It is being alleged that the administration at Simon Fraser was in such a hurry to put the approved candidate into a Royal Bank-sponsored professorship that they ignored their own procedures for approving hiring decisions just to keep the corporate donors happy. Is this a warning the Trent and Peterborough communities need to heed in light of the controversies surrounding the DNA Cluster and accusations of questionable governance processes?

by Nicole Vanderwyst, News Editor
Simon Fraser's e.Peak - January 17, 2005

Three months after it was announced, Simon Fraser University's Senate has approved a new corporate-funded professorship, and there are concerns that the university may have violated policy by creating and awarding the professorship before it was ever established.

In October 2004, the Royal Bank of Canada Financial Group donated $600,000 to SFU to establish the RBC Financial Professor in Technology and Innovation at the university's new Segal Graduate School of Business, which is due to open this September.

In addition to postings on several business faculty websites, SFU's Media and Public Relations department announced in two separate media releases that Ernie Love, dean of the faculty of business administration, had already been awarded the professorship.

However, according to the university's academic policy on the appointment of chairs, professorships, and fellowships, the establishment of professorships is subject to the approval of both Senate and the Board of Governors, neither of which had seen any terms of reference for the position before it was announced or awarded to Love.

At last week's Senate meeting, Dr. John Waterhouse, SFU's vice president, academic, said that the news releases and website announcements were errors that should not have been made, and that no one had been named to the position.

In a telephone interview, Waterhouse said that he believes the errors don't show that the university's policies have been circumvented, referring to concerns voiced at Senate that an abuse of process had taken place. Rather, he said it shows a lack of care on the part of whomever prematurely announced the professorship.

But Chris Giacomantonio, student senator and president of the Simon Fraser Student Society, speculates that the early announcements are more than a mere oversight.

"This is not an oversight. It can't be an oversight. It can't be a mistake that got blown out of proportion," he said. "It was something that they've been promoting on behalf of, in all likelihood, their corporate donor. I mean, otherwise, why not wait until it's actually approved?"

Ethical and conflict of interest concerns have also been raised about Love's participation in negotiating the professorship's terms of reference with the donor.

"I don't want to leave Senate with the impression that I was intimately involved with the negotiations of this," Love said, explaining that his involvement with a university advancement committee led to his interaction with the RBC Financial Group, and that he himself did not approach the donor with his personal recommendations on the professorship.

Waterhouse denies that Love's involvement reflects any ethical compromise or conflict of interest.

A sticking point in the terms of reference for the professorship is a clause that states it is "normally" to be held by the dean of the business administration faculty. This has led some members of Senate to wonder to what extent the RBC Financial Group has a hand in controlling SFU's freedom in the appointment of the professorship.

"'Normally' is inserted there to allow for the fact that it's possible that the dean of business administration in the future may not have interest in this area [of technology and innovation]," Waterhouse said at the meeting, explaining that a future dean may unwillingly be attached to the professorship through their deanship.

Both Waterhouse and Love believe that SFU has full control over the endowment and to whom it is awarded. But Giacomantonio believes that the university's freedom to determine its own affairs has been compromised, and that the RBC Financial Group has been allowed to direct who the university appoints to the professorship.

"The biggest problem there is that they [the university] also made it clear that the Royal Bank had asked them to put the language in there; the Royal Bank wanted it [the professorship] to be held by the dean, and their compromise was to put the term 'normally' in there," Giacomantonio said.

Though there are many corporate-funded professorships at SFU, the RBC professorship is only the second to be named after a corporate sponsor. The first was the Weyerhauser professorship in chain management, which was established in March 2003.