Phoning it in

Education minister Joan Burke turned up this morning as the first caller on Open Line with Randy Simms.

She was calling from Stephenville, or "from the district" as Simms put it.

He made it sound like Burke was just back in her district for a visit.

After all, that's likely what you'd expect given that the department she runs is headquartered in St. John's. Being a minister is usually a busy life, even in the summer, what with the meetings related to cabinet and the meetings in the department and just being available to sign all those letters that have to be signed even in an age of computers and e-mail.

Thing is, Burke likely wasn't just stopping in for a visit.

And she likely isn't the only minister who tends to head back to the district during the times the House isn't in session.

Something keeps coming back to your humble e-scribbler about a comment Burke made having to do with ministerial expenses. There was a document establishing her primary residence, which, if memory serves, government officials expected would be in St. John's while she held Her Majesty's commission. The declaration was part of determining what set of expense rules from treasury board would apply.

Burke's comment stood out as she found that form a bit problematic, given her primary residence was in Stephenville. There was some mumbling criticism about the whole arrangement reflecting the "old boys club" of politics.

Now memories can be faulty, not the least of which being the one between the ears of your humble e-scribbler, so it's possible that wasn't exactly what was said.

The old boys club crack just stood out, though, because it was from straight out of left field. Why would it be surprising that an employer would expect you to live within easy commuting distance of the place where your job was located? There's something sexist in that?

Anyway, Tom Marshall is another minister not originally from the capital city who seems to spend a whack of time working from somewhere other than the Confederation Building.

Sit and think for a second and you could probably come up with a bunch of ministers who have offices and work responsibilities in the capital city but who seem to spend a huge amount of time not in the office.

Well, not in the main office. Marshall likely has a suite in the provincial government building in Corner Brook. Burke too, could likely scare up a bit of space in Stephenville.

John Hickey? Patty Pottle? Trevor Taylor? Tom Rideout when he was still a minister? Charlene Johnson? Kevin O'Brien?

These are just tossed out as possible examples because their districts are not within typical daily commuting distance of the metropolitan region.

Any of them keep two offices and work from home, home being somewhere other than within an easy commute of Sin Jawns?

This is not just a matter of some mouldy old rule after all. The cost of maintaining duplicate offices can be steep. Add to that the cost of having to grab a quickie flight at full fare from Stephenville - for argument sake - and then hopping back the same day just to do a media scrum.

Then there are the regular cabinet meetings and the committee meetings and all the rest.

Pretty soon, the cost of commuting like this would get to be a tidy sum.

Then there are the intangible costs. It would be much easier to meet and discuss some business face to face rather than do it by e-mail or over-the-phone. Ministers living in St. John's - where their main office is located - also have the chance to be more accessible to news media in a slow period during the summer. It gives all sorts of opportunities to increase the amount of information government provides to the public on its activities.

Well, that assumes government wants to give more information or that ministers are capable of doing more than parroting prepared lines, but let's just work on the assumption the current situation is an aberration in the great scheme of things.

Still it seemed a little odd that Burke was in St. John's for a 2:45 newser on Tuesday and then bright and early on Wednesday morning was safe on the west coast again.

Maybe it's just a misperception but then again, there have been too many references to some sort of dual office arrangement over the past couple of years to make it a case of being completely mistaken.

There's a subject for a little bit of investigative reporting.

In the meantime, it might be worthwhile to keep track of the number of cabinet ministers who are phoning in their media hits during times when the House is not in session.

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Memorial University crisis to deepen

A member of the university senate apparently had a chat with the Western Star and told it as it is: the board of regents appoints the president, not the minister of education or cabinet.

Once the first one speaks, more are likely to follow.

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Memorial University autonomy crisis: choice quotes

From The Telegram coverage:

1.  Education minister Joan Burke:

"When those names and that selection process hits the cabinet table I want to ensure that we have the best possible selection, the best leadership that we can possibly find," said Burke.

Okay.

Define "best" and define it publicly and quickly.

If we all know what the cabinet thinks "best" means, then we might be able to figure out why it is that the board of regents Burke and her colleagues appointed and the people who run the university were suddenly struck incompetent.

Potential applicants would like to know what "best" means, especially since they now face a new and thus far secret process with secret selection criteria.

2.  Undergraduate student union external affairs director Cameron Campbell:

"I think the main problem here is the lack of accountability and the lack of transparency in the process, and I think that's really the issue we have to deal with," said Cameron Campbell, MUNSU executive director of external affairs.

While Campbell's comments earlier appeared to be somewhat equivocal, this line is an indictment of a government that supposedly embodies accountability and transparency.

3. The bizarre, from the cbc.ca/nl news story user comments by someone logged on as Anthony11:

I only hope that the next time the Premier is shopping at the South Carolina Home Depot that he stays there.

