The neoliberal transnational university: The case of UBC Okanagan.

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The neoliberal transnational university: The case of UBC Okanagan.

Introduction

In March 2004, the provincial Liberal government in British Columbia announced the creation of Canada's newest university, the University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO), (1) located in Kelowna, British Columbia/The promises were many, and the speed of Okanagan University College's (OUC) transformation from a regional post-secondary institution to a research-intensive university was both frantic and chaotic. UBCO would be connected to UBC Vancouver (UBCV) through a common board of governors, modelled on that of the University of California. UBC Okanagan and UBC Vancouver would each have an independent senate to 'set academic priorities for their respective institutions, based on regional needs and priorities' (MacDonald, 2004), but there would be one president and one chancellor for the two institutions. The connection to UBCV would enable UBCO to take advantage of 'one of the world's greatest universities with all the enormous assets and resource capability it has to offer' (ibid.).

Our task in this paper is to examine and discuss how and why this takeover happened by placing the University of British Columbia in context within the global market of university education, (3) where UBC increasingly functions as a neoliberal transnational university. This is part of a general change in which regions are reinventing themselves in an attempt to reposition value-added economic activities in an increasingly crowded marketplace in which competition is more intense regionally, nationally and globally. Regions no longer compete primarily within national borders and against internal fractions of the elite, but in the global marketplace and against the global capitalist class. Flexible capitalism 'is not so much global as regional in its impact', and 'regionalization is not a counter-tendency to globalization but, probably, an integral element in its operationalisation' (Munck, 2002: 83). As a result of neoliberalism and the global economy, regions are redefining themselves due to global economic pressures and the need to establish a niche for competitive advantage as the bourgeoisie searches for higher returns on investment.

Thus, we argue that UBC has actively joined with the local capitalist and financial bloc in the reinvention of the Okanagan region by setting itself up as a regional 'economic driver' (Perry & Wiewel, 2005). This arrangement has strengthened UBC's corporate power and influence by establishing a regional presence, while members of the local political and economic class now have available entrepreneurial academics in the university to aid them in the regional, national and global marketplaces of a deregulated contemporary capitalist economy.

The power bloc in the Okanagan

It was no accident that UBC should come to the Okanagan Valley. Rather, it was a carefully constructed joint effort by the Okanagan power bloc (Poulantzas, 1978) to attract BC provincial and Canadian federal government support, and to impose its political will by the establishment of a UBC branch campus in the Okanagan. UBC promotes itself as a significant economic and cultural player with a global identity, and it has now become an economic force in the Okanagan Valley region. According to former UBC president Dr Martha Piper, the new UBCO will be a 'magnet for brainpower' and will contribute some $500 million a year to the regional economy. However, the evidence suggests that UBC moved in to take advantage of the economic possibilities in the region (Poulsen, 2004; Steeves, 2005), although the growing alliance between postse...

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