ANOTHER MYSTERY AT UBC
Concern over professor’s suspension
It has been a strange, semester at the University of British Columbia, one of Canada’s largest post-secondary institutions, where nearly 60,000 students take courses on a busy main campus surrounded by forests and water, now shrouded in mysteries.
UBC’s president, Arvind Gupta, resigned under curious circumstances in August, just 13 months into a five-year appointment. With no explanations provided, into the vacuum rushed speculation, including suggestions of racism. Then the chairman of UBC’s board of governors, a banker and major benefactor, was caught in the controversy. He resigned last month.
The gloom on campus lifted Tuesday, when UBC announced it had surpassed an ambitious fundraising goal, collecting more than $1.6 billion in donations from business groups, individuals and alumni. But misgivings returned Wednesday, when UBC’s Dean of Arts released a terse memo noting that Steven Galloway, an associate professor and chairman of the university’s acclaimed creative writing program, has been temporarily suspended from duties with pay, pending an internal investigation into “serious allegations.”
Again, no explanation, but the dean’s memo encouraged anyone concerned about their “safety and well being” on campus to contact UBC’s counselling services and school authorities.
Galloway, 40, did not respond to an interview request Thursday. An award-winning novelist, he has spent his entire academic career at UBC, enrolling as a student in the school’s creative writing program in the late 1990s. He found early success, his graduate thesis, a novel called Finnie Walsh. After graduating with an M.A., he became a parttime UBC writing instructor.
Galloway was eventually made an associate professor and last year was named chairman of UBC’s creative writing program. He has now published four novels, including an “international best-seller,” The Cellist of Sarajevo. His latest novel, The Confabulist, reviewed in the National Post last year, was called “a stunning achievement.”
Some of Galloway’s friends and colleagues have come to his defence. Novelist Angie Abdou suggested on Twitter that speculators and rumour-mongers had best keep it zipped.
Fair advice, but as of Wednesday, Galloway had reportedly not been told what the “serious allegations” were about. The absence of any information — beyond loaded references to student safety — in the school’s memo means assumptions will be made. Some will be false, and those will be difficult to erase.
But this is how UBC seems to operate. It announced Gupta’s resignation as president in a vague, late afternoon news release. Professor Jennifer Berdahl, with UBC’s Sauder School of Business, speculated on a personal blog Gupta had “lost a masculinity contest among the leadership at UBC, as most women and minorities do at institutions dominated by white men ...”
UBC board chairman John Montalbano called her to say her blog post had upset him, very much. Berdahl blogged again, claiming she’d been pressured to shut up.
After a UBC-hired lawyer investigated, she concluded Berdahl’s academic freedom had been compromised — and Montalbano quit.
It’s another mystery that has left people shaken; they’ll just have wait for the next penny to drop.