The Resignation Of UBC President Arvind Gupta is not the only mess at UBC.
While pundits scramble to uncover why UBC President Arvind Gupta really left his position, most of them will be certain to ignore the factors that created the general mess that exists at UBC and many other Canadian universities.
(1) UBC’s policy of pursuing Diversity has undoubtedly displaced many Canadian-born students of European-descent. According to Douglas Todd of The Vancouver Sun, Visible Minority students comprised about 70% of UBC’s student population in 2010. Most of these students are economic migrants who can see how, compared to universities in China, for example, Canada’s universities are easy to enter. Many also saw that they could easily enter many high-paying professions which they could never have entered because of massive competition in their own countries. Past UBC President Stephen Toope, UBC President from 2006 to 2014, repeatedly stated that he wanted to create Diversity at UBC. By focusing on Asians, he in effect gave preference to them. If one group is preferred, then another is rejected. The matter is as simple as that. In fact, in the “UBC Stephen Toope tradition”, one of the main reasons for hiring Arvind Gupta as UBC President a year ago was probably the fact that he was of East Indian / Asian descent. By aiming for Diversity, Toope accelerated the process of leading UBC down a road not to Diversity, but to a virtual student monoculture—largely Asian and primarily Chinese.
Similar things are probably happening with the UBC Faculty where Faculty are given preference if they are not of European descent. These factors blend with projections for all of Metro Vancouver : If common sense is not restored to a suicidal mass immigration intake, Metro’s current majority population will become a minority by 2031. The key point is that neither Metro Vancouver nor Canada needed almost all of these people. To add insult to injury, the B.C. government recently announced that B.C. would give $150,000 in new scholarships to Asian students so that they could study in B.C. schools. This move has been justifiably condemned by the Canadian Federation of Students who say that this money should have gone to lower-income Canadian students who are already carrying huge debt.
(2) The pursuit of Diversity (Monoculture) at UBC reveals much about the mentality of UBC Administrators and Faculty. There was a time when hiring at many universities was said to be based on “the old boys’ network”. This meant a tendency of the established teaching staff and administration to hire friends and acquaintances. But this criticism has evolved into a strictly race-based one in which Canada’s majority European-based population is blamed for all of the failures that women and recently-arrived minorities have suffered in their job searches. To be more specific, the term ” White” has come to be used in much the same way as the words “Chink”, “Packy” or “Raghead” might be used. And the people who use it today seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to use the word “White” like this.
In fact, Professor Jennifer Berdahl of UBC’s Sauder School of Business did just that recently. In a blog about the resignation of Dr. Gupta from his position as UBC President, Ms. Berdahl stated Gupta was the first “brown man” to serve as president—as if UBC had an obligation to hire “Brown People”, particularly those whom Ottawa brought here with no justification whatsoever. Furthermore, Berdahl wrote that Gupta “lost the masculinity contest among leadership at UBC, as most women and minorities do at institutions dominated by white men.” This statement ignores the fact that the roots of Canada’s European-based population go back over 400 years. It also ignores the point that it is one thing to complain about gender-based hiring, but quite another to expect Canada’s majority population to surrender control of its country and to give up its right to priority in all hiring. Here is another way to look at the situation : Would Berdahl go to China, Pakistan, or the Punjab respectively and complain that there were too many “Chinks”, “Packies”, “Ragheads” and other brown/black people in university positions and that those countries had an obligation to hire “White People”? Yet she does this at UBC and sees nothing wrong with saying something like that.
(3) As expected, Berdahl’s words have received the approval of our CBC and other media hacks. To them, Berdahl is to be admired because of what she has said and because she teaches a course called “Gender and Diversity in Leadership”. In fact, she also holds the so-called “Montalbano Professorship in Leadership Studies: Women and Diversity”. That professorship is named after John Montalbano who obtained a $2-million gift from Canada’s largest bank (RBC) to finance Berdahl’s professorship and who sits on the advisory board for the UBC Business School and is Chair of the UBC Board of Governors.
According to Berdahl, Montalbano read her recent entry on her blog , then phoned her and told her she should not have made such comments. Ms. Berdahl subsequently complained that John Montalbano was suppressing her freedom of speech. The point is that Ms. Berdahl and hundreds of university “others” in positions like hers (as well as her admirers in the CBC and other media) will see nothing wrong with denying free speech to those who oppose half-witted ideas like “Diversity”. In fact, all those like her will self-righteously believe that they have a right to damn their opponents to the lowest circle of Hell, but that they have the right to whine about being denied free speech in trivial cases like the one she cites.
