All Posts Tagged With: "Judith Woodsworth"

Panel to be headed by former McGill principal, will report within 60 days of first meeting

The Montreal Gazette is reporting that Concordia has named the members of an external committee which will study the university’s governance.

The panel was struck in response to the controversy surrounding the sudden departure of the university’s president, Judith Woodsworth, in December.

According to reports, the university has tapped a former McGill principal, Bernard Shapiro, to head the three-person panel. Shapiro was also Canada’s first Ethics Commissioner. Former Quebec Lobbyist Commissioner, André C. Côté, who was also a dean of law and secretary general at Université Laval, along with Glen A. Jones, an associate dean at the University of Toronto and Ontario Research Chair on post-secondary education policy and measurement, will round out the panel.

The committee is required to report to Concordia’s interim president, Frederick Lowy, within 60 days of its first meeting and its report will be made public. Members of the Concordia community will be able to make written submissions to the panel.

While there was some information about the committee’s membership, and how to make written submissions to it, posted on a couple Concordia websites, the information appears to have been taken down. I will update this post once I’ve confirmed the details with Concordia.

UPDATE: Concordia University media relations director, Chris Mota has confirmed, via email, that the details in the Gazette story are correct. Apparently the university is having some technical problems with its websites.

Tensions high at Concordia’s first board meeting since Judith Woodsworth’s alleged firing

Were Concordia University faculty consulted before the (alleged) firing of president Judith Woodsworth?

On Thursday morning, the university’s board of governors met for the first time since Woodsworth’s sudden and controversial departure in late December.

And while steps were taken to move forward, approving a plan to review the school’s governance structure, new questions were raised about what role faculty played in the process leading up to her departure.

UPDATE: Concordia senate appears ready to move forward

Faculty representatives have universally condemned the process, blaming it on a secretive and powerful board executive committee acting without consultation or proper approval.

But according to Jean Freed, the part-time faculty representative to the board–a position that carries speaking but not voting rights–faculty members were consulted in the run up to Woodsworth’s departure.

“Every board member knew what was going on before Dec. 22,” she said.

Freed maintained that even though she doesn’t have a vote and is not a member of the “star chamber,” she had a say. “Every constituency was consulted.”

Freed said she is tired of people “pretending” that they didn’t know what was going on. “I think there are members of certain constituencies who’ve led their constituencies to believe this happened without consultation, without their knowledge and in my opinion that quite simply is not the case.”

Board chair Peter Kruyt had the support of a majority of board members, she said–even though no formal vote was taken–and that faculty had been outnumbered.

She added that the secrecy surrounding Woodsworth’s departure was due to the fact that it was a “matter of employment” and that board members were legally prohibited from commenting publicly, adding that Woodsworth was the only person who could have made the issue public.

“I can assure you that if your employer fired you you would not want that discussion in the papers,” she said.

Freed’s comments came towards the end of debate on a resolution to create an outside committee to review Concordia’s governance structure. If the university senate approves the plan Friday, interim president Frederick Lowy, along with the university senate, will be responsible for finding the committee members and creating their mandate. The committee would be composed of two or three experts from outside Concordia.

Throughout the meeting full-time faculty representatives criticized the actions of Kruyt and the executive, saying that their voices weren’t being heard.

When Lowy called for “people to talk to each other in a way that hasn’t been happening,” finance professor Lawrence Kryzanowski replied that, “it’s not a matter of talking it’s a matter of listening.” Kryzanowski comment was greeted with applause from around 30 professors and students who had come to watch the meeting. “People want a change in governance, there’s a real problem,” he said.

At times the meeting became tense. “It’s the chair and the vice chairs that have caused most of this problem,” said Kryzanowski,” again to audience applause.

“In your opinion,” shot back vice chair, Jonathan Wener, who was chairing the meeting.

Kruyt, arguably the most controversial member of the board was not in attendance. Wener said Kruyt was out of town on business. University officials played down Kruyt’s absence, saying it had been planed long in advance. According to one well-placed source, Kruyt is currently in China.

Throughout the meeting Lowy played the role of elder statesman. “We will overcome the current crisis,” he said. “The key activities of the university continue to perform well … academic activities in particular.”

Throughout the governance debate student representatives remained silent.

The university’s senate, the highest academic body, meets tomorrow.

Student paper stands by story alleging alumni are closing their wallets after Woodsworth controversy

Concordia University is disputing allegations that alumni donations have dropped off significantly in the wake of president Judith Woodsworth’s departure. Claims that donations were down by up to 80 per cent appeared in last week’s issue of student newspaper the Link.

In a letter to the editor sent to the Link and Maclean’s on Campus, director of annual giving, Brad Skog, and call centre manager, Bonnie Kay, write that:

The article draws false conclusions by comparing the results of calls made during October and November (when the call centre was soliciting individuals who contribute regularly to Concordia) with January, when the bulk of their efforts have been concentrated on alumni who have never given to Concordia. Naturally, the results will differ and attempting to equate the two groups makes no sense.

