Just How Broken is Collegial Governance at the University of Alberta? Part II: The University Secretary and “GCUS”

On 2 July 2020, Bill Flanagan’s first day, proper, on the job as the University’s new President, members of the University community received an email entitled “Announcement Regarding University Secretary.” This email informed us that “[t]o streamline functions and achieve cost-savings, the role of University Secretary and General Counsel will be merged into one.” The President’s email also declared that “With this change, the current role of University Secretary has been eliminated, and with regret, I announce that Marion Haggarty-France is no longer with the U of A.”

The proposition that the role of University Secretary was one that could simply be eliminated or merged with another (contradictory claims, no?) was the first public evidence that the Flanagan administration’s approach to the Kenney government’s savage cuts to the University of Alberta’s budget would not just be utterly ruthless, but also not rational. How does one eliminate the unique and uniquely important role of University Secretary? How does one “streamline” functions that are a full-time job in their own right? And what does it mean to achieve the so-called “streamlining” by “merging” the role of “University Secretary” with that of “General Counsel”? Surely these are roles that ought to be kept strictly separate.

The role of the University of Alberta General Counsel is set out here. The role of University Secretary, or the university’s senior governance officer, is that of safeguarding university governance processes so that the university community can have confidence that all governance decisions are being taken according to a scrupulously fair process, in accordance with all existing rules and policies.

The decision to “merge” the two roles became all the more ironic as Fall 2020 unfolded, and the university community heard repeatedly that the University had to create three new senior administrative roles in the form of “Executive” or “College” Deans because no Faculty Dean could be expected to manage the needs of a College “off the side of their desk.”

The university community rejected this argument, but as we saw that proved irrelevant: when the General Faculties Council did not make the recommendation that the President wanted in this regard, he simply went to the Board of Governors and disavowed that recommendation. I suggest that this could not have happened if the role of University Secretary had been preserved with its previous occupant fulfilling her responsibilities.

Now something entirely predictable has happened, but with a twist. At the October meeting of the General Faculties Council Executive the President announced that the workload of the combined roles of “General Counsel” and “University Secretary” was too great, and the person filling these roles (GCUS?!) would now have a “volunteer” Governance Advisor to assist him. This “volunteer” would be the previous Chancellor, Doug Stollery.

Right: because the role of University Secretary is so unimportant the vacuum can now be addressed with the assistance of a “volunteer.”

Squeeze out the woman who safeguarded governance processes at the University. Replace her with a man. Then bring in another man to help that man do the work that should always have remained with the woman who was laid off.

Three cheers for the stalwart upholding of EDI principles!

There is an additional difficulty.

GCUS has been given authority that I do not believe the University Secretary was ever previously given. If I’m wrong on this, I’m happy to be corrected. But even if the kind of authority in question is properly that of the University Secretary I suggest it does not properly reside with anyone occupying the merged status of GCUS.

We saw one ramification of this problem after the General Faculties Council passed a set of recommendations in the course of a “Committee of the Whole” discussion at its special meeting of 8 February 2021. Those recommendations were intended to bring about significant reflection, deliberation, and decision-making in relation to what had gone wrong with academic governance at the University of Alberta in the Fall of 2020, especially when the President claimed a conflict of interest to recuse himself from speaking at the Board to the GFC recommendation that would have prevented the creation of “College Deans.”

The full set of recommendations is here. The general point of the recommendations was to ensure that there could never again by the kind of railroading of the General Faculties Council witnessed in the Fall of 2020, and that academic governance would proceed in such a way that every future President of the University would always represent and defend GFC’s recommendations to the Board.

The most important of the “Committee of the Whole” recommendations to improve the governance situation was #4:

This work has not yet been done.

Not hard to guess why not.

Instead, the person currently in the role of GCUS was swiftly made “co-chair” of an ad hoc governance committee charged with conducting the overdue triennial review of three of GFC’s “Guiding Documents,” including the “Meeting Procedural Rules.” As I noted in Part I, the rules had very seriously stood in the way of democratic governance at GFC across Fall 2020.

A faculty member not on GFC was made the other “co-chair.” Members of this committee were then hand-picked. This committee then decided that the undemocratic rules that had caused so many difficulties in the Fall of 2020 were in fact rules that “have been serving us well” and that it would be proposing very few amendments to them. No new rule was proposed, for starters, to permit members of GFC to call a special meeting by an established procedure. That’s a standard democratic measure for a body such as GFC.

The lack of proposed amendments to the Rules involves a whole host of issues—more on them later. For now, let us remember that academic governance, properly conceived, is collegial governance: shared governance, that is, of the University by the faculty. It is not governance of the University by one or more lawyers.

It is hard to imagine a situation where a staff member is every properly the chair or co-chair of an academic governance committee or assigned decision-making responsibility for any academic governance matter. Staff are an important resource for that decision-making, but it is not right for them to be at the helm. And it was wrong, deeply wrong, for the most important of those governance staff roles, that of University Secretary, simply to be eliminated. The University of Alberta needs an impartial guardian of all of its rules for university governance.