A couple of weeks ago, the University of British Columbia issued a press release, which read:

The University of British Columbia is expanding its presence south of the Fraser River with the $70-million purchase of a property in Surrey.

Whoo!  Big bucks!  Can’t go wrong buying property in the Lower Mainland, right?  Seems like this could just be a good long-term financial play. I mean, why tie up your investments entirely in equities when property is so hot?         

UBC Properties Trust has acquired a 135,000-square-foot property—currently home to the Grace Hanin Community Church—at the intersection of King George Boulevard and Fraser Highway. The site, which is located close to SkyTrain, Surrey Memorial Hospital and other community amenities is anticipated to be a combination of residential and commercial space…

Ok, it’s the properties trust and not the endowment fund.  Seems like it’s a pure income-generation play.  That’s a bit different than what the university usually does, which is to manage new facilities (commercial, academic, residential) on UBC’s two campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna plus some other sundry research facilities elsewhere in the province.  But you know, anything universities can do to make themselves more self-sufficient these days is probably a good idea.

There is in fact, quite a lot of this going around.  The University of Manitoba has just bought out the obscenely large golf course next door and now has a ton of space to do all sorts of residential and commercial work out by its Fort Garry campus.  Just before COVID hit, NAIT bought the land that used to be Edmonton’s Municipal Airport, which is massive and gives NAIT a chance to do some quite incredible things over the next couple of decades, both in terms of residential/commercial but also to build the kind of big trades training facility that all colleges want but really can’t afford.  The increased aggressiveness of property management as a university revenue source is an under-studied phenome…

…which will generate revenue to enable the construction of dedicated academic facilities.

Say what now?

The acquisition of the Surrey site supports the achievement of a key commitment in UBC’s strategic plan to work with partners on the development of the university’s regional presence, as well as providing an exciting opportunity to improve access to post-secondary education in the Fraser region.

So, the Fraser Valley already has two universities – Trinity Western, and the UNIVERSITY OF THE (FREAKING) FRASER VALLEY – I’m fairly sure most people at UBC have heard of them.  And third, Simon Fraser University’s Surrey Campus is at most five blocks away from this church.   Five blocks.  But yeah, sure, access.

This is weird.  I am sure that the UBC government relations and comms department are smart enough to understand how writing a press release like that might seem insulting to other players in Surrey and beyond.  So instead of taking the press release at face value, let’s take it for what it probably is: a statement by UBC that it is going to plant a flag in the Surrey/Langley area because it is growing faster than the rest of the Lower Mainland, and UBC is desperate for more undergrads to increase the cross-subsidization of its research enterprise.

Whether this is a good thing depends on your point of view.  The pro-UBC view might run something like this: while the government has always funded staff salary increases, there has effectively been no funds to cover student number increases since (IIRC) 2006.  And there isn’t a lot of money to support research in BC, either.  When Gordon Campbell was premier, he found a way to do something big and nice for UBC every year outside the regular budget process, basically because he was the last Canadian premier who understood the benefits of a well-funded flagship institution.  Since Campbell left, UBC hasn’t been able to count of government for that “something extra” and so it’s hardly a surprise that UBC might look for a financial boost in some other fashion.  Like this one.

On the flip side, if you’re more into centralized government-planning of higher education, you’d say to yourself “what the hell is the point of adding another institution to the mix in the Surrey/Fraser Valley area”?  If you want to improve access, why not give more money to grow the institutions which already have a presence in the region?  It’s a good question in theory, but since the government hasn’t given a single extra dollar for growth for the past fifteen years, in practice it’s neither here nor there.

My feeling overall is that the Government of British Columbia has, through its own inaction stretching across multiple administrations of varying political stripes, encouraged institutions to do whatever is necessary to secure their own financial futures.  So, from that perspective, UBC has some justification for what it’s doing here, and indeed what it could do if it chose to spread its wings to other parts of the Vancouver region, and possibly beyond.

But from a longer-term perspective, UBC’s moves are harder to understand.  Does UBC actually want to be a multi-campus research-intensive institution in a big diverse province, a kind of University of California North?  Does it or the province have money for that?  Or is it trying to be like many other state systems where the “flagship” institution is research-intensive and the others are not?  The latter would certainly be unwelcome news to UBC-Okanagan, which was built on a promise of it having the same status as the home campus (only fair, since it has the same tenure/promotion rules).   

(Small aside here: if UBC really does want to be a province-wide institute again, it is going to need to learn to make allowances for expressions of local identity.  The UBC-Okanagan bookstore does not possess a single item of merchandise bearing the word “Okanagan”, presumably on orders from the mothership.  Given that UBC-O was designed to be a point of civic pride for citizens of the Okanagan, this is a deeply weird decision.)

Anyways, the point is: there’s nothing wrong with UBC pursuing an expansionist agenda, though maybe it shouldn’t pretend other regional universities don’t exist.  But there are some twists and complications in the move towards a multi-campus existence that they might need to be worked out first.