On freedom

While I've been spending so much painful time watching and thinking about recent Occupy-related protests on American university campuses, I've been thinking again about fundamental values, both those spelled out in UVic's draft Strategic Plan and those I tend to hold dear. Here are the Plan's declared values:

The following fundamental values will inform all of our actions and are a prerequisite to fulfilling the purpose of the university:

• intellectual and ethical integrity
• freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry
• equal rights and dignity of all persons.

And here's what I sniped a few weeks ago:

So ... the basic assumptions of a democratic society and of any university anywhere ever, some of which are entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? THOSE are the fundamental values of this university?

Handy PR tip: claiming as a "fundamental value" the nation's legal minimum standards may not be as impressive as you think.

I went on to say that the university, as a matter of principle, needs to take on leadership roles in areas that it feels are important, and that this draft statement of fundamental values failed to do that. My focus throughout this blog so far has been on ecological principles, but let's set that aside for now.

Events at UC-Davis, in particular, have suggested that, in assuming near-absoluteness for freedoms of expression and inquiry, maybe I'm giving too much credit to The Powers That Be. If police in Seattle can pepper-spray an 84-year-old woman not actively protesting, then maybe I shouldn't assume that my right to declare myself peacefully will be respected. If New York police can throw a self-proclaimed library in a dumpster, then maybe I shouldn't assume a broad cultural respect for independent intellectual inquiry. If the University of California's own security staff are so ready to use pepper spray against students sitting on a sidewalk in protest, then maybe other universities' security staff are similarly ready to take similar action. Maybe security staff are ready here at UVic to do this: please understand, I say this not to impugn them, simply to insist that the individual YouTubed experiences we're all watching can and must be generalized to other individual circumstances.

To that extent and for those reasons, I'm now somewhat more tolerant of the draft Fundamental Values: the university really does need to reaffirm its belief in and support for these abstract principles of freedom, integrity, and dignity.

But you know what? I'm embarrassed by it, both by my tolerance and by the need for reaffirmation. I've spent years and years thinking that human civilization was ready to reach further and do more, with this a core part of my desire toward activist change, and yet here we are, once again pledging allegiance to established principles of justice. Good on UVic for making the pledge.

But it hurts, it really does hurt, to know that maybe we're not equipped to do any better than we've been pledging to do for so many years.

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Additional reading:

• 1982: Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada)
• 1948: Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations)
• 1776: Declaration of Independence (United States)

Marketing UVic greenly

I've had a hard time figuring out how to express this, but here's what one element of my frustration with UVic's 2011 draft Strategic Plan comes down to: the university's selling sustainability broadly and supporting it narrowly.

Take the fall/winter 2011/12 Green Guide, for example. Distributed as part of the Times-Colonist today (Nov. 13/11), subtitled A Resource Guide for Sustainable Living, and with its three lead sponsors being the TC itself, the CRD, and the university, it should make me happy to see UVic involved with it, but it doesn't. Sure, I'm glad that information makes it out there about battery recycling and low-VOC paint for kids' rooms and whatnot, but as it says on top of every page, this is "An Advertising Feature."

The Green Guide does include stories about UVic faculty involved in sustainability research and education, so that's great. In spite of my longstanding and deep discomfort with business and capitalism, I'm extremely proud of our Gustavson School of Business and its recently opened Centre for Social and Sustainable Innovation (led by the inestimable Dr. Monika Winn). The online course modules on climate change developed by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions are proving both useful and valuable, and the university's research efforts toward green marine propulsion are to be congratulated.

But my first point is that faculty involved in these initiatives should be able to point to the Strategic Plan and say, "The university supports this work, as a matter of principle." Right now, the draft Plan offers no such explicit support.

My second point has to do with marketing more purely. When Maclean's wanted a photo to represent UVic on its page for BC universities, UVic provided a photo of an Environmental Studies student with a laptop, walking on rocks across water in Mystic Vale: very green-seeming. The draft Plan itself includes one photo of an ES sessional faculty member, I think from a course she teaches outside UVic proper at the Redfish School of Change, and another photo of students working at a local beach. And then there are the ads in the Green Guide and elsewhere.

If we can't point to specific items in the Strategic Plan and say, "This is how and why the university supports sustainability," then it's hard to read it as anything more principled than a marketing approach.

