One of the many ways UBC acts to promote, support, and safeguard academic freedom is through the office of the Senior Advisor to the Provosts. Dr. Neil Guppy, the current incumbent, is expected to promote academic freedom by helping with orientations for new Board, Senate, and administrative members, discussing academic freedom in Faculties and Departments, and generally ensuring that academic freedom issues are raised in all of the appropriate venues. He also works to support academic freedom by assisting colleagues at all levels, including administrators, with specific issues, often on a case-by-case basis. As for safeguarding academic freedom, he shares with all members of the academic community the responsibility, the positive obligation, to ensure everyone can pursue an unfettered quest for truth and understanding, unhindered by external constraints.
The University and the Faculty Association have procedures under the collective agreement to consider and resolve allegations of violations of that agreement. The role of the Senior Advisor will not replace or interfere with these procedures.
Dr. Guppy is a professor in the Department of Sociology where he served as Head for seven years. As a researcher his focus has been largely around issues of social inequality. This year he was awarded the 2016 Canadian Sociological Association’s Outstanding Contribution Award for his longtime commitment to Canadian sociology and the continued growth of the discipline, as well as the wide breadth of areas of research in the number of publications he has authored. Dr. Guppy was the recipient of the Killam Research Prize in 1989, and he was awarded a Killam Teaching Prize in 1992-1993. Further details about his teaching and research may be found at here.
Dr. Guppy’s administrative experience includes positions as Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts for four years, and Vice-President, Academic Programs in the Office of the Provost between 2000 and 2004. He is currently assisting the Office of the Vice-President, Students in an interim role as the Acting Managing Director of Student Development and Services.
Dr. Guppy understands academic freedom as a value that is essential to the proper functioning of universities, foundational to the integrity of universities, and especially imperative in advancing rigorous standards of free and unfettered enquiry and education. As a sociologist, he sees it as a convention that is supported by a set of training, hiring, and promotion practices that are cemented in the academic units that comprise a modern university – departments, divisions and schools.