Patrick Dare
Ottawa Citizen
September 17, 1997
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Canada's professors have started a boycott of a fledgling university in British Columbia's Fraser Valley over what they regard as an outrageous denial of academic freedom.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers this summer placed newspaper ads warning academics to steer clear of Technical University of British Columbia. The lead article in the association's newspaper this month is about the campaign. And the head of the association, William Bruneau, is in Europe this week, partly to alert academic associations.
Bernie Sheehan, the president of the month-old university known as Tech BC, said he hasn't noticed any effects yet of the associations attempts to prevent people from joining the university's staff. But recruiting for faculty jobs has only just begun.
At issue is the structure of the new university's governing bodies, which will break three rules cherished by many Canadian professors:
"They've really denigrated the idea of a university," said Robert Clift, the executive director of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C. "It makes us mad. This is what academic freedom is all about. The governance makes it a dictatorship."
Mr. Sheehan said he is disappointed by the boycott, when the university is a new, creative effort aimed at getting young B.C. residents - who traditionally are less educated than the rest of the Canadian population - into higher learning.
Mr. Sheehan said he expects 50 per cent of the university's courses will be offered through the Internet.
The BC. government sees the $100-million university, to be built in the Surrey area, as a non-traditional institution geared towards training young people for technology jobs of the new economy. Many of the programs will be in computer technology.
In a committee discussion, B.C. Education Minister Paul Ramsey said that much of the learning for the more than 3,000 students will be on work sites, rather than classrooms.
But national and B.C. academic leaders say that the province can't build a polytechnical institute and call it a university.
Mr. Clift says a university has to go beyond narrow job skills of the fickle high-technology industries. And he says researchers under the thumb of the university board of governors would not be allowed to pursue work that makes a company in the region look bad.
An analysis of the B.C. situation written by Mr. Clift and Donald Savage, former head of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, concluded:
"A viable university senate has the power to set the program curriculum, informed by research findings and unhindered by other bodies and interests. In this way, the senate represents the collective academic freedom of faculty to teach and to conduct research free of institutional censorship. In the Technical University, it is all too easy to imagine a circumstance in which a business or labour leader would question the 'usefulness' or the 'relevance' or 'rightness' of research, and recommend that such research not be taught. It is even easier to imagine a circumstance where the president, all-powerful as he would be, might discourage or even forbid the teaching of research results."
The university plans to start enrolling students next year, though the first classes will be at existing BC learning institutions before the campus is built, likely by 2000.
Mr. Sheehan said Tech BC isn't supposed to be a normal comprehensive university with arts and social science programs. In a letter to the professors' organization, Mr. Ramsey said Tech BC is to be highly responsive to the needs of the labour market: "Tech BC is to be an economic development and job creation tool as well as an educational institution, which is why its mandate is focused on applied research."