I'm proud of the university's efforts towards food security and supporting local food producers, so it's fine by me that the university promotes these activities in advertising. But when the Green Guide ad about campus food initiatives leads with "The University of Victoria is well-known locally for its beautiful campus and its strong commitment to sustainability," well, I need to know just where this commitment is explicitly articulated. The Strategic Plan doesn't make any such commitment, except for campus operations, just like every other university is working towards. If the Strategic Plan isn't the repository for the university's commitments, this leads me to two questions:

• what exactly is this Strategic Plan going to be used for?, and
• where else should I look for the university's list of commitments, anyway?

The Fifth Pillar

They aren't adequate to the university's ecological obligations, or to the university community's ecological activities and commitment, but at least the draft Strategic Plan is blunt about its priorities: "To achieve our vision and mission as a university, we must focus on four key areas and goals." These four areas and goals are the following:

• people: "to recruit and retain a diverse group of exceptionally talented students, faculty and staff and to support them in ways that allow them to achieve their highest potential"
• quality: "to offer programs in teaching, research and support of such quality as to place us in the upper 20 per cent of a national set of comparable programs as judged by peer evaluation"
• community: "to establish UVic as a recognized cornerstone of the community, committed to the sustainable social, cultural and economic development of our region and our nation"
• resources: "to generate the resources necessary from both public and private sources to allow us to achieve our objectives and to steward those resources in a sustainable fashion"

To which I say... pardon?

It's not that the areas and goals are in themselves deficient. It's that together, they represent a distinct blindness on the part of the drafters toward the university community's acknowledged (and carefully marketed) area of strength, namely its ecological commitment.

It is essential that our Strategic Plan be explicit about the university's obligation to the ecological reality of its site, of its region, and of the planet. If the Plan isn't explicit about that obligation, then its silence represents an admission that the university administration is trusting this essential work to be accomplished under the radar, without explicit support, and I regard this as unacceptable.

Accordingly, I'd like to see one of two serious changes made to the Plan's description of its key areas and goals.

Option one - Add a fifth key area of "ecology," complete with an express goal along the lines of "to give local, regional and global ecological concerns primary significance in all the university's planning decisions, as well as to support the teaching of and research into ecological sustainability." My preference would be for this area and goal, in layout, to run across the page below the other four areas, to indicate that this area underlines the rest of them.

Option two - Revise all four goals so that they involve ecological principles. They'd look something like this, after the revision:

• people: "to recruit and retain a diverse group of exceptionally talented students, faculty and staff and to support them in ways that allow them to achieve their highest potential, particularly in understanding their ecological obligations"
• quality: "to offer programs in teaching, research and support of such quality as to place us in the upper 20 per cent of a national set of comparable programs as judged by peer evaluation, emphasizing whenever possible questions of ecological literacy and ecological sustainability"
• community: "to establish UVic as a recognized cornerstone of the community, committed to the sustainable social, cultural and economic development of our region and our nation, and above all else the ecological health of the site, the region, and the globe"
• resources: "to generate the resources necessary from both public and private sources to allow us to achieve our objectives and to steward those resources in a sustainable fashion, paying particular attention to questions of ecological sustainability."

These revisions are typical of what the Plan as a whole needs to include, acknowledgements throughout of the ecology that underpins every endeavour of human society. To some extent it'd be possible to consider these revisions to be window-dressing, mere rhetoric, but even if nothing else, they'd be a powerful signal of the university's awareness that its community members are committed to ecological sustainability and planetary health. That's not everything, but it's something I'd be more than willing to get behind.

As it stands, the Plan's four key areas and goals are lacking this crucial element of ecology. If the areas and goals are silent on questions of ecology, then the Plan fails to speak for the university community, and fails to highlight the community's acknowledged strength in this field.

Structural eco-deficit

No room at the inn, the dice are loaded, the playing field isn't level: choose your metaphor, but the drafters of UVic's 2011 draft Strategic Plan have left precious little space to be potentially occupied by ecological awareness or responsiveness. This is why I'm worried that all the ecological objections that a person might raise can so easily be kept out of the draft Plan.

The Plan's strategic bit is divided into four sections:

1. People (pages 5-7, objectives 1-11);
2. Quality (pages 7-10, objectives 12-27);
3. Community (page 11, objectives 28-31); and
4. Resources (pages 11-12, objectives 32-37).

What I'm wondering, perhaps obviously given all my other objections in this blog, is where ecological awareness fits into this four-part model, at least as each of the four elements are conventionally imagined. People? Not part of nature. Quality? Well, it'd be nice to have a pretty campus. Community? More people, but off campus. Resources? Kind of: let's use our resources but carefully enough that we can call it "sustainability."

