A recent issue of the Bulletin featured two items on Memorial University's dispute with its former dean of science, Dr. Alan Law.

You accepted, as truth, lock, stock and barrel MUNFA's account of the Law affair. You did not bother to contact the chair of Memorial's Board of Regents or Dr. Arthur May, Memorial's President or myself for a counter-perspective.

Dr. Law in the end achieved a settlement of about $260,000. We offered him six months earlier roughly $220,000. You printed that our original offer did not guarantee him a pension. Wrong. I went out of my way to find a mechanism which would satisfy our pension plan's five-year vesting requirement, given that Dr. Law had worked at Memorial for only three years. You printed a derisive dismissal of our claim that the Law settlement was cost neutral. Why did you not ask us for the numbers?

You intimate that I am leaving Memorial because of the Law affair. You further assert that I left the university scene altogether. On the first issue, you should have contacted the chair of Memorial's Board of Regents. He would have told you that the board accepted the necessity to remove Dr. Law. He also would have told you that there was never any intimation that I did not execute my responsibilities. On the second issue, the Open University of British Columbia, one of the Open Learning Agency's institutions, is a fully accredited member of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. I can assure you I have not left Canada's university landscape. I am too fond of it, and too committed to further its excellence.

I am saddened that the Bulletin, which is meant to inform Canada's university professors, cannot adhere to a more rigorous standard of journalism. Perhaps you must choose -- you either speak honestly to university faculty-at-large or you speak from the partisan perspective of faculty unions. A choice would clear up matters to the benefit of all those concerned with the future of Canadian universities.

J. TUINMAN
Vice-President (Academic) & Pro Vice-Chancellor, Memorial University of Newfoundland