So, what happened last week? On Monday, pursuant to a freedom-of-information request submitted last fall, UBC finally released documents – mainly emails – related to the events surrounding the departure of Arvind Gupta. Much of it was redacted, including a flurry of fairly long exchanges that happened in May and June. On Wednesday, somebody figured out how to un-redact the document in adobe, and all of a sudden everyone could see the crucial exchanges. Then on Thursday, in view of the fact that the UBC leak effectively violated the privacy clause of the non-disclosure agreement with the former President, Gupta himself decided to give a couple of interviews to the press.
What did we actually learn from the documents? Apart from the fact that folks at UBC are really bad at electronically redacting documents? Less than you’d think.
We do have a better understanding of the timeline of where things went wrong. A discussion about a proposed strategic plan stemming from the February Board meeting seems to have been the start of the deteriorating relationship between Gupta and at least a portion of the Board. Clear-the-air talks about weaknesses in Gupta’s performance were held following the April board meeting. And then downhill from there. The documents make clear there were a lot of complaints within the Board about Gupta’s leadership: in particular, his relationship with his own leadership team and his handling of relationships with the Board. Read the May 18th letter from Montalbano to Gupta: it’s rough.
Some of the specifics were new, but frankly there isn’t much surprising in there. You didn’t need to know the details to realize that the heart of the whole affair was that Gupta lost the backing of the Board, and that this was something that probably happened gradually over time.
What has Gupta said in his interviews? He has said, first: the released documents provided a one-sided representation of the events of the spring, which is true enough. Second, that despite having resigned because he had lost the confidence of the full Board, he now regrets not having pushed back hard and wishes he could have fought back, which is puzzling (if you’ve lost the confidence of a body, how would kicking back have aided anything?). Third, he doesn’t understand why the Board didn’t support him because he had lots of support from professors, which seems to be a major instance of point-missing. Fourth, that the whole push against him on the Board came from an ad-hoc, possibly self-selected sub-committee of the executive committee.
Wait, what? There’s a lot of quivering about the fact that much of the Board were bystanders to the interplay between Montalbano and a few other key Board members, and Gupta – look, it’s a cabal, they had it in for him, hid it from the Board, etc. But some of this is overwrought. Generally speaking, a CEOs performance review is handled by the Chair of the Board and a few others, rather than by full Board. The unanswered process question here is: what was the relationship of this group to the executive? Was it duly constituted, or was it just a few people the Board Chair thought were “sound”? In the grand scheme of things, this is kind of beside the point. The fact that not a single other person on the Board has stepped forward and said “yeah, we were wrong about Gupta” suggests substantial unanimity on the key point: that even if something was amiss procedurally, any other procedure would have led to the same result.
(Similarly for the argument that there wasn’t “due process” for Gupta because he didn’t get the job performance evaluation that was in his contract: once the person/people responsible for evaluating a CEO decide the CEO needs to be replaced, what’s the point of a formal job evaluation? If you were the CEO in question, wouldn’t you resign rather than go through a formal review where a negative outcome is certain?)
Is any of this going to change anyone’s mind about what happened? I doubt it. Gupta’s backers will say “it shows the Board had it in for him for the start”; any evidence that could be read as saying “gosh, maybe relations weren’t going so well” is simply regarded as “a pretext” so the mean old Board could stitch Gupta up. A new set of rhetorical battle-lines seem to be forming: Gupta as champion of faculty (a point he himself seems keen to make) and the Board as the enemy of faculty. There is little-to-no evidence this was actually the reason for Gupta’s dismissal, but it’s nevertheless the hill upon which a lot of other people want to believe he died.
That’s unfortunate, because it entirely misses the point about this affair. Whether Gupta was popular with faculty, or whether he was a good listener and communicator with them, is irrelevant. Presidents have to run a university to the satisfaction of a Board of Governors – some directly elected, some appointed by an elected government – who are there to maintain and ensure that the public interest is being served. They have to do a large number of other things as well, but this is the really basic bit. Whatever other beneficial things Gupta did or might have accomplished – and I think he might have done quite a lot – this wasn’t something he managed to achieve. However nice or progressive a guy he may have seemed in the other aspect of his job doesn’t change this fact. And so he and the board parted company. End of story.
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That May18 letter was brutal. Who would not quit immediately after receiving it?
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your thoughts. I’d be careful at slicing up faculty opinion into two neat piles. Myself, I’m not ‘pro-Gupta’. From my seat, I have no information whether he was effective in his role or not. He may have been the best or worst ever–I have almost no information on that.
What I can observe is the following
a) the ex-BoG chair seems to have an odd view of his role, and I wonder if that pervades the whole Board
b) If Gupta was really bad, then why did the BoG hire him?
c) If Gupta was really good, then why did BoG push him out?
d) I’m really not sure that subgroups of the Board should be taking the kind of actions it appears they took without approval of whole board.
So, myself, I have a heap of questions about the BoG at UBC. But it would be quite wrong to slot me into ‘pro-Gupta’. I’m Gupta-neutral.
This seems a tad simplistic and lack context. Here are two points worth considering
1) While Gupta’s resignation had received a lot of attention, it was not the first early president resignation at UBC. His predecesor Stephen Toope ALSO resigned early (three years into second five year term). White at the time it was accepted as “stuff happens”, two in a row is a trend. Moreover, at university level rumours connect the two resignations as affected by similar factors.
2) BC university BoG structure drastically differs from that in top tier east coast universities:
UBC BoG: 11 provincial appointees, 1 elected by alum, 8 elected by students/faculty/staff. So an unaccountable government appointee majority (note that none of these people have any record of experience with post-secondary or other education – but most are big BC liberal party donors).
Contrast this with:
U of Toronto BoG: 16 provincial appointes, 2 president appointees, 30 elected by faculty/alumni/students/staff. So a large elected majority.
Waterloo: 7 provincial appointees, 3 local city appointees, 10 memebrs of community at large, 7 faculty, 5 studens, 2 staff. So again large ellected/represenative majorty.
McGil: NOT a single government appointee, 12 members at large, 11 elected by faculty/alumni/students/staff
This compostion difference was bound to start showing as UBC moved up from a backwater university to one of the top in Canada – you can’t be top, or at least not long-term, without well functioning management.
And Kenneth Hare resigned early,….
“The conflicting pressures of the job soon took their toll. On Jan. 31, 1969, just a year and a half after he accepted the presidency, he resigned. In his letter of resignation he said that he had found the job impossible for a man of his temperament.” from the UBC obit.
However
In 1969 he joined the University of Toronto (U of T) becoming a Professor of geography and physics in 1974. From 1974 to 1979 he was director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the U of T. From 1979 until 1986 he was Provost of Trinity College. From 1988 to 1995 he was the sixth Chancellor of Trent University. From 1992 until his death in 2002, he chaired Canada’s national Climate Program Planning Board.
There is a letter in the documents which seems to pass under the radar, the letter from a dean to the President, sent on behalf a group of deans met by the president. It is clearly the followup meeting after a complaint the deans sent to the chairman of the board. So who are the deans who wrote to the boss of the president? Why the chairman listened to them and even supported them?
In the letter, the deans seem to agree with the president on a new way to handle their unsatisfaction with the changes at the provost office. What happened after?
Could it be possible that the other members of the board aren’t talking because they’re cowed by a non-disclosure agreement of some sort? This is extremely relevant to whether Dr. Gupta truly lost the confidence of the board.
And while your summary is correct, it’s largely descriptive: should the board have this power? Should this board be composed in this way and have this power? Is such a system of governance appropriate for a community of scholars? A mere situation is not its own justification.