Senate Roundup, October 2015

The UBC Vancouver Senate will be holding their October meeting this Wednesday. Here’s a rundown of some notable items on the Agenda ^[1].

Email votes

Last month, the senate used email voting to approve the establishment of two things, (1) The Dr. Chew Wei MBBS [HK] FRCOG [Eng] Memorial Chair in Gynecologic Oncology and (2) The Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics.

Master’s grading policy

Did you know that a passing grade for Master’s students is 60%, not 50%? In addition, all courses where a student scores 68% or more will count towards his or her degree. However, if Master’s students score between 60-67 in their courses, they are only able to count 6 credits towards their program.

Routine business

1. Changes to admissions requirements for the Doctor of Pharmacy Flexible program.
2. New Awards.
3. Curriculum changes from the Faculties of Education and Graduate Studies.

Student Mental Health and Wellbeing

Dr. Louise Naismith, UBC’s Associate Provost of Health, and Richard Keeling, a hired consultant, will be presenting to Senate about the strategy UBC has come up with to invest in student mental health initiatives. This is related to the extra $2.5M of funding enabled by the 20% rent increases in student residence that took effect this year.

Confidentiality Agreement between UBC and Arvind Gupta

The following was respectfully submitted by math professor Richard Anstee.

Motion: That Senate calls on the President to approach the Board of Governors and Professor Gupta and have them renegotiate the terms of his resignation agreement so that both the University and Professor Gupta are able to speak more fully to the reasons for his resignation.