But every one of these sections could - should? - include specifically ecological objectives, apart from the purely social ones that are there now. Given the university's persistent marketing of itself as green, I'm puzzled why there's not even any gestures in this direction. After all, the recent Maclean's review featured exactly one UVic picture: of a laptop-carrying Environmental Studies student balanced atop two rocks in Mystic Vale, a photo provided by UVic Communications after they requested it from an ES faculty member. (I can't find it online, so you'll have to either trust me or check out the hard-copy version.)

And with this corporate exploitation of the ES program, its students, and the campus' ecology, you're telling me that there's no room in the Strategic Plan for environmental concerns?!?

So anyway, here are some possible changes.

People, for example:

• helping students understand their consumer footprint, both in this place and in principle for their future places of residence
• ensuring that alumni preparing to leave Victoria understand the principles that would allow them to fit into the ecological reality of their new places of residence
• helping faculty, most of whom are new to Victoria, learn the ecology of their new home and what they can do to work toward sustaining it.

Or maybe these ideas, under Community:

• ensuring that objective 28 - on governance - requires the university to take ecological concerns into account with all its decisions, particularly those that affect the community outside Ring Road
• insisting in objectives 29 and 30 that the university adopt a leadership role on regional ecological literacy and the activism that should flow from it
• recognizing at objective 31 that the university has a responsibility to the ecological community of which it is a large and awkwardly shambling part.

And yes, indeed I do realize that perhaps I should go ahead and draft the specific objectives I'm implying here, so I'll do some of that in the coming days. But you know what? This draft Strategic Plan is so empty of ecological awareness that it's hard for me to see how adding individual objectives will have meaning without contextual support that's interweaved throughout the document.

At this point, the statements of vision, mission, and fundamental values are so utterly divorced from questions of ecology that ... no, I'll just say that they're divorced. You figure out what it means, and why I'm so unhappy about it.

"Environment" isn't yours

Let me try this another way: Give us back the word "environment"! UVic, I need you - need you - to keep your corporate hands off of the language we all use to talk about ecological concerns.

I have never thought of the words cognate with "environment" ("-al," "-ally," etc.) as yours rather than ours, or really as strictly ours rather than open to you as well, but this document's use of these words must be deeply distressing to anyone with an interest in the environment, as that word "environment" is traditionally and widely used. The draft Strategic Plan uses the terms "environment" or "environmental" forty times in twelve pages (eleven, excluding the title page), and we might maybe think that this frequency reflects a somewhat green sensibility.

My question is simply, should the use of the word "environment" be linked to questions of sustainability? To answer this, let's look at the specific instances of these words.

As I've objected elsewhere in this blog, the draft Plan uses the terms "learning environment" eleven times, "research environment" or "environments" three times, and "teaching environment" "and "student service environment" once each (for fully 15 of the 40). The preponderance of these references is problematic at best, but I've already said that. It's the diverse other uses that have me cranked up today.

The second page alone, for example, refers to "a high-quality research and learning environment," to "environments for work and study," to "the changing environment for post-secondary education" (all-caps, in a title), to "a personally engaging and intellectually stimulating learning environment," and to "the University of Victoria’s unique, high-quality broader learning environment." Further along in the Plan we meet the "policy environment," a "resource-constrained environment," and the library's "welcoming physical and virtual environments."

And honestly, I call BS on all of this. Give me back my damn word!

Sometimes you mean "setting," sometimes you mean "context," or "legislative framework" or "economy" or "zeitgeist" or a half-dozen other things. The one thing you do not consistently mean is in fact the word you keep reaching for, "environment." By co-opting the word "environment," by stealing it and spraying it across this plan in all sorts of places where it's just not called for, you've sacrificed precision in your own expression, and you've betrayed this university community's long history of environmental research, teaching, and action.

Sustainability in the mission

Apoplexia: the silent killer for those critically reading institutional documents.

My characteristically apoplectic response to these sorts of materials was triggered very early on in my review of the current 2011 draft of the UVic Strategic Plan, in fact in the second column of the Plan's second page. Under the header "We are committed to" are seven points, mission-critical imperatives if you will, and the university declares its vision there to be promoting the continued growth of the existing social order. Most of it sounds good enough, if perhaps predictably non-measurable and PR-ish, but there's next to no awareness visible of the university's role in ecology or natural systems. (Yes, the vocabulary for talking about nature is tricky. Never mind that right now.)

Really, there's only one point in the mission statement where it could be said that the university is perhaps maybe preparing to address questions of sustainability:

• We are committed to: ... promoting the development of a just and sustainable society through our programs of education and research and the stewardship of our own financial and physical resources

Wait - we promote the development of a just and sustainable society through the stewardship of OUR OWN financial and physical resources? Failing to run a deficit = promotion of a just society? Accepting the provincial government's funding envelope leads to greater justice for all?

