• A president appointed contrary to the reservations of the faculty members of the search committee.
  
• A plan to restore the fiscal state of the university that seemed to imply abrupt program closures and forced early retirements in spite of a joint faculty association/management committee that indicated such measures were not required.
  
• A bitter strike in which management unsuccessfully attempted to clawback previously won provisions in the faculty association contract.
  
• Another strike, this one by the staff association.
  
• A motion of non-confidence in the president passed by a large majority in the faculty council.
  
• A referendum against the re-appointment of the president in which faculty and support staff voted overwhelmingly against the re-appointment.
  
• A strongly supported student petition also against the re-appointment.
  
• A president nonetheless re-appointed by the board of regents with no proper evaluation of his performance during his first term.
  

All this has happened at Mount Allison University. It goes without saying that collegiality has broken down at the university, in spite of the fact that the superb faculty have earned for Mount Allison a ranking of first in its category in the Maclean's survey.

In this situation the Mount Allison Faculty Association asked CAUT to appoint a commission of inquiry into the state of governance at the university. I served as the commissioner, and in my report made a number of recommendations aimed at restoring civility to the Mount Allison campus.

Institutional arrangements can help or they can hinder. There are arrangements that can foster suspicions; there are arrangements that can allay them. It is of course the latter sort that will help to restore civility. If things are to be handled better, then civility is essential. Administrators as management, on the one hand, and members of the faculty association, on the other, cannot be at war; they must be able to raise issues, talk things over, and work cooperatively to settle problems before they become major issues and matters of confrontation. Both sides, in other words, must exercise the civic virtue of civility.

If one searches through Cicero's Offices, one finds a variety of civic virtues mentioned and praised -- bravery, for example, and loyalty. But there are other virtues that do not appear, among them tolerance and civility. These are modern virtues, recognized only in the early modern period. They are both relatively strange.

To be tolerant is to recognize that the other person is wrong but to put up with it anyway; it involves the resolve to live with error. To be civil is to allow that the other person might be wrong but to work with that person anyway; it involves the resolve to work with those who might be wrong.

Both tolerance and civility require restraint, the determination not to push one's case or point of view to the extreme that the other person is forced to resist violently. They require the determination not to use appeals to emotions and to non-rational means in ways that make cooperation and further discourse impossible.

These virtues involve the aim of living together and working together towards common goals even where there is disagreement. In the context of universities, among those goals will be that of making an employer/employee contract work.

Civility does not preclude vigorous disagreement on policy or on the means to implement policy. Neither does it require always attaining consensus. And certainly, it does not require unthinking loyalty to leadership, the board of regents, say, or the president. People should be able to disagree on policy, indeed be able to disagree vigorously, while also maintaining social contact and discourse and while continuing to work together.

There is a strong tradition of civility in Canadian politics. In the House of Commons members can disagree sharply in debate, and resort to a variety of tactics to ensure that their voice is heard, while at the same time maintaining mutual respect and even to remain friends. Civility, however, does not require friendship. What it does require is mutual respect and a two-sided orientation involving a willingness to listen to the other side, together with the sense of restraint which all that imposes.

Civility is strengthened by institutional support. There must be debate and discussion about the goals and means towards those goals. There must be a forum in which such debate and discussion can take place, and rules which enforce the requirement of restraint.

It is all too human when one loses a debate to be tempted to use means other than reasonable discourse and argument, all too human to be tempted to use means other than rational persuasion. People recognize this but also recognize that greater benefits in the long run arise from the exercise of the virtue of civility.

They therefore establish rules and the institutional context which will help them resist temptation, rules of order and procedure and decorum that will help all continue to be able to work together in spite of differences.

It is civility in this sense, and its institutional safeguards, that has been weakened at Mount Allison. If good governance is to be restored, then there must be a return to civility. My recommendations are aimed to this end.

It is perhaps not surprising that civility has all but disappeared at the university. Meetings of the board of regents are closed. Such secrecy fosters suspicion. The senate has no effective role in developing and approving the budget. This generates the sense that faculty and librarians have no voice in the academic decisions that are shaped by the budget over which they have no control.

At many universities, these sorts of practices were abandoned after the 1966 Duff-Berdahl report, University Government in Canada, sponsored by both the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and CAUT. It is clearly time to bring practices at Mount Allison into line with other major universities in Canada.

Secrecy breeds suspicion; openness will go some way by itself to restore civility. The senate, and through it, faculty, makes academic decisions. But these cannot be separated from budgetary decisions, as Duff-Berdahl made clear. Making the budget a matter of collegial decision-making in senate will help to give it greater validity among faculty than it now has.

Lack of peer review processes in making research and teaching awards can also create suspicions that criteria other than merit are at work, even when those suspicions are ill-founded. Clear peer review processes should be established for all such awards.

It should be recognized by the president and board of regents that Mount Allison Faculty Association has a legitimate role to play in the governance of the university.

The president recently told Maclean's magazine that "The whole point of collective bargaining is to take certain things out of the collegial arena" (April 28, 1997). But collegiality involves people sitting around the table as equals. That is precisely what is achieved by faculty forming a union: they can now sit down and bargain working conditions as equals with the administration.

It is then no longer the case that they have to suffer the sort of bullying, masquerading as paternalism, that was so often present in the days before Duff-Berdahl. To deny the collegiality achieved by faculty unions is to move too quickly to the sort of confrontational stance that invites conflict and discord rather than reasonable discussion and bargaining.

The role of the president of a university is difficult indeed. The president is chair of senate; as such he is first among equals. It is his task to represent the position of senate to the board. At the same time, he must represent the board to senate. As president he negotiates on behalf of the board with the faculty and staff associations. He is the chief administrative officer of the university. And he represents the university community as a whole to the outside world.

Since the role of the president at once requires him to be first but still only one among the faculty as well as the chief administrator on behalf of the board, it is essential that he have the support of both.

CAUT has therefore recommended in its Policy Statement on University Governance that the president be appointed by the board but only with the advice and consent of senate. Mount Allison University would be wise to adopt a process of this sort.

Fred Wilson teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and is a former president of CAUT.