No complaint about suspended prof

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This article was published 14/06/2011 (5210 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE University of Manitoba didn’t give mathematics professor Gabor Lukacs a direct cease-and-desist order before suspending him without pay last fall.

Nor did U of M president David Barnard talk to Lukacs before the outspoken professor received his suspension, Barnard told a labour hearing Monday.

Barnard also testified that the PhD student at the heart of the furor did not file a complaint about Lukacs’s alleged actions, though Barnard contends Lukacs harassed the student to the point of leaving the U of M vulnerable to legal action.

Under questioning from U of M Faculty Association lawyer Garth Smorang, Barnard acknowledged that the administration did not directly order Lukacs to stop naming the student or identifying his medical condition.

Lukacs is grieving his three-month suspension without pay and wants his personnel record cleared.

Barnard recommended the university board of governors suspend Lukacs after the professor filed a lawsuit attempting to have the student’s PhD overturned — a lawsuit in which he named the student and his medical condition. A judge’s decision whether Lukacs has the legal right to try to have the PhD rescinded is pending.

Smorang asked Barnard if it was true that no one had ordered Lukacs to stop identifying the student. “I believe that’s correct,” Barnard said.

The U of M awarded the student his PhD, even though the student twice failed a mandatory exam. The university accepted the student’s claim that he suffers from the disability of extreme examination anxiety.

Barnard said Lukacs should have understood from a reprimand from the dean of science in 2009 and from numerous discussions that he was to stop identifying the student and that he was to drop the case.

“I’m surprised this logic wasn’t compelling,” Barnard said.

The U of M president told arbitrator Arne Peltz that he didn’t have to tell Lukacs to remove the personal information from his lawsuit because it was “overwhelmingly clear” that the university wanted Lukacs to do so.

Barnard said that the U of M considered further discipline against Lukacs but decided against it because of intense media scrutiny.

“We were concerned about this dispute occurring in public, and further damage to the university,” said Barnard, who didn’t want the U of M to appear to be “piling on” Lukacs.

Barnard agreed with Smorang that harassment falls under the U of M’s respectful work and learning environment policy, and further agreed neither the student nor anyone else had laid a complaint against Lukacs.

Barnard said the university would not have suspended Lukacs if he had not identified the student or named his medical condition in his lawsuit. Nor would the U of M have suspended Lukacs for claiming in the lawsuit that dean of graduate studies Jay Doering had no authority to waive mandatory exams in the awarding of the doctorate.

Over the objections of the U of M, Peltz allowed Smorang to enter into evidence a series of petitions and letters from mathematicians and students from around the world supporting Lukacs.

Lukacs is expected to testify when the hearing resumes in September.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca