The Ubyssey endorses Bryan Buraga and Drédyn Fontana for UBC’s Board of Governors.
Editor’s Note: The new Editorial Board is a pilot project launched for this year’s elections. From now on, that term refers to the group of journalists who write their views as a collective in the newspaper’s name, linking us with centuries of newspaper tradition.
Our pilot Editorial Board consisted of Features Editor Elena Massing, Politics Columnist Maya Tommasi and AMS Columnist Quyen Schroeder, who served as the board’s chair.
Over the past few weeks, they contacted every candidate, held interviews, attended debates and studied platforms before deliberating among themselves who The Ubyssey will endorse. Their deliberations were private and isolated from the rest of the newsroom, including from me, the Opinion Editor, until drafts had been filed. Like all of our journalists, they practised according to the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Ethics Guidelines.
— Spencer Izen, Deputy Managing Editor and Opinion Editor
Much of this debate — and our conversations with the candidates — revolved around who had the most experience and connections to powerful people at the university. Sure, there’s value in having big names and advocacy wins under one’s belt, but candidates generally have similar governance experience. When student governors bring opinions and issues to the board, rarely do decisions pan out in their favour, as evidenced by countless years of tuition increases or the resistance to a widely supported call to divest from companies complicit in genocide. While Buraga, Fontana and Zarifa Nawar all bear notable experience, the former two bring new or overlooked ideas to the table that might have more to offer students.
Buraga hopes to collaborate with students doing on-the-ground advocacy work, inspired in part by the student walkout for food security in October 2022 and the $800,000 allocation toward food security initiatives that followed in early 2023. This was a “student-focused movement” in which the governors had to “use their position and privilege to drive home the need for that increased funding.” It was an anomalous year, as there hasn’t been that kind of dialogue between students and governors in the past couple of years, but Buraga is set on mobilizing the “students on the ground” to bring this back. It’s an approach he found quite effective during his time serving on the McGill University Board of Governors.
Similar to Buraga’s emphasis on collaboration, Fontana was adamant on advocacy being a “team sport.” Fontana aims to prioritize working with faculties. He claimed “42 per cent of every international student dollar goes toward faculties,” implying they will suffer particularly badly from international student reductions. He plans to advocate for more transparency in faculty budgets, which he described as “essentially a black box.” This leads us to believe he will, compared to previous governors, have a more constituency and faculty-focused approach.
Over the past couple of years, students have called on the Board of Governors to divest from companies complicit in Palestinian genocide. Divestment is one of Fontana’s main priorities. He believes there could be significant progress within the next 18 months if students keep putting pressure on the board and there’s a governor in the room willing to hear them out.
Buraga holds a similar opinion. He’s optimistic about change being on the horizon if a candidate is willing to make divestment a priority and, like Fontana, emphasized the importance of continued “student momentum.”
To explain her stance on the matter, Nawar referenced UBC’s divestment from fossil fuels in 2019, nearly a decade after the first Climate Action Plan was developed in 2010. She says she’s passionate about moving forward on divestment, but believes that it is unattainable in the near future. We disagree. In the debate, she said progress needs to happen at a “significantly speedier pace,” and we think this is possible — but not from a candidate who resigns themselves to accepting the past as the only answer. It’s also worth reflecting on the context around UBC deciding to divest from fossil fuels. Amid thousands striking at UBC and millions taking to the streets around the world for climate protests, it would have been a bad look for the university not to take action. UBC has been seeing students carry out action after action condemning genocide in Palestine — perhaps we just need the right candidate to push things over the edge.
Unlike other candidates in this year’s race — and many governors past — Fontana is not running on a promise to fight for a tuition freeze, instead proposing a push for maintaining sub-inflationary tuition increases. UBC’s budget, he says, is not in a place where we can afford to freeze tuition without making cuts to affordability measures currently in place for students. By keeping increases sub-inflationary, tuition actually decreases relative to the value of money, which he says will lead to “essentially a free tuition” for both domestic and international students. Fontana has had to access emergency aid bursaries himself. He sees these increases as a more “fiscally responsible” way to go about making tuition more affordable without sacrificing any services along the way.
Both Nawar and Buraga will push for tuition freezes. To avoid making cuts, Buraga proposed using money from the endowment as a “rainy day fund.” Nawar’s proposal relied on recruiting more international students, specifically from the US — to her, the current political state is an opportunity, but we’re concerned that continuing to fund our university with international students is short-sighted. Students have yet to advocate successfully for tuition freezes, but perhaps these alternate funding proposals will prove more persuasive. If Buraga and Fontana were to be elected, they would need to compromise on tuition increases.
We found candidates Jacky Xue and Sultana Razia did not rise to the level of the other three. Both candidates were not particularly knowledgeable about the board in its current state. Like other candidates, they proposed limits to annual tuition increases and divestment from companies complicit in genocide, but their proposals for achieving these goals were unconvincing. They had neither the experience and connections nor the inspiring approach required to put them on par with Buraga, Fontana or Nawar.
Xue proposed alleviating upcoming budgetary strains by creating micro-credentials to increase university revenue. While the idea itself isn’t all that bad, he did not express concrete ideas regarding how it might be implemented — and even if this happened, it would be unlikely to make a significant dent in our budgetary difficulties, especially given the additional resources needed to run these programs.
Razia's approach to budgetary constraints was to “just venture out and get more funding,” not specifying what this would look like. She admitted to having fewer connections than Nawar and Fontana, but claimed she could “do it better than them” if given the chance.
Students are dramatically outnumbered on the board, so we need our two governors to agree with each other. Nawar has got wins in the past, but when asked how she would find success on the board, she took a hostile approach to asserting her superiority over candidates. She ended her debate by, yet again, listing her accomplishments and reinforcing that “no one else can say the same.” Among fellow candidates who have previously sat on a university board or held positions as an AMS executive and senator, we consider that simply untrue — and it’s certainly not the attitude we want to see one of our student governors bringing to advocacy work.
While voting for Nawar is reasonable — unlike voting for Razia or Xue — we’ll be casting out ballots for Buraga and Fontana. Their experience on university bodies and willingness to work together will benefit students across our campus.
Editor's Note: Razia also serves on The Ubyssey Publication Society’s Board of Directors. The board has no control over The Ubyssey’s coverage.
Editorials are opinion essays, and while they represent the views of the Editorial Board, they may not speak for every person at our newspaper. They are subject, however, to the same standard of fact-checking as anything else in our report.
