Erica Frank is running to be a faculty representative on UBC’s Board of Governors. She has been a professor in UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and department of family medicine in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine since 2006. She has also served two terms as a Tier I Canada Research Chair.
The Ubyssey spoke to Frank about her campaign and what she hopes to bring to the board. We asked her the same questions we asked all candidates, and edited this interview for length and clarity.
The Ubyssey: Why are you running and why should people elect you?
Erica Frank: I'm running because I mind the gap. I've been involved with volunteering at UBC, both on academic committees, but also in the University Neighbourhoods Association, since I came here in 2006. It's clear we have an extraordinary university, but there are places where gaps exist because I believe the university isn't always doing an optimal job at listening to all of its constituents.
I'd like to be a voice for faculty and for others, but particularly for faculty constituents, because I think that these missed opportunities are a barrier for us to go on to become the truly extraordinary university that we could become. Most of those issues are concerns about community, and that's an area that I have a lot of experience in, both organizationally as a founder and principal investigator, but also as someone who's lived in co-housing, who has been appointed by Campus and Community Planning as the developer of co-housing at UBC. These are the kinds of social determinants of health, well-being and thriving that I think I can bring.
Last week, the federal government announced it would be further reducing the number of new international study permits from 437,000 in 2025 to 155,000 in 2026. This is a 65 per cent decline. How should the university respond to budget shortfalls that may result from this?
In many ways, this is just an amplification of the same issues that the Board of Governors and universities in general have to deal with perennially. This is an excellent example of the kind of place where I would not come in strongly opinionated, but I would talk with the Dean of Graduate Studies and others about what kinds of techniques are already being pursued, what kinds of things they're thinking about. I've been on a lot of boards, and it is clearly our fiduciary and moral responsibility to opine on these kinds of things. But I also think in as complex an ecosystem as this is, where there's huge expertise in dealing with these questions off the Board, that's probably what I would do first — talk to our inside experts about what's already been done, what's being planned.
What usually ends up happening in such a situation is that universities simply become more exclusive, more elite, that we use this opportunity to be even more selective in who we admit. I'm the inventor of NextGenU.org, which provides free education in every country. I believe very strongly in UBC’s mission as a public university. So the one answer that I will not punt on is that I think simply becoming more elite is one answer that I wouldn't put forward. Trying to find ways to provide more education to a larger population is what I've always been about. I'll give you a concrete example in the School of Population and Public Health, which is my primary appointment. We often have these discussions being very proud of how we're only admitting 10 or 15 per cent of applicants, and the question that I invariably raise my hand and say is: “As the University of British Columbia, how are we providing a more useful answer for the 85 per cent of applicants to whom we say ‘No, we don't care to educate you at this moment?’” So that's always going to be my drive — to find a more equity-promoting, more floating-all-boats kind of solution.
Earlier this year, the UBC Library announced a “significant structural deficit” in its funding, despite UBC President Benoit-Antoine Bacon stating that the university is in a financially strong position. What do you believe is the correct response to the library’s problems?
This is an issue that's an exacerbation of a pandemic of library closings. I'm on one of the boards of the Internet Archive. I actually brought Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, here for half a year during the pandemic. So this is an area that I'm deeply personally involved in.
This is one kind of committee that I'd love to get to work on, because as a former journal editor, as a part of the Wayback Machine’s presence in Canada as well, I think that we need to find more interlibrary solutions and more common deprivatized solutions, like the Internet Archive, so that we can, again, collectively lift all boats, not just feed our researchers who have the privilege of interlibrary loan. We can really remain a research resource — like a provincial university library should be — by doing these kinds of partnerships.
Should UBC organize teaching and learning around the tradition of a university as a place of pure knowledge-seeking, or around the interests of the post-graduation labour market?
This one is a pretty clear ‘both’ answer, as it always has been. I have an interesting perspective on this as a physician whose primary appointment is in the School of Public Health. In the faculty of medicine, when we're producing MDs, we’re very focused on the labour market. When we're producing MPHs, not so much. And when we're doing research, often not so much. I think there are disciplines where there is the assumption that the work — if you manage to find work in that discipline — will lead you to a life of the mind. But those jobs are rare, and a life of the mind that's coupled with action based on what you figure out is so much more interesting and productive.
