negotiator for the Bishop's faculty associa-
tion, where he helped negotiate the first
collective agreement after a long and bitter
series of strikes. "It was such a transforma-
tive experience to sort something out for
the community, to be thanked," he says.
Just as his colleagues were apprecia-
tive, the Bishop's administrators on the
other side of the table seem to have been
impressed. They made him chair of the
department of psychology, and then dean
of arts and science, and then associate vice-
president, research. In 2013, Concordia
University in Montreal, where Bacon had
done his undergraduate degree, sought him
out as provost and VP of academic affairs,
a role he reprised at Queen's University, in
Kingston, three years later. And, in 2018,
he was announced as the 15th president of
Carleton University in Ottawa. He says now
that he got the Carleton position because
he came clean in the interview about being
in a state of recovery—sharing the grittiest
details of his story. "I was seized by the
notion that I should be completely honest
with the committee as to who they were
hiring, but I can't tell you how shocked I
was that they called me back."
All this was on the record when
UBC
called last year with an offer that Bacon
says he couldn't resist.
UBC, he adds, is
"arguably the greatest university in the
country." Certainly, he adds, no Canadian
post-secondary is better positioned—geo-
graphically, next to Asia, but also given
the current level of government support
and the usual selling points: "two beautiful
campuses, a depth of talent and a spirit of
innovation that you don't see in some of the
big universities in the east."
But if you're wondering what Bacon is
going to do with all that potential—what
personal stamp he plans to put on the insti-
tution—he's at the ready with an answer
that's really not an answer. "It's not for me
to write a plan and hand it down," he says.
"The role of the president should be to con-
vene the community—to define a shared
vision for a common journey."
That can read like a dodge, or like an
acknowledgment of what you might rea-
sonably consider as the powerlessness
of the president's job. Martha Piper, who
was
UBC president from 1997 to 2006 and
then again for a year in 2015-16, spoke to
that powerlessness more than a decade ago
when Andrew Petter, then newly recruited
as the next president of Simon Fraser Uni-
versity, called her for some preparatory
advice. As Petter reported at the time—and
as Piper confirmed for this story—she told
him that "the worst mistake a university
president can make is thinking that they
run the institution."
Piper went on to say that the univer-
sity's board of governors believe that they
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