Dr. Yves Tiberghien remembers the “gruesome” weeks-long eight-hour exams and preparation he and other French high school students did to get into prep school.
“The old French system about those elite exams is very, very harsh,” he said.
Tiberghien happened to be good at math, so he was encouraged to pursue engineering.
“But I refused that because I loved history and I loved languages,” he said. “I was this open, curious person.”
Tiberghien ended up in prep school for social sciences, which he described as closer to being a business school.
The institution attracted the best students in the country, but Tiberghien felt it lacked knowledge of psychology and learning principles. Instructors would often resort to punishment, shaming and hazing students as disciplinary practice.
The drive to embody the opposite of these prep school experiences motivated Tiberghien to leverage compassion and innovative instruction techniques in his teaching to encourage curiosity and creativity, borrowing from his adventures around the world and the lived experiences he observed along the way.
Life on the island
Tiberghien credits much of his world view to his love for his home on the Gulf Islands.
Tiberghien’s life on the island is slow-paced and intentional — encountering orcas, seals and humpbacks and growing fruits and vegetables in his family’s yard. Having made the move nearly a decade ago as a result of a frustration with Vancouver real estate, Tiberghien learns a little every day from the interconnection of the nature around him.
"You can create a complete ecosystem," he said. "When you are stressed, if you deal with global issues and work too much, if you garden then you work with the earth, and then also you are with the animals, you completely open up your heart."
To create environments that spur creativity and allow people to mobilize through shared respect and collaboration, Tiberghien leads with hope and imagination.
“I don’t want to be rosy and lie … [the world] we’re facing right now is big, profoundly disappointing and very dangerous,” he said.
Having lived in so many places throughout his life, Tiberghien expressed that he has always been a foreigner. But as he said, people across the globe have the gracious capacity to be welcoming, and that is what we need to embody.
A backpack, a notebook and curiosity
As one of the only students in his cohort to do all three international programs that existed at his school, including an extra year studying genetic engineering in the US, Tiberghien began exploring the world and has not stopped since.
He followed up this exchange with hitchhiking across the US and a semester abroad at London Business School, after which two years of French service awaited him. As an alternative to enlisting in the army, at the time, France allowed citizens to work for French companies abroad in the form of civilian service. This took Tiberghien to Japan.
“I had a lot of incredible experiences, but also incredibly humanly enriching,” he said.
During his time in Japan, amid working full-time and trying to build a life someplace new, Tiberghien kept dreaming.
“I went alone on a small island in Japan, and I wrote a 100-page book in a whole night there, with my long-term dreams, my vision, my plan. And I was discovering that I'm most interested in questions of peace and justice and international relations,” he recounted. “But here I was working in Michelin Tire in Japan — still a long way.”
To put his clarity into motion, Tiberghien lived a double life — he’d spend his workday at his job and take evening social justice classes.
Eventually, Tiberghien resigned from Michelin and spent a year travelling across Asia — him, his backpack, a notebook and a curiosity to meet new people and learn more about the world.
Once he began his master’s in international relations at Stanford University, he wrote to the director of the program, writing, “I'm doing this for peace, justice ... My plan is to develop great ideas and then later, hopefully have a role in helping the world toward a better pathway.” Tiberghien did not get the response he thought he would.
“‘That's not what we do here. You're in the wrong place. We're here to do social science modelling. You can't care about the world. If you care, you won't do good social science,’” he said, recalling the preconceived notions he heard from others in the program.
But that didn’t stop him. Tiberghien ended up staying at Stanford for his PhD, fuelled by his endeavours to incorporate care and responsibility in political science and international relations.
"If we don't care at all about the outcome, we're missing a lot of what could be done."
Politics, hope and happiness
Created by Dr. Barbara Arneil in 1998, POLI 100 is the first introduction UBC students have to university-level political science. This term, Tiberghein was asked to teach it as well.
Coming to the course post-pandemic — which for Tiberghien was a big political turning point — combined with his work with high levels of government advising, shaped his approach to refining the course Introduction to Political Science: The Politics of Hope and Happiness. He said 100-level courses tend to be “supply driven.”
“Here's the theory you need to know — this is the canon of political science. I wanted to instead, start from empirical puzzles that young people care about,” he said. “Why is there polarization in society? Or why did some cultures colonize others … when they had similar power?”
Interdisciplinarity helps Tiberghien situate political science in “what brings happiness, how we can really free our genius and our sense of freedom, and who we want to be.”
For Tiberghien, POLI 100 is not merely about the fundamentals of political science in Canada. He hopes to combat the eurocentric lens with which it is often taught by broadening the ideas and thinkers he brings to class. In addition to Machiavelli and Plato, Tiberghien brings ideas from Mencius and Ashoka and reshapes ideas usually understood as the “norm” as being merely western-centric.
Studying political science is also where youth can come together to learn about themselves and their intersectional positionality in the world.
“Each of us has to discover our own genius. Society usually squashes that genius,” he said. “[University] is also about wellbeing, about mental health. So I feel responsible for all of that.”
Tiberghien’s POLI 100 lecture after Trump's inauguration began with the MoveU crew getting the students on their feet and moving their bodies. Structured on his belief that if we are kind to ourselves, we are more likely to be kinder to others, such activities are part of his mission to incorporate wellbeing and positive mental health in the ways in which students engage with the world around them.
“I tried to do a completely novel approach to [the course] by starting right from the get go with wellbeing, mental health, also our relation with social media, relation with AI, engage everyone where they come from and also try to transmit all the tips I've learned from many disciplines."
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