My first complaint in 2020 did not involve being told my problem. That cock up was entirely Director Narain’s personal error. Her duty to her office was to interpret policy to and for students. Instead, she allowed her “team” to advise her that if throwing a student out of class for asking their instructors questions about their methodology wasn’t illegal on the street, it wasn’t institutionally improper conduct.

When I asked if I could have that decision appealed, that director refused to allow it to even be reconsidered because she believed if improper conduct wasn’t illegal, it’s 100% proper conduct in an institutional setting.

I dropped it because I still had to get through another year of class. Director Narain told me I had no expectation of a respectful environment because the university didn’t “legally” have to provide one. I’m so glad I didn’t. My institution didn’t know retaliation was also improper conduct. At least I made it through my last year.

I made it through because I asked my instructor if I could send her constructive criticism that might have helped the story. I told the instructor I would share praise on the public forum. She agreed and thanked me.

Every diety ever worshipped knows my instructors only instructed me to give up even more academic freedom. You can’t imagine how grateful I was that the last properly controlled document dealing with harassment clearly says harassment is harassment, even if the UBC member has allowed it to continue before.

By the end of the program, every nerve I had was on its last edge. I didn’t complete my program and then discovered just how much my academic freedom had been violated — I think it was the first thing I said to the first instructor who told me to be less craft-focused. They didn’t care being less craft-focused violated academic freedom entirely, but I did.

But I also foolishly believed — even with no evidence of one after three years of the program — that my program had a pedagogy that allowed the methodology to work. In my first year, I believed that my sample size was too small to decide no pedagogy existed. Even if none of my instructors couldn’t explain how only focusing on the positives worked as a methodology, that didn’t mean no instructor could.

I didn’t even attend my classes in my last semester. My instructor had emailed me to tell me to stop defending my opinion that fiction requires a source of tension, and I had had enough.

At the end of my coursework, I emailed my director to explain how uncomfortable her program had made me and asked for an apology. Instead of providing one so I could move on with my life, she told me that I could have my academic freedom destroyed and retaliated against for asking freedom of inquiry-protected questions because we had a “difference of pedagogical opinions.”

She believed that I didn’t deserve a respectful environment to learn in because we had different opinions. When I asked her to explain her pedagogical view, she couldn’t. She only provided me with the mission statement.

If she had been a teacher and a director, she would understand that a mission statement guides the program’s ideology and a pedagogy guides its methodology. They are not the same thing. The only aspect of the mission statement that was somewhat pedagogical in nature was being “rigorously craft-based.” My program had been rigorously anti-craft-based.

So, I complained to the Dean of Graduate Studies. I told the Dean that my program seemed to attack academic freedom, and not even the Director could explain its pedagogical approach. The Dean sat on my complaint for three months and then wrote back the same day I queried her: “you had a difference of pedagogical opinions.”

The Dean also refused to explain what theirs could be. As a New Decision Maker, she failed entirely.

Then the real gaslighting started. I emailed the president to explain the academic freedom violation and the lack of pedagogical support. Dr. Santa Ono’s only contact with me was to tell me that Andrew J. Szeri “handled” complaints like that. I thought he meant “in an institutional setting.”

He’d meant it like a wartime consigliere.

Because handle it, Andrew J. Szeri did. He sent me a letter explaining a creative writing program I would have loved to attend. Szeri’s mythical program used all the “standard industry tools” that my program refused to allow mention of. My program almost focused only on what was already done well in work that almost always needed structural assistance.

Szeri told me — in writing — that his program’s pedagogy was “gentle.” When I told him that any program that needs to explicitly control what a learner says violates academic freedom at its core, he stopped all communication. Szeri confirmed my program violated academic freedom and didn’t have a workable pedagogy in a single sentence.

My new complaint became that once Andrew J. Szeri had confirmed my original complaint in writing but had dismissed it as “not liking the way class was taught.”

Every New Decision Maker should have considered that Andrew J. Szeri hadn’t even investigated to see if my program had attacked academic freedom. They should have considered that he confirmed that to be the case in writing.

They failed to understand that even a suspected conflict of interest — such as closing down a complaint you just confirmed in writing — had an obligation to report that was tied to billions of dollars of public funding and billions of tonnes of public trust. If each New Decision Maker in the appeals process decided that I hadn’t liked how class was taught before starting their review of Szeri’s decision, they wouldn’t even look into it.

To the Senate, if they were told what my problem was, they had no problem telling me I’d already been informed I just hadn’t liked the way class was taught at the University of British Columbia as an absolute fact.

Wanting a program that didn’t violate academic freedom at the methodology level was a personal preference.

Hubert Lai took it further by eliminating any mention of the word “appeal” in his falsified version of the 2019 Investigations Policy. It seems like he wanted to give UBC officers the ability to tell the student what their problem was without the student being able to appeal that decision. It sure seems like there was no aspect of that man’s duty to his institution he did not violate. The law even requires FOIP responses to be within six weeks. UBC’s response time was slightly less than it would have taken to complain about the FOIP response times.

That I didn’t go ahead and file a complaint about it is my one regret.

I’ll probably outline what each point of contact was like dealing with the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education, the Law Society of British Columbia and the Ombuds Office of British Columbia was like dealing with. I was accusing senior administrators of the UBC of some pretty heinous acts (that they committed in writing.)

None of the other public sector institutions had personal stakes in the matter.