Not bad for a university that is so maligned by the good citizens of this city on a constant basis. Or at least in here.

One hopes that the new UNBC administration reciprocates the hard work of its faculty and staff in achieving these milestones. By reciprocating it in all of its everyday decision makings that could negatively affect the quality of teaching and research of any of the faculty members
or staff.

The 2010 faculty bargaining negotiations, between UNBC and the faculty union, has provided another opportunity to once again "smoke the peace pipe in the UNBC circle" and build better trust between the two parties. The full implementation of the faculty agreement between the university and union is the key to creating a friendly working environment.

Those in the best teaching university in the West expect the best exercise of management rights with the highest
"standards of fairness and transparency".

"One hopes that the new UNBC administration reciprocates the hard work of its faculty and staff in achieving these milestones"

Boy, isn't that a loaded statement. Says it all.

I would like to think it is a team effort. It takes quality people working at all aspects of what makes the University a good one so quickly.

Please do not become like CNC was a couple of decades ago. If the Administrators of the day had listened to the Faculty Association, UNBC would not have existed today.

Every segment of the University has its part to play. I think it would be fair to say that if all those segments did not pull in the same direction towards excelling at what they do in their area of responsibility, the UNBC would not be where it is today.

According to a public statement of UNBC faculty association (FA) available at: http://www.unbcfa.ca/FacultyNegotiation2010/themes_for_negotiations_js.html

"However, many concerns were raised in 2007 and 2008 about the arbitrary exercise of management rights at UNBC. As a result, the [UNBC Faculty] Association will be bringing forward proposals to insure that where management rights are exercised, they meet basic standards of fairness and transparency."

- They are asking for some "basic" standards of fairness and transparency and my previous post ended with an exact quote from this very paragraph.

One should note that in 2008, UNBC was ranked #2 in McLean's ranking of undergraduate universities and one step higher than its rank of #3 in 2009 and 2010.

As I wrote before, UNBC needs to reciprocate the hard work of its faculty members and staff and make peace (i.e. smoke peace pipe) with the union instead of ignoring the past agreements and wasting the limited resources of UNBC in stupid legal battles. Iwama was hired to change the 2007-08 course of UNBC and it is time for him and his legal and media machine to "change the discourse" and "change course".

You wrote:
"One hopes that the new UNBC administration reciprocates the hard work of its faculty and staff in achieving these milestones"

That implies the placement in 2008 was due to faculty alone.

So, faculty must therefore also be responsible for the drop in ranking in 2009.

Do you have another opinion of why the ranking dropped? After all, the inability of faculty and management to get along at UNBC is a bit older than 2 years. It goes back to before Jago retired.

FA raises the management problems in the period of 2007-2008 when Cozzetto was president and Jago temporarily replaced him in 2008. It also raises the problems in appealing the CEC decisions, when FA says: "We will be re-examining the role of the College Evaluation Committees (CEC) in evaluating members' career progress."

The extra powers given to CEC in 2005 agreement(e.g. performance evaluation by CEC and firing of tenured faculty) was a very bad solution to deal with UNBC grievances against the mismanagement of the deans/chairs and improper evaluation of members. The union compromised and it should have used other methods to ask Jago and the VP Brunt to deal with the growing mismanagement in UNBC. These unresolved grievances snowballed into bigger legal headaches for UNBC. It also damaged the team spirit in UNBC and created "a wall of mistrust" between the administration and the faculty members (us vs. them). Cf. what is happening to the nurses under Jago in NHA.

The era of Jago/Brunt/Cozzetto is over
if "both" Iwama and his provost Dale move away from those bad policies and restore the team spirit in UNBC by reciprocating the hard work of faculty members (as I put it) or in the words of the UNBC FA:
properly "evaluating the members' career progress."