Granted, the bullet point specifies that such promotion also occurs through "our programs of education and research," but five words on academia and nine words on money and materials? That's an imbalance of rhetoric that signals a parallel imbalance in institutional preference. If this university's operations have a larger effect on achieving a just and sustainable society, then we should maybe read that as a condemnation of our programs of education and research. If our programs of education and research are in fact deeply committed to achieving a just and sustainable society - and they are (here and here, for probably the two best examples) - then my only response is to read this mission-critical bullet point to be signalling the administration's ignorance of this university's programming and research expertise.

This bullet point cannot be left unrevised, as the Plan's only allusion in its mission to questions of justice and ecological sustainability. If all my complaints only lead to one change, this had better be the one, or it's clear no one was listening.

Fundamental values: what it should have said

I've already complained about the existing "Fundamental Values" in the draft UVic Strategic Plan, so I'm not going to repeat myself here. But if I'm going to challenge the document, then I need to offer some replacements that reflect a different politics. If I want to be inclusive and respectful of others, and also to be aware of ecology in a way utterly unlike that of the draft plan, then I need to imagine something like the following as an alternative "Fundamental Values" section:

The following fundamental values will inform all of our actions and are a prerequisite to fulfilling the purpose of the university:

• a healthy ecology, both locally and in increasingly larger regions up to a global scale
• freedom of academic inquiry, particularly innovative and/or interdisciplinary teaching and research
• equal rights and dignity of all persons and peoples.

What do I mean by these points, and why are they better than the ones we've got?

Well, the drafted ones are (as I said already) either empty or unfathomable. They mostly just duplicate provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (that we're legally bound to follow anyway), or say that UVic's a university just like any other that lets its faculty members figure out their own research projects. Neither element makes the values meaningful or valuable.

Why are mine better?

The first one - about a healthy ecology - postulates that a healthy ecology is the baseline for human society's persistence and and its future, and that the world as a whole is better off if humans all work toward a healthy ecology, but it also assumes that the local and global ecologies are under threat. Without an express acknowledgement of all these elements, a Strategic Plan becomes merely a short-term stratagem, a gambit rather than a vision. UVic needs to take this as a basic condition for its future activities.

My second value assumes that teaching and research are intimately connected and that the institution needs to be proactive about encouraging and permitting both research and teaching. For example, right now it's extremely difficult to team-teach even with someone in your own department. If you want to partner up with someone in a different faculty, then your two Chairs and Deans will likely turn the discussion into a smackdown about bums in seats, who gets the credit for them, and who will have to pay for it all. We shouldn't have to invent a new school or concentration or program just to let students watch two instructors work out together, at the front of a classroom, what their disparate backgrounds and research projects have to say about an individual subject.

And finally, I've merely added the two words "and peoples" to the third draft fundamental value. Maybe this is already captured by the Charter, but the draft plan doesn't specify respect for distinct groups of people, particularly First Nations peoples. Human dignity may be protected under the Charter, but it's under threat in the world in a way that freedom of speech and of academic inquiry aren't under threat.

In each case my hope is that the university will see itself as bound to take a leadership role in each issue. Right now, the values don't commit us to anything interesting, and that's a real shame. We ought to be trying harder than this.

Fundamental values

Here's why I'm cranky about the "Fundamental Values" underpinning UVic's 2011 draft Strategic Plan:

The following fundamental values will inform all of our actions and are a prerequisite to fulfilling the purpose of the university:

• intellectual and ethical integrity
• freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry
• equal rights and dignity of all persons.

So ... the basic assumptions of a democratic society and of any university anywhere ever, some of which are entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? THOSE are the fundamental values of this university?

Handy PR tip: claiming as a "fundamental value" the nation's legal minimum standards may not be as impressive as you think.

I'll agree that the University of Victoria should definitely support all these things, definitely, but there's just no way that these set UVic apart from every other Canadian university, or really any Canadian institution of any kind with a strategic plan. Heck, some of this is awfully similar to language from the Ukrainian constitution, to let Google choose a country almost at random.

Or alternatively, if the administration really thinks that intellectual and ethical integrity, or freedom of inquiry, are sufficiently threatened around here that we need to declare our allegiance to same, then I don't know what kind of place I'm working in. They're ... I don't know, either empty or unfathomable. I can't tell which, and I'm not sure how to decide.