Having had the opportunity to observe five different former presidents over my career at UBC (Martha Piper, Stephen Toupe, Arvind Gupta, Santa Ono, and Deborah Buszard), I can certainly say Benoit-Antoine Bacon is not like the others. Bacon is UBC’s first Quebecois president. We’ve had BC'ers, Brits, and Yankees, but this is the first Quebecer at the helm of BC’s august flagship university. I suspect he finds it intersting moving from one ‘distinct society’ to the other one on the west coast.
A retrospective tour of past presidents
Piper took up the reigns around the same time as I was hired at UBC. She inherited the big APEC meetings on campus that infamously turned into a police action against UBC students. I watched both the police action and the president’s response from the sidelines. Piper took it in stride and moved forward and didn’t hide behind the excuse it was former president Strangway’s mess. Piper’s term was notable for acquiring the UBC-O campus, finding the funding to start maintaining the buildings Strangway had built, and kick the campus development up a notch to lay the foundation for our current supersizing of density in the residential areas.
I found Toupe highly responsive to faculty emails. He was also an intellectual’s president - very much interested in ideas. Toupe seemed more intersted in the academic side of things (though he clearly managed the entire presidential portfolio well) in a way that appealed to faculty.
I met Gupta while serving as an elected director of the UNA. We had set up quarterly meetings between the UNA Board and UBC Execs. Toupe delegated this to his VP-external and VP-Finance. It was a surprise to attend the meeting and find Gupta there. I appreciated his frankness at the meeting. I suspect that frankness is part of what rattled the exec team and Deans and subsequently led to his departure.
Ono was the first president with whom I served on the Board of Governors with. Ono was highly responsive -at first- to faculty. Even as he became less responsive he remained a big presence on social media in a way that stood out as different for UBC presidents.
Ono wore his heart on his sleeve. Consequently, he could take offence easily. He was a sincere advocate and devotee of a Christian influenced notion of service leadership. When he left I penned a comment, Saying Goodbye Ono.
Deborah Buszard stepped out of retirement and into Interim Presidency following Ono’s early departure from UBC back to the States. Buszard and I had met when I first served on the Board. She was then Principal of UBC-O. Trained as an agricultural scientist, Buszard focussed on support for the core academic mission as opposed to other more current non-academic issues- traditional ideas like good work, effective teaching, and ensuring the university kept on ticking.
The Bacon Presidency
As a member of UBC’s Board of Governors and UBC-V’s Senate I am starting to get a sense of what the Bacon Presidency might look like.
The March 24, 2024 open session of the Board’s Executive committee offers an indication.
All of the items on the open agenda had been prepared for the consent agenda, which means voted on but not discussed (assumption is consent agenda items are to be approved with no issue). Governors can request an item be removed from the consent agenda. In this case, in response to a letter from the AMS earlier in the month, the approval of the board policy on the appointment of administrative vice presidents was taken off the consent agenda.
A presentation by the university council and the vp-human relations was given during which time they shared their concerns with the AMS letter in that it was an 11th hour contribution. There had been amble time, the execs said, for the AMS to previously share any concerns. Furthermore, the policy development committee thought the policy revisions were all fine.
A UBC-V student governor (Eshana Bhangu) and both UBC-V faculty governors (Anna Kindler and Charles Menzies) expressed concerns with the comments made about the AMS. I also shared concerns about how the revised policy has only one board member appointed at the discretion of the president and that board member would have to recuse themselves from discussion on admin vp hires when it came to the board.
After some back and forth, President Bacon said the following [see minute 30:46 on livestream]:
“Well that's quite a heated discussion to start a nice Thursday morning. Thanks everybody. What I would say is, as a board, we should choose what we fight about. Important weighty matters. For me this is not one. This particular policy predates me and I do consider it relatively minor compared to, for example, the budget that is coming at the board, so on and so forth.”
Bacon then deftly summarizes the points that were brought up. In so doing he identified two points to take back for review, dismisses the others, then says “no one was prepared for a full substantive discusion this morning, I think we might as well table this.” Following which the motion is formally deferred to the next meeting of the executive committee and the open session is adjourned.
I agree. The university budget is way weightier than an appointment and renewal policy for administrative vps.
At the same time there are important considerations in the proposed policy and arising from the presentations: letting the president, not the Board, select the governor who serves on the committee; whether or not that governor should be recused from the subsequent board decision, and; the manner by which the AMS’s letter (and one of it’s authors) were addressed in open session. True, not as big as the budget.
Very often the little decisions look inconsequential. It is in their cumulative effects that we should be concerned. The ‘modest’ revisions in this policy act to reduce the input of the Board of Governors by reducing the number of governors serving on the appointment committee and by shifting the authority to select the governor firmly into the president’s hands without either the Board Chair’s or full Board’s involvement. By itself this might be nothing, but as part of a series of similar actions it may serve to centralize and transfer the board’s legal authority more firmly into the hands of the President.
How Bacon navigates these less ‘significant’ matters alongside of the more weightier ones will come to frame the nature and style of the Bacon Presidency.