Many of you probably woke up on Saturday, still reeling from the previous night’s festivities, to find you’d received a rare e-mail from your humble university president, Stephen Toope, which claimed that the end of the world was coming because Metro Vancouver wanted to take over campus. You might be wondering: Is this really true?
Not really. In 1997, UBC and Metro Vancouver negotiated an Official Community Plan (OCP) that outlined how UBC would be governed. That document was based off the UBC Campus Plan, which was passed in 1992. Since UBC is finishing up a new Campus Plan, it follows that the OCP should be changed. Right?
If you’re Stephen Toope, apparently not. Instead, you should send a borderline-hysterical e-mail out to all of your friends, using words like “devastating” and “unprecedented,” because Metro Vancouver wants UBC to operate in the same way as McGill or the University of Toronto.
Toope’s e-mail ends urging students, staff and the UBC community to e-mail academic.freedom@ubc.ca. Which is ironic because the university’s concerns aren’t about any freedom but their own. They’re based on UBC wanting to keep total control—of zoning, of development and of keeping students as second-class citizens in a community that caters more and more each year to people who don’t actually attend the university.
This isn’t about academics, or research, or real complaints about academic land use. Metro Vancouver doesn’t care about that. They care that an institution exists that is the size of a city, has the resources of a city, and makes zoning and development decisions in the same way that an actual city does, and they have no real control over it.
Just because it works for the university doesn’t mean it’s right. Or legal.
UBC’s situation has never made sense. Metro Vancouver’s actions are just the first step, but it may result in this campus having the sort of accountability and organization that makes sense. Instead of complaining and sending hysterical e-mails, Toope should suck it up, look for compromises, and accept the fact that the days when the university acts as judge, jury and executioner may be coming to an end.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Loading ...