Huh?

This is either completely off the wall or a clue to some sort of back story that sounds interesting.

Made only more weird if someone googled "charter flights from South Carolina to St. John's" and landed at the Bond Papers post about Miss Teen South Carolina and her concern for education.  Remember Caitlin?

There's education for you and a totally freaky connection.

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CAUT: Prov Gov threatens MUN autonomy

Predictable but still, a voice worth heeding:

“This is an unprecedented and serious violation of university autonomy,” says CAUT president Penni Stewart. “Universities must be free from political interference or any outside influence.”

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Memorial University crisis: the media coverage to date

Conversation at the Tuesday family supper table included a question from your humble e-scribbler's sister as to why the education minister held her scrum with reporters at 2:45.

Good question, since, as the Sister noted, media now had time to get reaction from critics of the government's policy.

There is no good answer, though, except that she was essentially correct. Since news runs on controversy, this story will have legs. The contradictions between the Premier and the minister will fuel further inquiry.

At some point, the Grenfell issue will come back since a key part of the earlier rumour held that at least one of the candidates Burke now admits rejecting may have been someone who wasn't a fan of the proposed second university. Burke denied the issue had any impact on the hiring selection but that sounded a bit like what labradore calls "Not(x) = x".

Media coverage on Tuesday only intensified the criticism since the rumours of cabinet interference in hiring the university president have now been confirmed.

Canadian Press filed a story about seven hours ago with about half the story consisting of comments from the university faculty association: N.L. university faculty say freedom jeopardized after minister's intervention. The reaction is strongly negative:

"What it suggests is that if she's going to be actively administering the university, would she come in and deal with an individual faculty member whose politics she didn't like? Or an individual administrator at a lower level that she didn't like?" [Ross Klein, president-elect of the faculty association.]

That builds on a story that ran earlier on Tuesday across the country.

The Telegram's quickie version from Tuesday afternoon is simple and focuses on the continuing search. That's pretty much been their coverage to date. vocm.com's little summary sticks to the simple.

CBC's online story is a bit more detailed. it includes critical comment.

The CBC Here and Now supper hour news piece was harder hitting. On the Go played the entire scrum. None are online as of Tuesday evening unfortunately. The scrum would be worth having in its entirety, especially the bit where the education minister dances around the fact the Premier's version of events and hers are somewhat at odds.

NTV's report was longer and included critical comment.

There's also been a bit of blog coverage, like a post at Macleans.ca by a MUN education professor who labeled the media coverage "sometimes bizarre".

Editorial opinion has also been strongly negative, like this column from last weekend's Telegram. That's been the case since the details of the story and the allegations of interference first surfaced on the front page of the Globe and Mail last Saturday.

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Closed minds, reason and the Memorial University crisis

Education minister Joan Burke today confirmed the rumours that have been swirling around the province for months, namely that the cabinet had interfered in the process to hire a new president for Memorial University.

In her media scrum, today, Burke repeatedly spoke of following the provisions of the Memorial University Act. She then described a new process for selecting a president of the university in which a list of names would be presented to cabinet and from which cabinet would make select the person to be appointed.

That is not what was intended. The Memorial University Act is clear:

51. There shall be a president of the university who shall be appointed by the board in consultation with the senate and with the approval of the Lieutenant-Governor in Council.

The board of regents makes the appointment. The cabinet - the lieutenant governor-in-council - may reject an appointment but nowhere is it provided in law that the president of the province's university is appointed by cabinet.

Memorial University traces it roots to Memorial College, founded in 1923 as a non-denominational institution of higher learning. In a country where public affairs were more sectarian than politically partisan, this was a revolutionary move. The college became a university in 1949, but government's intention, as expressed, in the Memorial University Act was to create a publicly-funded university that operated autonomously from government.

The Act gives to the board of regents the power to run the university and central to that is the authority to select the university's chief executive officer, the president. The hiring system, as it was, has functioned exceedingly well, finding successive presidents of extraordinary calibre: Dr. M.O. Morgan, Dr. Leslie Harris, Dr. Arthur May, and Dr. Axel Meisen are examples.

Under their leadership, the university has grown. It has earned a well-deserved international reputation despite sometimes very difficult financial times. The vision of the university founders has been fulfilled. The wisdom of their approach and that of successive government administrations has been proven.

Those administrations contained men and women of no mean ability. They were no less visionary, no less intelligent, no less capable and no less virtuous than Burke and her colleagues.

There was no reason to change the method of finding a university president.

To be fair, Joan Burke did not attempt to provide reason, nor did the official news release.

She simply laid down the law, even if she violated the statute as she did so.

Before going any further, let us dismiss any suggestion that Burke acted alone here. Only someone overly concerned with insignificant distinctions, only the most partisan of partisan apologists would consider it important that Burke claims to have made the decisions rather than the Premier, as accounts such as the one in The Globe and Mail have alleged.

Only someone totally unaware of how the administration works might think that a minister who cannot travel outside the province without the prior approval of the Premier's chief of staff might have undertaken to inject herself into the selection process at Memorial without the full approval of, if not direction by, the Premier's Office.

Burke is merely the instrument of government policy and that policy is aimed squarely at dismantling Memorial University's autonomy, the basis of its success thus far. Cabinet has already shown it's willingness to ignore the board of regents with its decision to create a separate university at Corner Brook. Now it confirms the policy by usurping the legal authority of the board of regents in not merely watching, but in substituting itself for the board.

Government policy, as described by Burke, will make finding a genuinely superlative candidate all that much harder.

The potential applicant will face an entirely unknown set of criteria for selection. Merit - the basis on which selections have been made to now - has been replaced with secret considerations. If the goal is to continue the university with the sort of success it has achieved to date, we should be suspicious of anyone who submits to this selection process. It is hardly the sort of thing one would expect in an academic institution that is supposedly "competing with other institutions nationally and internationally for the right person to take on the job."

The potential applicant will also know that - as demonstrated both in the Grenfell decision and in the hiring of the president - he or she will have no say on the future direction of the university. Cabinet is the sole authority, and it must be obeyed. Burke said it plainly in her scrum.

In the end, Burke made it clear that cabinet is not interested in open discussion.

There can be no more eloquent a reason for cabinet to stay out of the future of Memorial University than closed minds and the absence of reason. For all the contradictions between Burke's words and government actions, the contradiction between the essence of a university and the essence of this cabinet could not be more stark.

The only question left for the public right now is what the board of regents - those with the legal authority to appoint a president - will do now that their authority has been usurped.

Memorial is, to use Burke's abysmal phrase, the people's university. The people should look to the board, and to the candidates for the elected alumni seats on it, to know if the university will continue to reach for the heights or if it will begin a slide into the deep.

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Academician, heal thyself

If there actually is concern among academics that there is political interference in the hiring of a new president at Memorial University, then doesn't having a cabinet minister speaking about the issue - instead of the chairman of the university board of regent's hiring committee - tend to confirm the interference?

Just an observation.

Update: Interference confirmed.

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A buzz around the university

From the inadvertent humour category, provincial New Democratic Party leader Lorraine Michael told CBC this afternoon she'd like to see someone as president of Memorial University who could create a buzz.

For those of a certain age, the words "buzz" and "university" are synonymous, but likely not for the same reasons the NDP leader had in mind. Now if Ms. Michael wants to harken back to the salad days of many a young man and woman from the province, then we might be able to add a few new names to the list of possible presidents.

The only thing is we'll have to check and see if some are coming up for parole.

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Globe runs MUN president story

The Globe is reporting what has been rumoured for months, namely that the Premier nixed the nominee to replace Axel Meisen as president of Memorial University.

There are denials - sort of - from the powers that be.

Elizabeth Matthews, who is Mr. Williams's director of communications, said provincial legislation allows the Premier to have the opportunity for input, and the government doesn't apologize for having an interest in who takes on the job. “It would definitely be fair to say that he would ultimately have an interest when the names are brought forward,” she told The Globe earlier this week.

She also denied suggestions that the Premier has interfered in the process. “He can't have interfered because no names have been brought forward yet,” she said.

One minor problem with that bit: it's not correct. The Memorial University Act gives certain power to the Lieutenant Governor in Council - that is the entire cabinet - not just to the Premier.

51. There shall be a president of the university who shall be appointed by the board in consultation with the senate and with the approval of the Lieutenant-Governor in Council.

As for the rest, it's a bit of verbal gymnastics that doesn't get to the point one way or the other. Any of a number of people on the senate could have, informally and unofficially, notified the Premier's Office of the name or names under consideration, there by giving plenty of opportunity for the Premier to have his say even though "no names have been brought forward yet" officially.

All deniable.

The Globe makes an increasingly common comparison, one that seems to be finding favour with the 8th:

The current situation harks back to former days in Newfoundland when politics did play a direct role in the leadership of Memorial, which gained university status in 1950 and has long been regarded as a key institution for the province. In 1966, Premier Joey Smallwood picked Lord Stephen Taylor to lead the university. Changes to the university's governance structure in the 1970s eliminated such direct appointments, but still require that the selection of the president be approved by the lieutenant-governor-in-council – essentially the premier and cabinet.

Those who have taken part in recent presidential searches say that approval has been a formality. “The recommendation was not questioned,” said Chris Sharpe, a geography professor who was a member of the committee that chose the last president.

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