American Association of University Professors
1012 Fourteenth Street, N.W., Suite 500
Washington, D.C 20005-3465
FAX: (202) 737-5526
(202) 737-5900

October 17, 1997

General Secretary
Mary Burgan

Hon. Paul Ramsey
Minister of Education, Skills, and Training
Government of British Columbia
Victoria, B.C. V8W 9E2
CANADA

Mr. R. Dickson, Chair
Interim Governing Board
Technical University of British Columbia
1280 - 13401 108th Avenue
Surrey, B.C. V3T 5T3
CANADA

Dear Minister Ramsey and Chairman Dickson:

As General Secretary of the American Association of University Professors, I write to urge you to find a way to avoid the grave error of setting up your new technical university without providing for the essential structures of faculty governance and tenure. If such an experiment were tried, the Technical University of British Columbia would begin with a deficit of acceptance by other universities and university faculties in North America.

But, more importantly, such an educational institution would be weakened by its lack of any essential mechanism of self criticism and adjustment -- subject to the goals and motives of forces outside the educational heart of the university, perhaps unresponsive to a notion that education (even education in science and technology) must involve training in thinking about values as well as formulas. These are issues that concern faculty and that become embedded in the culture of a university through faculty's stake in its governance. Further, these values form an essential foundation for the discovery and teaching of new knowledge to students.

Faculty participation in governance combines with the protection of tenure to assure faculty the freedom to pursue and to express new questions. This assurance is especially critical in an academy devoted to science and technology. Major North American universities that contribute most significantly to the advancement of science and technology -- such as MIT and Caltech -- are characterized by such assurances. They carefully protect, for their faculties, an atmosphere of open inquiry, in which faculty members exercise the freedom to test theories that run counter to the norm, and the ability to pursue independent research -- even that which may not be connected to an immediately identifiable economic benefit.

The freedom of scientific and technical faculty to pursue questions in their disciplines is an essential element of training for the next generation of scientists. The students at the new university must learn the value of unfettered questioning, if they are to contribute usefully in their chosen fields. Domination by commercial interests rather than academic inquiry can be expected to have a stultifying effect on the development of scientific knowledge. It would be most unfortunate to teach students, by example, to limit their curiosity and their investigations to a dogged pursuit of commercially acceptable results.

The American Association of University Professors, comprised of 45,000 professors in the United States, views this proposal with alarm, and urges you to reconsider. This new university has an exciting potential to take its place among major universities specializing in the sciences, and to command the respect of the scientific community. We urge you to consult with Canadian university faculty, through the good offices of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia, in completing and implementing the design of this new institution.

Sincerely,

Mary Burgan
General Secretary