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Committee endorses all BoG-related governance recommendations

 
Graphic by Katie Brioux

The latest step in Concordia’s mission to fix its governance troubles came last week when an ad hoc committee of the Board of Governors announced it was endorsing all of the recommendations stemming from an external review.
The BoG’s ad hoc committee on governance met four times over the summer to pour over the BoG-related recommendations in the external governance review committee’s report. The result is that the ad hoc committee will announce to the full board at its Sept. 28 meeting that it supports all the recommendations, minus a few significant tweaks. Whether the board will actually adopt the recommendations remains to be seen.
The major modification suggested by the ad hoc committee is to include two undergraduate representatives on the BoG, one with speaking and voting rights, while the other, who would be known as the alternate governor, would have speaking rights only. Both, however, would have full voting and speaking rights at the committee level.
The EGRC had originally recommended that the number of student representatives on the Board – currently four undergrads and one graduate student – be reduced to one undergrad and one grad, keeping in mind its recommendation that the board itself be reduced from 42 members to 25.
“One undergrad and one graduate student, that’s quite a reduction from the current undergraduate student representation, but the board is shrinking from 42 to 25, so there’s going to be reductions in sheer numbers,” said Concordia’s VP institutional relations and ad hoc committee member Bram Freedman during a press briefing on Sept. 2. “At the ad hoc committee level, the composition of the board was discussed a lot, and [former CSU president] Amine Dabchy was there and very clear with the dissatisfaction with the reduction down to one.”
Concordia Student Union president Lex Gill said the union remains unhappy with this recommendation, and wrote in an email that the CSU will continue to push for a proportional shift on the board, reflecting the fact that undergrads at Concordia represent over 30,000 members of the campus community.
“The CSU’s position is that the reduction to one undergraduate student is not acceptable,” she wrote. “More than that, the introduction of an ’alternate’ appears to us to be a pretty straightforward attempt to undermine student representation while giving the appearance of compromise. It certainly doesn’t take complicated math to realize that undergraduate students are losing in this new model.”
The four current undergraduate representatives on the board – AJ West, Laura Beach, Cameron Monagle, and Gill – recently sent a letter to the ad hoc committee outlining their position and noted that “currently there is one student governor for every 9,000 students, making up 12.5 % of the Board. If we are to maintain this level of representation, theoretically there would be 3.125 student representatives, or one student for every 14,400 students.”
Some of the other BoG-related recommendations will come into effect immediately at the Sept. 28 meeting, should they be adopted by the board. These recommendations include the formation of new committees such as the governance and ethics committee, and enshrining new items in the BoG’s bylaws, including a maximum of three, three-year terms for external members on the board.
Other, more complex recommendations, including those dealing with composition, will take effect as of June 30, 2012 when a number of board members’ terms are set to expire. The EGRC had recommended that the Board should ultimately include 15 external members and 10 internal members. These 15 external members will include replacements for the four to five governors leaving in September, replacements for those departing in June, 2012, as well as some members who have only been on the board for a few years.
“There will also be some carry-over from who we have now. Some people who have only been there for just a few years still have expertise to bring to the table,” said Freedman.
The EGRC was formed in February through a joint agreement by the Board of Governors and the Senate to mull over Concordia’s governance issues, which really began to take centre stage after the BoG ousted president Judith Woodsworth last December. The Senate’s steering committee studied the EGRC’s Senate-related recommendations over the summer and will be presenting their findings to the full Senate at its Sept. 9 meeting.
The EGRC’s three members, Bernard Shapiro, Andre C. Cote, and Glen A. Jones, stood to make $1,000 a day for their work for a maximum of 20 days, thereby costing Concordia $60,000 in remuneration alone. But the final cost incurred by the university for the EGRC’s work came closer to $78,000, mostly due to hotel fees paid for the two members from out of town.
When asked last week if the administration had ever considered having all three committee members hail from the Montreal area in order to avoid hotel bills, Freedman said, “I think people were more concerned with the profiles and the expertise of the committee members.”

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Action on governance report could come in September

