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[ President's letter to the UW community, 19 October 1995 ]

Wednesday, November 1, 1995

Faculty member is disciplined

UW president James Downey says that a professor in the department of environment and resource studies, Sehdev Kumar, has been the subject of disciplinary action under UW's Policy 53, which could have led to his dismissal. In fact the dean of environmental studies, Jeanne Kay, did recommend firing, but the president changed the penalty to a salary reduction.

In a statement that appears in full on page 3 of today's Gazette, Downey says that Kumar's offences, "though inexcusable and warranting a severe penalty, did not, I felt, justify dismissal."

The charges are that Kumar "sexually harassed and sexually assaulted an undergraduate student" during a field trip to India last year, "failed to take adequate measures on a field trip to provide the help and protection that the students required" during the trip, disobeyed the dean's instructions about "how the field trip was represented and whether or not University credits would be granted", and "committed unwanted touching of other participants". The sexual harassment is described as the most serious offence.

Section VII of Policy 53 allows the dean to make a recommendation for dismissal, which is then considered by the president. "I was satisfied that Professor Kumar posed no threat of further behaviour of this sort towards students," Downey writes, and he imposed a lesser penalty.

It's the first time a faculty dismissal case has been dealt with under the Policy.

Preregister now for spring

Co-op students who will be back on campus in the spring term of 1996 should be preregistering for courses today through Friday. (Regular program students who want to be here next spring should wait and preregister in the winter term, the registrar's office says.) Information about department advisors and the other things students need to know to pre-register can be found in the Course Offerings List, available in academic department offices.

Lovesick hearts and a study's charts

Who can best predict the outcome of romantic relationships: lovers, parents or roommates? That's the question psychology graduate student Tara MacDonald will tackle today at 11:30 in a "social brown bag" presentation (psych conference room, PAS room 3026). MacDonald's talk is based on her study of first-year students' predictions about their dating relationships. Parents' and roommates' predictions were also collected. Students were then tracked to see how long their relationships lasted. And which predictions were most accurate? At two and six months, parents' and roommates' guesses were more correct than those of the lovers themselves. MacDonald says she's planning a follow-up study to see what factors each group considers in making the predictions.

More on the Westhues case

The faculty association's newsletter Forum, distributed this week, says there will be a report on "the Westhues case" from the academic freedom and tenure committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

The case involving sociology professor Ken Westhues can hardly be described at less than epic length, but Roman Dubinski, chair of the UW association's own AF&T committee, does his best in five pages of text. He notes that what began as a disagreement about a graduate student's oral examination, and continued with discipline against Westhues, ended in a report from the UW faculty grievance committee, which was unable to get everybody to agree on procedures for hearings. A CAUT fact-finding committee visited Waterloo last winter. During the summer, says Dubinski, UW officials suggested mediation to settle the remaining issues in the case, but the idea collapsed. He says:

The formal procedures of Policy 63 have absolutely failed in this case. The substance of Westhues's grievance against severe sanctions imposed by his Chair depriving him of his right to carry out the normal duties of a faculty member -- a matter of great significance to all faculty -- was not considered by the Grievance Committee because it could not get past purely procedural issues.

And in other news, briefly

 I note that the air supply in Needles Hall will be shut off tomorrow from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. for maintenance. Guess we'll have to supply our own hot air for three hours!

Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca

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