Indeed, when non-donors were called during the fall semester, donor participation was almost identical (within 0.5 percent) and in January, the average gift actually increased. With respect to donations falling to “$50 on some days,” there is a grain of truth. The shift on January 10, 2011 only resulted in $30 because it was cancelled shortly after calling started due to technical difficulties with the call centre computers.

But Link editor-in-chief Justin Giovannetti is standing behind the story, which he co-wrote.

“The Link did its due diligence when reporting on the story,” Giovannetti wrote in an email. “The university had four days to respond to the story while it was being written and didn’t respond until after the national media picked up on it, the day after it was published.”

He adds that, “while the university’s position might explain a larger drop in donations, it does not explain why staff reported that callers turned down donating due to mismanagement at the higher administrative level.”

At the moment, everything seems to be pretty anecdotal. Other members of Concordia’s student press told me that alumni have gone on the record saying that they’re reconsidering future donations because of the Woodsworth situation but at least some call centre employees have disputed the article’s claims.

The departure of Concordia’s president is one of several mysterious, high-level exits at Canadian schools

Concordia University, with its history of student conflict, has rarely been an easy place to govern. Yet when Judith Woodsworth took over in 2008, the school was in a tough spot even by this standard. Its deficit had swelled to $5 million following a lengthy construction blitz on its campuses. The university remained Montreal’s ground zero for tensions over the conflict between Israel and the occupied territories, with protests, boycotts and heated rhetoric on both sides hogging more than their share of oxygen. To top it off, Claude Lajeunesse, the previous president, abruptly resigned from the university two years into a five-year contract, taking over $1 million in severance with him.

Woodsworth was to be a salve for Concordia’s ails. Unlike Lajeunesse, an engineer by training, she had an arts background, and according to several Concordia staff was as approachable and collaborative—a kind of mother hen, some suggest—as he was stern and aloof. If her past record was anything to go by, she was also results-oriented: as president of Laurentian University in Sudbury from 2002 to 2008, she opened a medical school and introduced six new doctoral programs. At her public introduction to Concordia staff and faculty in February 2008, she spoke of the need for listening and consensus building. She insisted people call her Judy.

Woodsworth barely outlasted her predecessor. Shortly before Christmas, the board of governors announced Woodsworth was resigning “for personal reasons.” Board chairman Peter Kruyt, instrumental in recruiting and hiring Woodsworth barely 2½ years earlier, announced the sad news. “Concordia has thrived under her direction, with significant progress and an enhanced reputation on the local, provincial, national, and international scenes,” Kruyt said.

Yet there was a twist: in an interview with CTV News earlier this month, Woodsworth herself said she would gladly have stayed on as president but was asked to leave, and that her departure was forced on her in the days before Christmas vacation. As with Lajeunesse before her, the board refused to discuss the circumstances of Woodsworth’s resignation, sending the university into familiar terrain, with faculty, staff, and students furious at how the board conducted itself, and clueless as to why she was gone. Kruyt declined to answer questions regarding Woodsworth. “Dr. Woodsworth resigned,” responded Concordia spokesperson Chris Mota to Maclean’s. (Woodsworth herself spoke to Maclean’s, but not about the specifics of her situation.)

“There’s a climate of fear within the staff at the university,” says Concordia professor Lucie Lequin, president of the faculty association. “We think that there is an occultish power at the university, and that many of the decisions are taken outside of executive meetings or within the board.” And news of Woodsworth’s resignation has travelled well beyond Concordia, with more than one well-placed observer believing her version of the story. “That the board . . . would announce and attempt to conceal the truth of this dismissal in such a clumsy and ham-fisted manner does little to inspire confidence,” wrote Torstar chair John Honderich, who knew Woodsworth from her days at Laurentian, in a letter to Kruyt earlier this month, obtained by Maclean’s. “In short, I am appalled.”

Woodsworth’s exit caps a five-year senior management purge at the university that has seen the departures of Lajeunesse and Woodsworth, and of five vice-principals—including Concordia veteran Michael Di Grappa, who also briefly served as interim president, and recently debarked for crosstown rival McGill. And if it’s any consolation to Woodsworth, she appears to be in good company when it comes to Canadian university presidents who’ve suddenly and prematurely made for the exit signs. The past five years have been marked by nearly a dozen such high-profile dismissals or resignations, reflecting what Ryerson University president Sheldon Levy calls “an acceleration of the problem” of rapid turnover in senior management at Canadian schools. These include David Atkinson, who left Carleton university in 2006, 15 months into a six-year term; former St. Thomas University president Michael Higgins, who left in 2009 after an acrimonious labour dispute; and Don Cozzetto, who abruptly left the University of Northern British Columbia in 2008 because “he was tired of being a scapegoat,” as one sympathetic board member told the Vancouver Sun.

