Following University of British Columbia (UBC) president Arvind Gupta’s resignation on Aug. 7, there has been speculation as to why he resigned from faculty members at UBC and universities across Canada.
Gupta has not revealed why he left only one year into a four-year term, but vice-president of the Public Policy Forum Julie Cafley said Gupta’s departure from an academic leadership position is not an isolated event.
“In the past 10 years, there have been at least 18 university presidents with unfinished mandates,” said Cafley, who wrote her dissertation on unfinished university leadership mandates.
With the situation at UBC, Cafley said very little has been disclosed but there are signs of distrust within the executive team.
“There seemed to be an issue related to board governance and communication, and also a lack of trust within the executive team,” she said. “[And] each of the presidents who participated in my PhD research experienced similar challenges in their unfinished mandate.”
Cafley said she doesn’t believe governing boards intend to cause harm but simply need more “understanding of the academic enterprise.”
On Aug. 10, UBC professor and member of the faculty board of the Saunders School of Business Jennifer Berdahl published a blog piece questioning whether UBC’s historically white male leadership had anything to do with why Gupta left.
“Gupta was the first brown man to be UBC president. He advocates for women and visible minorities in leadership,” Berdahl wrote on her blog. These ideas of Gupta’s worried UBC’s board of governors, according to Berdahl’s post.
Soon after the piece was published, John Montalbano, a member of the business school’s faculty board and also the chair of UBC’s board of governors in which Gupta was part of, contacted Berdahl about the piece.
According to Berdahl’s blog, Montalbano said the post was hurtful, inaccurate, and unfair to the board, as well as causing others to question her academic credibility.
Following criticism from Berdahl and UBC’s faculty association and an investigation into whether Montalbano tried to compromise academic freedom, Montalbano resigned as chair of the board Aug. 25.
Cafley said she believes male-dominated academic leadership structures do exist.
“When speaking with university presidents with unfinished mandates, both male and female leaders referred to an ‘old boy’s network’ within university culture,” Cafley said. “University leadership needs to reflect the diversity of our campuses.”
Cafley said in her research, only 19 per cent of university presidents in Canada are women while the last six out of eight presidents with unfinished mandates were women. She said the trend is “very significant and worrisome.”
She added female university leaders such as Carleton’s Roseanne Runte “are helping to change this trend.”
Runte, who has been Carleton’s president since 2008, said “Every university is different and has needs and expectations which change over time.”
