President Stephen J. Toope
Office of the President
The University of British Columbia
6328 Memorial Road
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
Dear President Toope,
We are writing in regard to an ongoing concern: After their 4th year, graduate students in Humanities and Social Sciences need to work several jobs to make a living and pay tuition, leaving precious little time for research and writing. Dissertation completion takes longer, and it becomes increasingly difficult for students to be involved in research related activities such as organizing workshops, participating in conferences, or joining in research collectives, all crucial for this time of their program. This situation directly threatens UBC’s efforts to foster academic excellence, and it has a solution.
This problem is the direct result of your administration's decision to:
1) Stop students' support (in the form of Fellowships and TA preference) after the 4th year, exactly when they need to write and produce the final result of research.
2) Stop waiving PhD student tuition in the moment in which they are working more intensively for their research (ie they are not passive recipients of education but producers of research results).
3) Deny support to students with families, (there is no childcare subsidy).
The people signing below request that you start working on very simple solutions:
1) Create a universal dissertation write-up fellowship.
2) Extend TA hiring preference to at least 5 years (requested by TA Union).
3) Waive tuition fees until dissertation completion.
4) Create policies to support students with families. If UBC hopes to be a first-class university it has to match the ways in which first-class universities support their students, as does the University of Toronto, for example. We ask for an investment that will generate serious transformations in the productivity and ranking of our graduate programs: shorter PhD completion periods, lower incompletion rates, and access to better employment after graduation.
We expect to receive concrete solutions to this problem now.
cc: Prof. David H. Farrar
Provost and Vice President Academic
Walter C. Koerner Library 1958 Main Mall, Room 640
Vancouver, BC V6T1Z2
Board of Governors Secretariat
University of British Columbia
6328 Memorial Road, Room 121
Old Administration Building
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Vice-President, Students
6328 Memorial Road,
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z2
Faculty of Graduate Studies
170-6371 Crescent Road
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
UBC Vancouver Equity Office
2306 – 1874 East Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
International Student Development – International House
1783 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2