(4) There is a considerable amount of irony in this behaviour. For example, the people who pay her a very comfortable salary for teaching her views and so-called “research” are The Royal Bank (RBC) and its CEO. Both have promoted unjustified high immigration and Diversity. If she were to use her head on the facts available about Canada’s high immigration intake, she would easily see the folly of that policy. But she seems to think that using her head is not one of her obligations. Instead, she robotically spews out the cliched racial slurs of many of her colleagues. Let us compare the “free speech” issue she raises with an issue that her colleagues in the UBC Business School have notoriously raised and which she has to be aware of. Those colleagues have denied that any significant connection exists between wealthy foreign buyers and immigration, on the one hand and Metro Vancouver’s astronomic house prices on the other hand. If she is really going to insist on her right to free speech, why has she not challenged her Business School colleagues? Strange for UBC, solid contradictory evidence compiled in the UBC Geography Department exists. She could easily have used that legitimate research to champion one of the most fundamental of rights : the right of many Metro Vancouver-born to a realistically-priced roof over their heads? The fact that she spends her time playing the race card instead demonstrates that she is a champion of academic triviality.
(5) Furthermore, if she thinks of herself as such a champion of academic virtue, why did she accept a teaching position which was funded to the tune of $2 million by Canada’s largest bank. This has all the stench of a conflict of interest. Obviously, UBC Board of Governors’ Chair John Montalbano allegedly reprimanded her because he wanted to prevent any loss of funding to the “Montalbano Professorship In Leadership Studies” from the Royal Bank (RBC). As part of a university, The UBC School of Business’ first duty should be to be impartial, but it has accepted money from an institution like the Royal Bank that wants to advance its high immigration and Diversity interests. In fact, Montalbano is the former CEO of RBC Global Asset Management. Why did the provincial government appoint him of all people to be Chair of UBC’s 21-member Board of Governors? If there were ever a conflict of interest, this case is it.
Also, to illustrate the sleaze factor, let us recall that The Royal Bank was caught last year displacing its entire IT workforce who were told their work was to be out-sourced to India. (For the benefit of Ms. Berdah who thinks only in racial terms, let’s say The Royal Bank was out-sourcing the jobs to “brown people”). And most insulting of all, in order for the “Whites” to qualify for severance pay, RBC required “White employees” to train their “Brown displacers”. When this scandal was exposed, Gordon Nixon, The Royal Bank’s then CEO, was forced to apologize to Canadians and to re-hire all of the displaced workers.
Even more sleazily, just a few years before, the same RBC CEO Nixon had advocated that Canada increase its immigration intake to 400,000 per year from 250,000. This was one of the most ridiculous recommendations that anyone in the immigration lobby has ever made. Any knowledgeable academic should have known this. But academics are not expected to be aware of such things any more because Diversity is supposed to trump everything else. We suspect Berdahl never criticized CEO Nixon for saying something as nationally damaging as that. It is widely acknowledged that unnecessary immigration of the kind CEO Nixon supports had already caused wage suppression and job losses. If Ottawa had agreed to implement Nixon’s proposal, that increase would have caused even worse consequences. Those results have affected both Canada’s majority population as well as Canada’s minorities. But apparently, when it comes down to important issues like this, Berdahl thinks that petty race-based comments are far more important to make and that RBC greed has to be satisfied at all costs.
(6) Finally, the Canadian University Teachers Union (CAUT) has stated that Berdahl’s right to free speech must be defended. It has also called for an investigation of John Mantalbano’s alleged “suppression” of Berdahl’s “free speech rights”. This is laughable because anyone who follows the immigration issue in Canada knows that anyone in a university setting who voices even a peep of dissent with Canada’s current immigration intake and the promotion of Diversity is intimidated and ostracized on all campuses. In fact, many will be threatened with firing.
It is no exaggeration to say that on the mass immigration issue, the current toxic Canadian university environment resembles that of Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. While any thinking academics cringe in terror, those academics who support unnecessary immigration, Diversity and the most groveling of apologies to minorities are funded lavishly. Why? This funding is absolutely necessary in the propaganda and mis-information assault on Canada—whether that assault happens in the classroom or in textbooks. UBC’s “History” Department is glaring evidence of that. In fact, if any students are looking for a true education in Canada’s history, they should stay away from most Canadian universities, particularly UBC.
These are some of the messes at UBC.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
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