New UBC president Benoit-Antoine Bacon is learning on the job

University presidents are prompt. Scripted. Scheduled.

Sure, that’s a generalization. There are likely presidents at smaller colleges who still operate in absent-minded chaos. But if you’re running an organization like the University of British Columbia—70,000 students, 20,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $3 billion—you’re inclined to function like the CEO of any vast enterprise: with discipline. In tightly timed phone calls with any number of previous UBC presidents, it’s always been the same: they give you a chatty opening minute, 13 minutes of focused attention, another minute of pleasantries and you’re out, with the president primed to greet the next caller or delegation in their long day of meetings, entreaties and appearances.

So, it’s a surprise, sitting in the glassy C-suite offices on the top floor of UBC’s Walter C. Koerner Library, when the still-new president, Benoit-Antoine Bacon, comes through the door sweaty, dishevelled and so late that I fear my one-hour interview slot will have evaporated altogether. Bacon is apologetic—even a little embarrassed. It turns out that he had accepted a 5 a.m. invitation to attend a sweat lodge at the UBC First Nations House of Learning, an event he never imagined would last for four hours. And by “sweat lodge,” you shouldn’t be envisioning an austere, Swedish-looking sauna. Think, rather, of something purpose-built but temporary—hot boulders in a big fire under a low, bent-wood frame, covered by blankets. A cramped, dark, cedar-scented space.

Bacon says, “It gets quite personal.”

It turns out, however, that the president doesn’t mind. He did his PhD at the Université de Montréal in neuropsychology, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He loves the personal. In the generous hour that follows, he lays bare his own personal story with something between surprising transparency and actual courage.

Benoit-Antoine Bacon grew up bouncing around a bunch of undistinguished Montreal neighbourhoods, the son of a tyrannical, alcoholic father and a co-dependent mother. In the first seven years of his life, existing in what he describes as “that hypnotic state when you build your view of the world,” he got used to a place that was “dangerous and untrustworthy.” And as he watched his father wrestle, so unsuccessfully, with his own demons, with his fear and shame, Bacon says he, too, became accustomed to living in fear and to feeling shame—a sense that he was permanently and irrevocably ineffectual.

But he was always a good student. And in the Quebecois transitional year from high school to university, he decided to go to CEGEP (a French acronym for General and Professional Teaching College) in English, which he describes as a first step out of his stultifyingly narrow self-image, a neurological break tied not to the French language, so much, as to the whole mindset from which he felt “transformed, reborn.” He also discovered psychology, of which he says, “When you are raised in a world that doesn’t make sense, you look for sense.”

Still, it wasn’t the clean break he might have been hoping for. “You think that, once you’re out, everything will be fine,” he says. “You leave these crazy people behind and live in truth and beauty, and everything will be wonderful. You think you’re over your trauma.”

But not so much. The linguistic characterization of “post-traumatic stress” implies that the trauma is over. But in an ensuing decade or more of drink, drugs and depression, Bacon says, that trauma followed him around.

At the same time, however, he also found himself increasingly subject to pleasant surprise. In 2003, he welcomed a baby daughter—a powerful motivator to break from the toxic patterns of his own family of origin. “I felt, ‘I have to do better for my little baby.’” He was offered a job teaching at Bishop’s University on the edge of Sherbrooke, Quebec—a place, after the harsh surrounds of urban Montreal, that appeared to Bacon as “God’s country, where the grass was green and the water blue.” He got recruited as the chief ­negotiator for the Bishop’s faculty association, where he helped negotiate the first collective agreement after a long and bitter series of strikes. “It was such a transformative experience to sort something out for the community, to be thanked,” he says.

Just as his colleagues were appreciative, the Bishop’s administrators on the other side of the table seem to have been impressed. They made him chair of the department of psychology, and then dean of arts and science, and then associate vice-president, research. In 2013, Concordia University in Montreal, where Bacon had done his undergraduate degree, sought him out as provost and VP of academic affairs, a role he reprised at Queen’s University, in Kingston, three years later. And, in 2018, he was announced as the 15th president of Carleton University in Ottawa. He says now that he got the Carleton position because he came clean in the interview about being in a state of recovery—sharing the grittiest details of his story. “I was seized by the notion that I should be completely honest with the committee as to who they were hiring, but I can’t tell you how shocked I was that they called me back.”

All this was on the record when UBC called last year with an offer that Bacon says he couldn’t resist. UBC, he adds, is “arguably the greatest university in the country.” Certainly, he adds, no Canadian post-secondary is better positioned—geographically, next to Asia, but also given the current level of government support and the usual selling points: “two beautiful campuses, a depth of talent and a spirit of innovation that you don’t see in some of the big universities in the east.”

But if you’re wondering what Bacon is going to do with all that potential—what personal stamp he plans to put on the institution—he’s at the ready with an answer that’s really not an answer. “It’s not for me to write a plan and hand it down,” he says. “The role of the president should be to convene the community—to define a shared vision for a common journey.”

That can read like a dodge, or like an acknowledgment of what you might reasonably consider as the powerlessness of the president’s job. Martha Piper, who was UBC president from 1997 to 2006 and then again for a year in 2015-16, spoke to that powerlessness more than a decade ago when Andrew Petter, then newly recruited as the next president of Simon Fraser University, called her for some preparatory advice. As Petter reported at the time—and as Piper confirmed for this story—she told him that “the worst mistake a university president can make is thinking that they run the institution.”

Piper went on to say that the university’s board of governors believe that they run the university, and it’s kind of their job. The faculty think they run the university, and they do, through their influence in the academic senate. The deans, so often called “princes” in the academic world, think that they run the university and, again, their influence is undeniable. And the staff believe they run the university, and if you were ever to tell them they don’t, they might stop.

Hearing about this conversation, Bacon quickly picks up the thread, saying: “The students!” Students absolutely think they run the place, or that they should. Then he goes on to add: the government, which pays the bills; and, the taxpayers, who pay for the government. It’s complicated.

Interestingly, Bacon lands exactly where Piper did in her coaching conversation with Andrew Petter. A president’s only real opportunity is to set the agenda, says Bacon. “I can’t go into the labs and make discoveries. I can’t write the exams.” But, he says, if he can establish an environment of safety and harmony, “people will want to come help.”

Accordingly, Bacon says he is going to continue to “listen, listen, listen,” knowing that “next year, there will be time for a process of strategic planning, to find the best ideas about what we can achieve—what we can do today to make the best opportunities for tomorrow.”

At the end of the day, though, Bacon says it comes back to something that, as someone in recovery, he has always known: he is not now, and never will be, in control. Contemplating the unfolding issues—an always worsening financial crunch, arguments about academic freedom, protests and encampments on the campus lawn—he recalls an earlier conversation in which a colleague said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just smooth out the bumps and do the job?” To which another, wiser colleague replied, “Nope. The bumps are your job.”

It’s one Bacon hopes to do with “patience, humility and an open heart, a willingness to listen and an understanding that, the more you can get out of the way, the better.”