Has UBC's obsession with good PR made image problems worse?

As the University of British Columbia stumbles from crisis to crisis, smiling officials have attempted to put a brave face on problems ranging from sexual assaults to faculty mutiny.

It's understandable that one of Canada's most revered public institutions would want to protect its reputation. But at what point does the obsession with good public relations become a problem in and of itself?

Amplifying the damage?

There's a telling point in Madam Justice Lynn Smith's review of the fiasco that resulted in former board of governors' chairman John Montalbano's resignation last October.

One that speaks to PR issues which continue to dog the university.

If you haven't been following the soap opera intrigue inside UBC's hallowed halls, Montalbano stepped down in November after Smith found UBC failed to protect the academic freedom of Jennifer Berdahl.

She's the professor who blogged about her suspicion suddenly departed former president Arvind Gupta lost a "masculinity contest" with school leadership.

Never mind that copies of emails between Montalbano and Gupta leaked months later appeared to back up that claim; not for the first or last time, UBC's PR-centric approach to a situation only served to amplify the damage.

The judge didn't find Montalbano broke any policies himself, but said nobody stopped him from making an "unprecedented and unwise" direct call to Berdhahl to tell her how unhappy he was with her musings.

Instead, the office of the dean of the Sauder School of Business appears to have been worried about potential fallout from the posting on a blog which — realistically — most people might never have heard of had the whole situation not been handled so spectacularly badly.

"Concerned about Mr. Montalbano, Sauder's reputation and future fundraising prospects, the dean's office conveyed a message about those concerns to Dr. Berdahl," Smith wrote.

"At the same time, it failed to elicit her point of view or state support for her in the exercise of her academic freedom."

Transparency demanded

In case you missed that — essentially — the university was more worried about looking good than acting well.

It's an approach veteran pollster Mario Canseco says appears to be typical of the way UBC handles problems — one stuck in an era when crisis communication meant a press conference and an apology.

"The era of holding press conferences is coming to an end," says Canseco, vice-president of Insights West.

"If you don't engage people using the tools that they're communicating with, it's going to be very difficult to try to turn the tide and change perceptions they have of you and your brand."

With 60,000 students and 15,000 staff split between its Vancouver and Okanagan campuses, Canseco says UBC is effectively a small community. One that would rank somewhere between Prince George and Nanaimo in scale.

Given the youth of the student population, he says it's impossible not to expect social media buzz around major events on campus to outstrip official proclamations.

And what's demanded is transparency.

This week, UBC has had to deal with the faculty association's vote of no confidence in the board of governors, continued fallout from the Gupta affair and the search for a new president.

The university's vice-president of external relations has called the vote a "healthy internal discussion" which is good to have in a place full of "big personalities and big egos".

But critics have complained the board is treating the university like a corporation, as opposed to the open marketplace of ideas, dissent and democratic principles that you might hope for from a post-secondary institution.

Cardinal rules for risk communication

In 1988, a pair of American researchers laid out what are still considered the seven "cardinal rules" for risk communication.

Chief among them: "be honest, frank and open"; "speak clearly and with compassion"; and "accept and involve the public as a legitimate partner."

Granted, what's happening on campus may not rise to the level of health, safety or environmental threat risk communication is usually meant to convey, but good public relations borrows from the same principles.

Canseco says these are lessons he learned himself after the dramatically wrong predictions pollsters made about B.C.'s 2013 election.

"I've done 35 elections in my life. In the 34 that went well, nobody called me," he says.

"You need to be able to face all of the controversy that comes when something goes wrong and the best way to do it is be open and say, 'this is what happened,and this is why it will never happen again.'"

The facts about Gupta's departure have gradually emerged through access to information requests, leaks, and the former president's decision to break his own non-disclosure agreement.

But the process has left UBC looking like it is being dragged into the light instead of leading the charge.

There's another telling moment, this one from the massive FOI dump the university released almost half a year after Gupta's sudden resignation.

It's a four-page summary of the "various chatter around social media" prepared by a communications officer for UBC managing director of public affairs Susan Danard on the day Gupta's departure was first announced in August 2015.

"Arvind Gupta" was trending in Vancouver by 1:15 p.m. with an average of "400 people at any given moment reading the Arvind article" on the university's website.

The memo lists four "main themes of tweets" including "what's the real story?"

We're still waiting.