Many of the presidents are victim, say colleagues at other universities, of more business-oriented boards and government-imposed fiscal restraints. Ryerson’s Levy says he doesn’t know the particulars of Woodsworth’s case, but that exits like hers are often a result of the increased acrimony between business and the academic side brought on by a demand on universities to do more with less. “It’s easier to fire the coach,” he says.

He sees it partly as a question of divided loyalties. “The board might have certain business objectives it wishes the president would realize,” he says, “while the faculty, students and staff have a different set of academic objectives they want you to achieve. The tougher the fiscal situation is, the more pressure on presidents to balance expectations and do both the left and the right at the same time.”

The business community is certainly well represented on Concordia’s board of governors. Kruyt himself is president and CEO of Victoria Square Ventures, an investment firm owned by Montreal-based Power Corporation. His colleagues on the executive, nominating and senior salaries standing committees at Concordia include Montreal real estate mogul Jonathan Wener, BCE Emergis e-commerce founder Brian Edwards and Aéroports de Montréal president and CEO James Cherry. “Whoever controls those committees controls the university,” says Enn Raudsepp, professor emeritus of journalism at Concordia.

Yet, as Woodsworth herself points out, a business-minded board isn’t a problem in itself. “Having people from business on university boards, or the boards of other not-for-profit organizations, can be a good thing,” she told Maclean’s. “I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we still have a bottom line, and we have to balance the budget. You need people looking over your shoulder telling you that. They bring those qualities, but it is also important for them to be aware of the realities in a university and to try to understand the academic culture.”

Whatever her relationship with the board, Woodsworth did have her critics among students. Student union president Heather Lucas signed a letter of non-confidence in her leadership last fall, in part due to her support of tuition hikes. Nevertheless, the CSU issued a statement condemning “the abrupt dismissal of Concordia’s second president in three years,” which has caused “a serious crisis of confidence at our university.” In the long run, such acrimonious departures will mean universities will have difficulty recruiting top talent to fill the job without bulletproof contracts and huge pay increases, says William Barker, president of the University of King’s College. “Do people really want to go to a place that has had so much turnover?” he asked. “The universities themselves might not know what they want in a president, so you’re caught in a crossfire that you weren’t even aware of.”

Faculty up in arms over president’s departure

Faculty members at Concordia are calling for a total review of the way the university is run in the wake of the alleged firing of university president, Judith Woodsworth. Some have gone even further, calling for the university’s entire board of governors to resign.

While Woodsworth’s departure certainly brought the situation to a head, tensions between the university’s faculty and its board of governors, the majority of whom come from outside the university, have been simmering for years.

On Monday, the department of sociology and anthropology called for the resignation of the board.

The head of the part-time faculty union told the Montreal Gazette, “They are going to have to resign … Nothing else will do.”

Over 200 of the university’s professors, lecturers, librarians and staff signed an open letter condemning the board’s actions and calling for a review of its powers.

According to the letter, written by journalism professor Mike Gasher, “the Board appears to have assumed the role of a modern-day star chamber, acting according to its own dictates, accountable and answerable to no one. It is an abuse of power.”

The letter adds that the announcement of Woodsworth’s departure, “sought to deceive the university community and the public by stating the president resigned ‘for personal reasons’ when we now know her resignation was forced by the Board.”

Lucie Lequin, the president of the Concordia University Faculty Association, which represents full-time professors, has issued a similar statement, calling for faculty to “take back our University so that it remains a University dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and not to more concrete and more bureaucratic cliché-mongering.”

Lequin also criticized the abruptness and secrecy surrounding the departure of Woodsworth; her predecessor, Claude Lajeunesse, who left under similar circumstances; and five vice presidents who have left in recent years.

Both Lequin and the staff letter also criticized the high cost of these departures.

“Is the proliferation of golden parachutes doled out to senior administrators, often, if not mainly, without explanation, an appropriate use of what are largely public financial resources?” Lequin wrote.

The staff letter also criticizes the make up of the board of governors, which has long been a controversial issue at the university.

“Twenty-three of the 40 members of the board represent the ‘community-at-large,’ but in fact represent a very narrow segment of that community given that the vast majority are from the corporate sector. At its upcoming meeting in February, the Board seeks to cut faculty membership–from six to four members. Five external Board members sit on the all-important Executive, Nominating and Senior Salaries committees, constituting an elite clique within the Board itself.”

It is widely believed at Concordia that this clique is behind most major decisions made by the board and forced Woodsworth out.

On Monday, board chair Peter Kruyt issued an open letter in what seems to be an attempt to calm the situation, instead the letter, which failed to answer any of the major questions, appears to have fanned the flames of discontent.

The Gazette has reported that the board has hired an outside public relations firm and is soliciting letters of support, in an attempt to salvage their tattered reputation, however this has been denied by the university.

Both the university’s student newspapers have also weighed in, with editorials criticizing the board, the lack of transparency surrounding Woodsworth departure and the high cost of her severance package.

UPDATE: Students’ union supported removing Woodsworth