If Concordia University's board of governors thought that announcing the departure of Judith Woodsworth the day before the university closed for Christmas holidays would mean the matter of yet another president being summarily dispatched would die a quiet death, it was dreaming.
As students and professors start a new term at a university in apparent turmoil, they have blasted the board for its refusal to explain why two presidents have left their jobs in less than 31/2 years. Woodsworth, for one, admits she was pushed, saying she was told "some members of the board had lost confidence" in her.
The board owes an explanation to the university -its students, faculty and supporters -as well as to the city and the provincial government that funds it. Concordia is a public institution of great importance for the province as one of three English institutes of higher learning in Quebec.
The board of governors of such an institution should be expected to uphold the highest standards of integrity, conscientiousness and transparency. Instead, a university that is home to 45,000 students and 1,700 professors is left in the dark on a large number of key questions.
For instance, in a letter this week, the Concordia University Faculty Association complained it had no information on how much money has been paid out in severance packages, not just to Woodsworth and her predecessor, Claude Lajeunesse, but also to the five vice-presidents who have resigned over the past five to six years. The faculty association has quite properly asked for an independent audit of these "extra payments" to see if they constitute a justifiable use of public funds.
Association president Lucie Lequin also suggested that some board members run Concordia as if it were a corporation and not an institute of learning. There's no question the board's officers have been drawn mainly from the world of business: chairperson Peter Kruyt is a vice-president with Power Corp.; his fellow officers include BCE Emergis founder Brian Edwards, Jonathan Wener, chairman, CEO and principal shareholder of CanderelManagementInc., L. Jacques Menard, chairman of BMO Nesbitt Burns and president of BMO Financial Group, and James Cherry, president and CEO of Aeroports de Montreal. Only Annie Tobias, who teaches business as well as heading up the Jewish Community Foundation Leadership Institute, is not directly involved in industry or business.
Their silence doesn't help dispel their image as a group of autocrats. They owe the university and the public an accounting of what they have done, why they did it, and how they plan to do better in the future. Concordia is not part of the private sector. It is accountable to those it serves and those who pay for it, which is to say all of us. We're waiting.