UBC’s Board of Governors chair steps down amid scandal
Posted October 15, 2015 12:42 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – A surprise resignation from the chair of UBC’s Board of Governors the night before a report on his conduct involving a Sauder School of Business professor is released. The chair is stepping down even though the report found he did not directly infringe on anyone’s academic freedom.
Professor Jennifer Berdahl says John Montalbano had accused her of embarrassing the university and threatened her funding following her blog post on the resignation of former UBC President Arvind Gupta. Berdahl wondered in her blog if Gupta’s resignation had something to do with race.
The fact finding report compiled by Retired judge Lynn Smith finds Montalbano’s actions were inappropriate, but they fell short of infringement as Berdahl was not fired and her funding was not pulled.
The report finds Berdahl’s Sauder School of Business supervisors also did not individually infringe on Berdahl’s academic freedom. It does find that the university failed to proactively protect Berdahl’s academic freedom. UBC Interim President Dr. Martha Piper accepts that.
“We did not express to her explicitly that she had the right to say what she said and we did not clearly tell her we would defend her right to say what she said. That is to say we did not adequately support her in the exercise of her academic freedom. As a result, Dr. Berdahl, who is a distinguished scholar in the areas of gender and identity, felt isolated and reprimanded. The events had a significant negative impact on her and so on behalf of the university, I sincerely regret this.”
Dr. Piper says UBC will create a new program to better educate staff on the principles of academic freedom in the future.
Chair of the UBC Board of Governors Governance Committee Douglas Mitchell says Montalbano told the board of his decision last night. “He felt that he’d been vindicated with regard to the allegations that had been made and that perhaps he felt under the circumstances that he’d been vindicated and now is the time to move on.”
