I have been reflecting on my service as an elected governor on UBC’s board. I’ve been elected twice. Once in 2017 to a board mostly appointed by a politically conservative government. Then again in 2023 to a board mostly appointed by a politically centrist government.
Both boards are very different, yet eerily the same.
The difference is the current board appointees are significantly younger and more racially/ethnically diverse than the former board. There are more concerns expressed with empathy for students understood as diverse (i.e. not white) and efforts ensuring the university is welcoming to as full a spectrum of personal identities as possible. The old board was on average older, less racially/ethnically diverse (i.e., more white), and drew more directly from the private sector business world.
The similarities, however, are what stand out for me. Ideas around concepts of competency, leadership, and expertise are very much based in the same cultural values and assumptions (new board or old). Some might suggest this is a good thing. I wonder if perhaps the structures of power within society are such that deviating from cultural norms is impossible when driven only by individual inclinations.
As a professional anthropologist I study how people in different ‘cultures’ (culture understood broadly as the learned behaviours and ideas/values of a group of people) come to define certain ‘truths’ and ‘facts.’ While these things can in some sense be ‘objectively’ defined, they stand in a kind of cultural justification that rarely allows for real differences to emerge.
In my research with and among Indigenous communities (my own and others) I have noted that ideas like capacity, competency, and expertise are culturally driven. Indigenous peoples are often met with well meaning folk who enumerate deficiencies and offer to help build capacities. All this while ignoring our intellectual, cultural, ecological, and cosmological knowledge and capacities that were part and parcel of our success as human beings for eons prior to colonialism.
For a good part of my career I researched Indigenous ecological knowledge and facilitated the development of Indigenous-based high school science curriculum. Here is a domain in which ecological competencies were defined to exclude Indigenous knowledge. It is now understood that Indigenous knowledge holders have competencies that university trained ecologists don’t and these competencies are valued. Those of us with a foot in both worlds bring a synergistic appreciation of the value of complementarity.
As a governor I think this might be an area of potential growth in the way governance is embodied. At the moment what I see seems to highlight a narrowly defined set of cultural values that restricts ‘competency’ into specialized technical categories. These ideas of competency are then linked to cultures of leadership emanating from the administrative world (government, business, and NGO’s alike). Thinking complementarily with divergent - even conflicting- cultural frames of competency might create a more diverse board that not only looks different from past boards but also imagines the world differently too.
EDI intersects this in an interesting way. We might assume that EDI would counter the dominant cultural norms. Yet, ideas like ‘Inclusive Excellence’ seem to be rationalizations to assure ‘quality’ won’t be undermined by ‘inclusion’ of difference. Here the assurance is that the cultural values of competency can be maintained while swapping in people who arrive from a wider range of identity groupings than may have been the case previously. Yet this approach to EDI can replicate and maintain current power structures and cultural assumptions of what (and thereby who) constitutes competent leadership.
One could argue, ‘let’s be real,’ we’re in a capitalist world where market mechanisms and competition drive the agenda and we need people who understand that to be in charge. Maybe that’s the right attitude to take?
Just the same, consider the old saw, ‘a fish only knows it’s in water when it’s taken out of the water.’ Cultural values are like that, they structure the way we see and understand the truths of our world. It’s often disruptive to a personal sense of self to have one’s cultural values challenged, in some domains challenging cultural values produces strong backlashes (as in the so-called ‘parent-rights’ response to SOGI backlash), other times it merely produces bemused dismissal of the contrasting values.
So how do we get a body of people with authentically diverse perspectives rooted in visions of what our world could be (rather than grounded in what our world is). There is always ‘diversity’ (as in unique and different) in any group. Our board includes people with different occupational backgrounds, different homes of origin, different racialized experiences of life. Yeet even with these differences we seem to operate and govern in amazingly similar ways in terms of what is assumed as natural and unchallengeable.
There is another possibility here that might partially explain the persistent sameness. We might indeed have a diversity of individual perspectives. But, folks feel constrained and they silence their inner perspectives choosing adherence to the dominant culture in order to stay afloat. Many years ago political scientist James C. Scott devoted an entire book to this topic. The publisher’s summary tells it this way:
“Confrontations between the powerless and powerful are laden with deception—the powerless feign deference and the powerful subtly assert their mastery. Peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, laborers, and prisoners are not free to speak their minds in the presence of power. These subordinate groups instead create a secret discourse that represents a critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant. At the same time, the powerful also develop a private dialogue about practices and goals of their rule that cannot be openly avowed.”
I’m not sure it is possible to change much of this. The rules of the game are tightly internalized in our outlooks. They are prescribed by external bodies (like government). The structures of power themselves are so pervasively ingrained that the capacity to entertain fundamentally divergent perspectives may well be impossible.
I am, however, an optimist. I share these reflections despite the inertia of dominant society cultural values in the hopes that we might collectively reimagine how we define and constrain competency.
“My mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and willpower to overcome each and every obstacle.” Antonio Gramsci, 1929.
Great of you to say this, and it's also cool to speak to James C. Scott's work. Such a great thinker on authority. Mainstream White culture is deeply alienated and arrogant, and the superficial engagement with people and their humanity is a pillar of that. I see you resisting this everywhere, and I have so much respect for how you deal with the structures of power at UBC. For most people, there's a process of conformity to this alienation and arrogance that's part of graduating to these levels, and it's a requirement because the people who are choosing who's granted access are the people who already have access. They aren't chosen by the people they're supposed to serve. Hence, the diversity represented is tokenistic, not substantial. These institutions wouldn't have such a uniform pattern of error if it worked the other way around!
I’m very appreciative of these insights. To become aware of our blinders is a marvelous pursuit - and of structure as it reinforces behaviors. The very operating rules and presentation modes of advisory councils, boards and executive governance hold us hostage and keep us from authentic communication.