With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/364562
bcbusiness.ca This isn't always easy. As Ghous- soub notes, politicians and bureaucrats frequently disdain academics as being both demanding and condescending. Yet Gupta, with Mitacs, has been able to negotiate funding agreements from almost every provincial government in Canada, and the federal Conserva- tive government has named Mitacs specifically in the last two consecutive budgets. Similarly, universities and industry don't always speak the same language—and again, Mitacs has obvi- ously cracked the code. ere we come to the prom- ise—or the threat—of any new university presi- dent. Whenever a new candidate is appointed, everyone always wants to know pre- cisely what they're going to do; and in the fiercely political academia, there is generally a group that passionately doesn't want them to do it. (By way of full disclosure, I come to this con- clusion with some insider perspec- tive, having written extensively about or for university presidents at UVic and SFU, and for the last three presi- dents at UBC, Gupta included.) There were celebrations for—and dire warn- ings about—each new UBC president. David Strangway, who held the chair from 1985 to 1997, had been the vice- president academic at the University of Toronto, but he was originally a geologist; he was recruited by NASA to run the moon rocks program when he was just 36 and he brought NASA's command-and-control rigour to UBC. People complained that his administra- tion was like a train: you could be on it, or in the way. But he was also credited with transforming UBC from a provin- cial institution into one with national status and international funding. In fact, he raised more money than all the previous UBC presidents combined. Martha Piper came next (1997- 2006), originally a physiotherapist/ epidemiologist coming from a posi- tion as the vice-president research at the University of Alberta. Many in the institution said they hoped she would restore a sense of calm after the Strangway years—even as others said that she would never match his pace as a fundraiser. Then, for her installa- tion speech, she put on a baseball cap with " UBC" on the back and "Think about it!" on the front—and a whole cadre in the academy dismissed her as insufficiently serious. That got worse when she suggested that UBC should resolve to be the best university in Canada (Maclean's was ranking it 8th at the time), and the complainers had a field day—until UBC rose to no. 2 on the Maclean's list in just two years. In addition to adding the UBC Okanagan campus in Kelowna, Piper shot past Strangway's 12-year fundraising total in her first five-year term. As with all previous candidates, Stephen Toope (2006-2014) was also a seasoned university administrator— although, even having been the young- est dean of law in McGill history, some critics wondered if he was seasoned enough. But Toope was—and this was key—the McGill Law faculty's most successful fundraiser ever, following a pattern established by his two pre- decessors. Under Toope's leadership, UBC also reset its goals from national prominence to international recogni- tion; it now cracks the top 20 in most of the international rankings for publicly funded universities. The selection com- mittee members who chose Gupta have their eye on the top 10. bCbUSiNeSS.Ca September 2014 BCBusiness 39 H "We must develop true two-way partnerships with the business community, government, cultural organizations and not-for-profits. Such relationships require us to listen to the challenges our partners face, to understand where we can add value through our research" —Arvind Gupta