When Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon first visited Vancouver during a cross-country road trip from Montréal, he was awed by BC’s natural beauty.
A young Concordia University student at the time, Bacon never imagined he would get to stare at these beautiful views every day through the windows of the president’s office just a couple of decades later.
“When UBC ... offered me the position, I didn‘t hesitate for one second,” said Bacon.
Bacon was born and raised in Montréal and, as a self-proclaimed Habs fan, he’s still adjusting to cheering for the Canucks and to West Coast life.
A neuropsychologist by training, Bacon’s desire to research the brain was heavily influenced by his childhood experiences. He viewed his studies on the brain as crucial to understanding how people see, view, feel and interact with the world.
“I was gifted a dysfunctional childhood in an unsafe home and I think that’s what led me to study psychology — because I was looking for sense in the world,” said Bacon in a May interview with The Ubyssey. “I was also a summer camp counsellor and many of those kids were experiencing difficulties around their family — as I was — perhaps, in school, and I felt ill-equipped to help them.”
Research and teaching remain Bacon’s main interests and his contract includes a clause ensuring he is able to access funds to pursue personal research.
Seeing all the work done at UBC labs has been one of his favourite parts of the job, and he’s been actively engaging with the federal government over the past few months to advocate for increased support for post-secondary institutions — something the latest budget delivered.
“The first lab I visited was the Quantum Materials Lab, a really amazing place. It feels like the future when you get into a lab like [it],” said Bacon.
While he hasn’t had the opportunity to draft up any research plans as of yet, Bacon said he is a member of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health and hopes to continue research on perceptual systems (his specialty) and mental health.
Throughout his career as a public administrator, Bacon has been an advocate for destigmatizing mental health, often sharing his past experiences with substance use and depression to humanize these experiences. One of his main personal and professional goals at UBC is to further expand mental health support at the university.
“It’s sometimes tempting for [the] university to think we’re all about thinking and decision making and rationality and these are all good things, but we’re also human beings with feelings, with complex emotions, and we need to put that at the centre of our lives as well,” said Bacon.
“When I took the chair of the psychology department [at Bishop’s University], I really thought it would be three years. When I took on a deanship, I really thought I would go back, but now it’s been 16 years, one year after the other taking on these leadership roles. It creeps up on you, and it becomes your life.”
Over the next five years, Bacon aims to support the community and work collaboratively toward building a future that the community wants. For him, a job well done means improving student happiness and success, producing impactful research and being a leader in truth and reconciliation and sustainability.
“The president is the face of the university but the president is not a king,” said Bacon. “If you get to a leadership position like this one, you’re no longer a musician. You don’t play in the orchestra, you’re the conductor. You need to make sure that the violins are playing with the cellos and everybody’s playing together and at the right level.”
University administrators have recently faced scrutiny as campus discourse has entered the mainstream with the establishment and end of Canadian university campus encampments. UBC’s MacInnes Field was occupied by a community-led Palestinian solidarity encampment for two months.
Bacon said UBC’s role in world events is to “be a space where these various viewpoints can be debated in a rational and reasoned way, and obviously in a peaceful and respectful way.”
“There’s so much that we can do through education, through research, to build a better world.”
Since Bacon’s arrival at UBC, he has released statements refusing calls to divest from companies activists say are complicit in human rights violations in Palestine. This was one of the encampments’ demands before it ended.
Still, Bacon said the university wants to find a way forward that satisfies everyone and ensures safety for all.
“The only way to get there is through talking,” said Bacon. “We’re hoping engagement is possible [and] that we‘ll find a path forward.”
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