One interesting piece of fallout from the UBC imbroglio is a newfound focus on governance.  A new group called Take Back #Tuumest (“Tuum est” being UBC’s Latin motto, meaning “it’s yours”) has started up, with the goal of reviewing how the university’s Board of Governors functions, and reducing the proportion of its government-appointed members (you can read their initial manifesto here).

So what should we make of this?  Is UBC’s Board too subservient to government, not attuned enough to actual campus issues?  To answer that, let’s take a quick tour of external governance around the world.

Board governance in Canada varies quite a bit from province-to-province.  As a general rule of thumb, the presence of government-appointees on Boards increases as you head from East to West.  In many places in eastern Canada, the institution pre-dates the province and so they never had government appointees to begin with (McGill, for example).  These Boards are, in effect, self-perpetuating oligarchies – similar to Boards at private US institutions.

In Canada, government appointments are given to friends of the government of the day.  As a result, Boards usually do not become overly partisan.  When governments change, the Board members appointed under different administrations stay in their positions for awhile, and Governors of different political stripes get along reasonably well, reflecting a fairly wide consensus about how universities should be governed.  In most instances, political appointments are more or less free to act and vote on their best judgement.  In the US, on the other hand, we are increasingly seeing state boards (often entirely made up of government appointees) acting like appendages of the Governor’s office, which makes them hyper-partisan.  This isn’t just bad for governance, it’s ridiculous – why have 100% government appointees when government is paying less than a third of the bill?

If you go further afield – say, to Europe where universities began – the tradition of external boards is not nearly as strong.  Indeed, there are some countries where governing boards are entirely free of external representation.  But the movement in much of Europe towards increased external oversight has intensified over the last two decades, or so: universities in Denmark and the UK are both required to have 50% plus one external governors (note: “external” does not necessarily mean government-appointed).  The reason?  Essentially, governments simply don’t trust universities to spend public money properly without external supervision.

The trade-off is essentially about what kind of relationship publicly-funded universities want to have with government.  Refusing government oversight through external board members just means government will try to re-impose control through other, more intrusive means – audits, budget control, greater control over procurement, you name it.  It is not, to be honest, a productive use of anyone’s time.

Is there a “magic proportion” of external governors – whether appointed by government or not – which is “right” for universities?  Not really.  There’s nothing particularly sacred about 50% plus one, other than it gives governments assurance that the lunatics (from their point of view) can’t start running the asylum.  At the University of Toronto, the proportion of externals on the Governing Board is considerably lower than 50%; though, in part, this is because the University’s anomalous unicameral system means that the Governing Board also acts as Senate.  And there’s nothing saying that external appointments have to be government appointments: McGill has proved a good steward of public money simply by appointing its own external overseers (direct government appointments in Quebec are arguably much less successful at doing this – see UQAM’s half-billion dollar construction fiasco).

But this observation cuts two ways: on one hand, there’s nothing particularly dangerous about #tuumest’s push for fewer government appointees; on the other, there’s nothing saying that altering the proportion of appointees is actually going to change much, either.  Boards are made-up of people: some are good and some are bad.  Nobody gave much thought to the UBC Board’s composition until it made a decision with which many disagreed.  And it’s not clear that moving a board member or two around at the margin would have changed the outcome.