Concordia needs to be more open

"My name is Edgar. I am contacting you to bring to your attention a terrible situation at Concordia University."

So began the first of the damning email messages about Concordia president Judith Woodsworth, sent two months and a day before Concordia announced that she would be "stepping down for personal reasons."

It’s a safe bet that Edgar is not this Deep Throat’s real name.

What is it? Can’t say. Reporters don’t make a habit of ratting out their sources. Besides, Edgar was never available to meet or talk on the phone, claiming fears of retribution. "It is VERY RISKY for people to ask questions or talk," was the reply to requests for specifics.

Were Edgar’s motives pure or self-serving, Machiavellian or inspired by the simple desire to find the truth? I still don’t know whose agenda this mysterious correspondent (he, she, they?) was serving by emailing cryptic, critical, attacks on Woodsworth and her entourage in the weeks before the university’s board of governors pushed yet another Concordia president out into the snow with two years’ salary.

In one of his rare public statements since Woodsworth’s departure Dec. 22, board chairman Peter Kruyt dismissed all suggestions of wrongdoing or misuse of funds by either Woodsworth or her husband, former journalism professor Lindsay Crysler, as "untrue and unfair" and "irresponsible speculation."

Neither Kruyt nor anyone else at Concordia has been able to explain why Woodsworth was fired, or why Kathy Assayag, the vice-president of alumni and advancement, left late on a Friday afternoon in early September, also purportedly for "personal reasons."

Maria Peluso, president of Concordia’s part-time faculty association and a fierce critic of the university’s corporate structure, is among those who say the reasons Woodsworth was sacked are unimportant.

For her, what matters now is that the power wielded by the board of governors be diluted and that web of vice-presidents far removed from the academic concerns of faculty and students unravelled.

Yet Peluso speaks of a "chronic pattern" of departures from Concordia. Over the last decade, Peluso estimates Concordia has shelled out "a conservative" $10 million in severance payments, early retirement packages and other forms of contractual obligations to dozens of senior administrators, middle managers and staff who were either fired, pushed or made so miserable they were paid to stay home.

If that is so, surely there needs to be a reckoning, a public accounting of the circumstances under which so many people came and went, what they did to upset their colleagues or the board, and who signed the cheques that sealed their silence?

A month before she lost her job, Woodsworth was called to testify at a Quebec labour tribunal investigating claims of unfair dismissal by Concordia of two internal auditors.

Ted Nowak and Saad Zubair were fired in September 2009 for allegedly approving their own charges for $250 in restaurant meals and then concealing it from Woodsworth.

The case had been scheduled to resume last Thursday.

Since then, the hearing has been postponed, feeding suspicions Concordia is quietly moving to shut down another potentially embarrassing situation.

Has the board learned nothing from the Woodsworth fiasco?

The time for secret settlements and sweeping problems under the rug is over.