Off the heels of a trip to Ottawa, President Benoit-Antoine Bacon told senators the federal budget wasn’t as bad for UBC as it could have been.
Bacon expressed relief at the Nov. 19 Senate meeting that the tri-agency research grant councils — federal research funding bodies which are “already underfunded compared to [equivalent organizations in] other OECD countries” — were largely spared from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s directive that federal government organizations reduce spending by 15 per cent over three years. Last academic year, UBC researchers received over $258 million from the tri-agencies, making up more than a quarter of the university’s $936 million in research funding. The cuts the tri-agencies are being asked to make will come from administrative savings, meaning research funding is expected to remain stable, Bacon said.
On the budget’s immigration changes, Bacon said it’s too early to know for sure how the government’s plans will affect the institution. B.C.’s allocation and UBC’s allocation of international students are not yet known. However, Bacon did welcome the government’s move to exempt international graduate students from requiring a provincial attestation letter (PAL), a document which confirms that a study space has been allocated to a student in a province.
PALs were introduced last January, and remain necessary for prospective international undergraduate students. He also welcomed the government’s $1.7 billion talent attraction initiative — referring to it as a potential “brain gain for Canada.”
“If you read the news releases from Universities Canada, and the U15, people consider this budget good news, under the circumstances,” Bacon said.
Senator Amin Adibi brought up graduate student funding, telling Bacon it needs attention. He noted that UBC competes against American institutions like Harvard and MIT that offer far more than UBC does, as does the University of Toronto (UofT). Last November, UofT announced it was increasing annual base funding for PhDs to $40,000. UBC, by contrast, provides PhDs with a minimum of $24,000.
That number is below Statistics Canada’s before-tax low income cutoff figure for a single person in a metropolitan area, which is $30,526. After tax, it’s $25,297. Bacon acknowledged the funding minimum is “low” and said conversations are “ongoing” to raise it. It’s a matter of “when and how high,” he said.
“We are working very hard on this issue,” Provost Gage Averill said. “It's a top priority to begin to put our minimum in a more competitive space.”
Bacon also used his remarks to voice support for a SkyTrain to UBC, thanking the AMS for its advocacy, and spoke about the B.C. government’s Look West industrial plan. “If you read the document, it clearly identifies education, talent and innovation as a key to the future of all sectors of B.C.’s economy, [including in] many areas in which we have significant strength, such as life sciences and biotech, AI, quantum critical minerals, forestry and others,” Bacon said.
“I would say that overall, the NDP government does understand and value what we are doing in higher education, and that's not the case across the country.”
Student Experience of Instruction (SEI) report tabled
The 2023 SEI Working Group tabled a report finding that classes that were smaller, more advanced and had more international students were associated with higher SEI scores — with class sizes having the “most pronounced effect.”
Instructors’ background also affected scores. “In undergraduate courses, racialized instructors tended to receive slightly lower scores, although the differences were small and varied in both size (smaller in some cases, larger in others) and direction (more positive ratings in some cases), when considering other factors such as discipline, class size, and course level,” the report found.
However, no “consistent differences” were identified based on instructors’ gender, Indigenous status, disability or rank. Teaching-focused faculty — lecturers and educational leadership, according to the report — also received more favourable responses.
In the interquartile range of SEI scores — the values between the bottom 25 per cent and top 75 per cent in a distribution — “the vast majority of responses fall between 80 and 95 per cent” favourability across three winter sessions, said Simon Bates, vice provost and associate vice president, teaching and learning.
Derogatory comments in SEIs were also a focus of the working group.
“Currently, UBC lacks a centralized system to review SEI comments, and only a small number of inappropriate student comments are removed each year, and the existing process depends primarily on individual instructors to identify and report problematic comments,” said Bates. “This decentralized approach … puts the onus on those who are most impacted by them.”
To address the problem, the working group proposed investment in text analytics software capable of flagging comments for human review, trained on UBC data. The report suggests pilot testing be launched with the machine learning company Dataiku.
Senator Robert Kozak, dean of the faculty of forestry, asked Bates how soon a text analysis solution could be implemented. Bates said he hopes something will be pilotable “within the next 12 months.”
“Given the focus [on] mental health at our university, I would suggest that funding that [pilot] is a priority,” Kozak followed up.
“Just looking at the data and the favorability, it looks great. It looks a little too great,” Senator Drédyn Fontana said. “I’m wondering if there's some selection bias, maybe, in who's filling up these surveys?”
“I'm wondering if the committee has considered … mid-term surveys,” Fontana asked, adding the “personal incentive” of being able to affect a course mid-semester might make for “more constructive feedback.”
Bates said any survey has to deal with selection bias, and that while the university encourages midterm check-ins, they serve a different purpose than “summative” SEIs.
At one point, Senator Steven Pelech suggested the lower scores associated with racialized faculty might not be due to discrimination but instead to some of them being “diversity, equity, inclusion hires.” No senator responded to that remark.
Meeting time debate continues after tied vote
The Oct. 15 Senate meeting saw a proposal to move the body’s meeting time from 6 p.m. to 4 p.m. for the next eight years, starting next September. It was sent back to the Agenda Committee after student senators objected, saying many students would categorically be unable to participate in proceedings if their class schedules failed to align. After a narrow vote to refer the matter back to the agenda committee, Bacon asked the committee to focus squarely on this issue. The original purpose of the change was to support the participation of faculty with families and make sure proceedings ended earlier in the day.
This meeting, the Agenda Committee returned and recommended the same thing — 4 p.m.
“The Agenda Committee is making our motion exactly as we made it last time [because] we feel that this is the best decision to bring forward to Senate,” said Senator Wendy Norman, presenting the motion for the committee. She added that deans from all faculties would be “able to work with any student or faculty member” in need of accommodations to participate in Senate proceedings.
The Academic Calendar already provides a mechanism for granting academic concessions to students whose attendance is required at governance meetings.
More than a half-dozen senators spoke against the motion. Student senators Cade Desjarlais, Zarifa Nawar, Kareem Hassib and Judy Xu all voiced their opposition. Hassib noted that there are 18 student senators, compared to twice as many faculty senators. “If six students can't make it to Senate … that's a third of our entire student caucus,” he said.
“I think it's a bit lame that we can't cope” with a 6 p.m. start time, Senator Sean Graham said. Senator Adibi said if there were a motion on the floor to ban certain students from running for Senate, everybody would vote against it. “I think while this motion is well-intentioned, it has the same consequence,” he said.
The eventual vote was a tie — 27–27. “Are you joking?” Bacon asked the Senate clerk. “I don't want to make a decision like this on one or two votes, especially when it's divided across the stakeholder lines … Senator Norman, with my apologies, I'm going to send it back to committee,” he said.
“Thank you for a great debate, everybody, and let's move on with our lives.”
A previous version of this article incorrectly included Drédyn Fontana in the group of student senators opposing the Senate time change. He actually supported it, saying he took a "different perspective" from his peer student senators. The Ubyssey regrets this error.
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