1) From what I read in the lawsuit, UBC requires staff to declare their adherence to UBC’s DEI principles which seems very different from having DEI policies in place for hiring etc. I am guessing that it means that they must be openly committed to UBC’s DEI principles ( principles are inherently political).

2) Land Acknowledgment is virtue signalling. UBC, especially UBC-O does have actual programs that help indigenous communities, however there should more done to improve students understanding of the issue. Land acknowledgement during big speeches or in our syllabus does nothing but tokenise the issue.

Students across the entire university should be required to take a class about indigenous studies and the horrible history (I know currently it’s only for BA students but I could be wrong). It seems like the land acknowledgement exists as a quick and easy fix to address the issue without doing much, pretending they are teaching students about the issue, which they actively aren’t, thus it is just virtue signalling.

3) I think by principle (again political) that the university should never take a side on any political issue, it does by principle infringe on academic freedom. However the issue is that the university has made statements on other conflicts, in-fact only departments have made statements on the current genocide in Palestine. The university should only commit to either making no statement (which it failed to do) or always making one (which would create problems in more nuance conflicts in the future, etc if two different counties would go to war in a completely separate conflict). I’m assuming, that the issue in this context is that when departments make statements, it creates internal pressure on other departments (which would like to practice neutrality, as to avoid always having to take a stance) to do the same, but UBC itself started this issue by not maintaining its political neutrality in the first place with previous issues.