Concordia’s governance troubles could be on the mend as early as this September, depending if the university’s governing bodies adopt a set of recommendations stemming from an external review.
The 39-page report from the external governance review committee, released in June, outlined 38 recommendations that could eventually lead to ending what the committee members described as a “culture of contempt” at Concordia.
Formed in February, the committee was the product of a joint agreement between Concordia’s Senate and Board of Governors. It saw the light of day in the direct aftermath of the ousting of former president Judith Woodsworth in December by the BoG.
Woodsworth was sent on her way with a $705,000 severance package. The entire scenario was described by the external review committee as an event that “revealed a substantial degree of misunderstanding, blatantly deficient internal communications and a lot of distrust, often bordering mutual contempt, between the various communities of the University.”
Eight months after the flaws in Concordia’s governance structure began to expose themselves, the BoG’s ad hoc committee on governance is preparing to present its report on the ERCG’s recommendations to the full Board at the end of September. Whether the ad hoc committee, or the full board for that matter, will endorse some or all of the ERCG’s recommendations remains to be seen.
“At the open meeting held in June about the external review committee’s report, the chair of the board’s ad hoc committee, Maitre Rita DeSantis, indicated that the ad hoc committee would be studying the report very closely with the intention of moving very quickly,” said Concordia spokesperson Chris Mota. “There were some concerns that this report would be just be sitting on a shelf, but it will be dealt with as quickly as possible.”
The BoG’s ad hoc committee met four times over the summer to discuss the ERCG’s report, said Mota. Apart from DeSantis, the ad hoc committee’s nine members include BoG chair Peter Kruyt, Concordia interim president Fred Lowy, representatives from full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and staff, and one student representative, former CSU president Amine Dabchy.
Mota indicated that the Senate’s steering committee also met twice over the summer, and will discuss the ERCG’s report at Senate’s first meeting of the year in early September.
The ERCG’s report recommended a major overhaul of the Board of Governors, Senate, and the Office of the president. Among other items, it recommended reducing the BoG from 42 seats to 25, which would incude 15 external members and 10 internal members.
Among the internal members, the ERCG recommended that there be two student representatives, down from the five currently in place – four undergrads and one grad student. This is the main recommendation that has Concordia Student Union president and BoG representative Lex Gill concerned.
“If the recommendation is accepted, it would reduce undergrad representation on the BoG to four per cent. That’s unacceptable,” said Gill.
Gill said she still remained generally satisfied with the report’s recommendations, particularly those empowering the office of the president. The report also called on Senate to assert itself as the supreme governing body on academic affairs at Concordia, indicating that the governing body’s priority for the time being should be to adopt an academic plan.
The EGRC’s three members, Bernard Shapiro, André C. Côté, and Glen A. Jones, stood to make $1,000 a day for their work for a maximum of 20 days, thereby costing Concordia $60,000 in remuneration alone. According to an email sent earlier this summer from Concordia spokeswoman Fiona Downey, the final cost incurred by the university for the EGRC’s work came closer to $78,000, mostly due to hotel fees paid for the two members from out of town.
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BoG votes to approve review committee

A handful people from outside Concordia University will soon have a chance to independently examine how the university is governed. Concordia’s Board of Governors unanimously passed a motion at its monthly meeting on Feb. 17 to create and support a special review committee set up to evaluate university governance.

The motion was drafted in response to a call by senate members at their January meeting to set up such an external committee to examine “governance structure” in the aftermath of the reported dismissal of president Judith Woodsworth.

BoG members appointed interim president Frederick Lowy, who began his term at the beginning of the month, to work with senate to draft the committee’s mandate. Lowy and the senate steering committee will also make recommendations as to who will sit on the committee. While the BoG motion did not list the number of potential members, Lowy suggested it would be two to three people.

A day later, Concordia’s Senate passed nearly the same motion, approving the establishment of an external governance review committee. The motion in Senate, introduced by Lowy, did undergo a few amendments during the discussion period, however. First, it was amended to specify that the committee be of “at least three members.” Additionally, the Senate steering committee was put in charge of setting, rather than drafting, the mandate and approving, rather than recommending, the membership of said committee. Finally, senators inserted into the motion that at least one of the committee members must be a “current or former faculty member” external to Concordia.

Lowy motivated for the motion in Senate saying “of the issues that have been brought forward, from senate and elsewhere, it seems to me that the most important one, and the one that has engaged so many people in this room, is the issue of governance, and governance in the larger sense including the relationship among the different constituencies, most particularly between the Board of Governors and […] the broader internal community. “

Most of the discussion from senators focused on the actual wording, and as to whether the group of experts should be called a commission or a committee based on the power each word conveys. Ultimately, Lowy said the wording didn’t matter because the committee would not be given a mandate beyond what Senate expected of them. The title made no difference because the university would retain all the power to implement, or not implement recommendations. He said that they were not looking for a group “to tell us how to run the university, but give advice with which they’re free to take or not to take within our existing channels,” and that even if they cannot force action, he expects “their work will have major moral suasion.”

BoG chair Peter Kruyt was not present at the Thursday meeting, and was replaced by vice-chair Jonathan Wener. Lowy addressed some of the criticism that has been levelled at Kruyt in recent months in his first president’s report to the BoG. “There’s a general feeling of victimization; a sense that something bad is being done to us, and this, surprisingly, goes across the board, from the Board of Governors and its members, on the one hand, to just about every academic sector, including students.”

And the blame, said Lowy, has come to rest with the chair. “Peter becomes almost a scapegoat, in the symbolic fashion. This maybe the current situation, at least that’s the way I’ve come to see it, but it’s clearly not an answer to any basic problems that we have in governance.” These problems, he added, have to be examined “very well.”

Later on in the meeting, Jean Freed, an observer on behalf of the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association, decried the apparent assigning of blame to Kruyt and appeared to chastise BoG members who claimed that they were unaware of the decision to replace Woodsworth. “Every board member in this room knew what was going before Dec. 23. Every constituency was represented. Everyone of us had the chance to voice our opinions and to be heard. We cannot lay this just on the leadership.” While the discussion might not have happened at the level of the BoG, she said, it happened in other meetings. “I’m very tired of people pretending they didn’t know. […] If [Kruyt] didn’t have the support of the majority of the board, none of this would have happened.”

Lowy repeated comments he had made previously about needing to repair the rifts in the university in order to move on, but he suggested that Concordia could falter if this does not happen. “We don’t want to [be] one of these institutions that shoots itself in the foot just because that’s the tradition.”

 

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