I have done this a great deal at the School of Population and Public Health. The one course that I teach every year, “Intervening in Global Public Health,” is about exactly that. It’s about marrying how you take the UN Sustainable Development Goals and actually do something in public health that has a meaningful, measurable effect. I think that is a place where we need to continue to step up more, that we cannot be an ivory tower. It is a luxury that is unaffordable, not just for the individual students who end up without something to support themselves with at the end, but it's also unfair to society, because we have an obligation as a university to educate people to solve problems with basic research, but also to solve problems with acting on that research.
Over the last three years, some students and staff have called on the university to divest from companies they say are complicit in the Palestinian genocide. If elected, will you push for divestment from these companies?
This is a massively hard one, so I'm afraid that I have to give you a couple sentences of background to explain why. I'm the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. My grandfather became a physician in Germany and served in First World War for the German government. My parents had to leave Germany in the late '30s because of Hitler. I'm also a third-generation atheist. And I'm also a person who, because of my name, family background and appearance when I walk into a room, everybody assumes that I'm a Jew — even when I tell them that I'm an atheist. So that's the complexity that I bring to it. I have not figured out what the right stance is for UBC to take on this, and at this point, probably having an opinion on that is less critical than figuring out: how will I handle the next such situation?
I am the steward of the commemorative casting of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize that was given to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, on whose board I sit in the US, Canada and globally. It was cast in 1990 for the 10-year anniversary of the organization and the five-year anniversary of the Peace Prize, and it's made from a melted Soviet missile. The Soviet chapter gave one of these to each of the other international chapters, and I'm the custodian of the Canadian version. That is my talisman for letting you know that these kinds of issues — how our organization is going to speak out on fraught issues that people care deeply about — I'm skilled in doing that. I've done that on multiple boards. I'm a board member-elect on the American College of Preventive Medicine board as well. This is what we do: people come to us with policies and — this is what my background in public health, of course, allows me to do as well — we look at both sides of them. And my experience as a journal editor, as well, is to look at both sides of the issue and opine on them in a reasoned way with my colleagues.
Despite a 44 per cent decrease in UBCV greenhouse gas emissions since 2007, the university is not on track to meet its 85 per cent reduction goal by 2030. Is there anything you would do differently to attempt to meet this goal? If not, how do you plan to approach climate-related issues at UBC?
I was a UBC sustainability fellow for two years. I was elected three times for six years on the University Neighbourhoods Association board, where I had responsibility for sustainability and for public health. So I care hugely about this. I also designed, built and lived in the only energy independent home in Georgia in 1993. I've been at this for a long time.
Culminating in 2021, I got, along with others, the UBC Board of Governors to agree to reduce our air travel carbon footprint by 50 per cent by 2030, compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. It has been a struggle trying to get something done about that. But as best as we can tell, we have actually increased our carbon footprint from flying in 2024 and 2025 compared to pre-pandemic. I've helped organize several cohorts at UBC who have worked on this. I've had my students create a little campaign, and I'm ready to roll on this.
The reason why I'm interested in air travel particularly is because this has been excluded from UBC’s scope for consideration for sustainability until a few years ago, and as you can see here, it is so much more powerful than anything else we do. The official Board of Governors policy concerns UBC work-related travel. But two things about that — I'm responsible for both my work-related travel and for my non-work-related travel, and I would hope that we would do a compelling enough job convincing people, showing people these data, that they would not say, “Oh, well, yes, I need to do that for my work, but for my own travel, I can just travel whenever I want to.” So I do think it needs to be both. I think that with my Board of Governors hat, I would need to promote the Board of Governors policy around work travel, but I don't think you can do a good job of that and fail to convince people that they ought to also limit their personal travel.
Are there any issues important to your candidacy that you haven’t got the chance to talk about already?
I'm really committed to UBC for the rest of my life. I intend to live here for the rest of my life. I'm developing co-housing at UBC as well, which will be the first academic and first experimental co-housing in the world. Having lived here for most of the last two decades, I really see UBC as being a full ecosystem where we invite students and faculty and staff to truly become part of this family — to live here, to work here, to have our friends anchored here as well. I’m the sort of person who constantly does environmental scans and gap analyses and sees this could be better, or that could be better. That's what drives me to do this — I would really like to spend a substantial part of my time helping us achieve the magnificence that I think we are right next to.
First online
Share this article
Submit a complaint Report a correction
