now for 10+ years, I know there simply isn’t an effective way to model metastasis besides using living organisms. For sake of my family members who’ve died of cancer in the past, I’ll continue to do this research, and I’ll know full well that I’ve shown as “heightened a sense of the deepest humanity” as possible.
Perhaps the biggest caution is this: Diversity documentation may function to conceal both existing and new forms of inequity and the gap between words and deeds. While equity and diversity documents may articulate institutional commitments, and may inspire an organisation’s members, they also pose risks. Sometimes the mere existence of such documents may give the impression that change is underway. However, without clear mechanisms and benchmarks to assess institutional performance, it is difficult to assess outcomes. We must look beyond the documents.
Equity and diversity are two complementary pursuits in the 21st century academy. Achieving equity and diversity requires more than inspirational mission statements, strategic plans, dynamic websites; they require turning words into deeds, and aspirations into best practices. The best practices for achieving equity and diversity include identifying benchmarks for assessing results over time. The best ways to reflect commitment to equity and diversity include documentation, benchmarks, accountable leadership and modelling the desired outcomes.