top of page

UTFA Dysfunction

UTFA completes very important work at our university. The last few years, UTFA as an organization has lurched from one unprecedented crisis to another that inhibits our work:

The result is that our association fails to reflect the values we trust UTFA to uphold, our expenses are soaring, and our association is weaker and less effective. Most UTFA members are likely unaware of the issues at UTFA, but all should be concerned.

Staff Turnover

In 2020, when the previous UTFA President completed her four years in office, she thanked four staffers, including the Business Officer and the Bookkeeper for their years of service. Four years later, all four are gone. The current UTFA President also thanked employees at last year's AGM - in April 2023, two more of them have also already left. Two other employees retired after years at UTFA, including the Business Officer. Remarkably, no one on staff replaced the Business Officer or the Bookkeeper.

​

After four years in office, the previous President, Cynthia Messenger, wrote:

“I am grateful to our very dedicated in-house lawyers: Helen Nowak (General Counsel), Heather Diggle, Reni Chang, and Samantha Olexsen. They have climbed the steep learning curve of UTFA’s grievance and policy negotiation portfolios, and they have profoundly helped many, many members as a result.”

 

All four departed UTFA after the last Presidential election - between May 2022 and June 2023, taking all the benefits of having climbed that steep learning curve with them. At least three other lawyers hired since 2020 also left UTFA: Tony Micallef-Jones, Kim Veller, and Gavin Leeb, as did an articling law student, Khaleda Rashid. 

 

These departures have had a huge impact on how UTFA looks out for faculty and librarians. Normally, there are three in-house lawyers working on everything from association grievances to PTR appeals. In July 2023, UTFA’s legal office which had included at least three full-time lawyers was left completely vacant. Every single lawyer left and UTFA could not find a single replacement. Today, the work of several busy attorneys must be completed by one attorney (with two months of experience at UTFA working on her own), a legal assistant, and external legal counsel.

​

When UTFA’s legal work is outsourced to external attorneys, UTFA spends substantially more of our members’ funds. While there still was remnants of a legal team, UTFA spent $1,052,285 on legal costs in 2022-2023, 21% of the association's annual expenses, a 37% increase from the $768,772 UTFA spent in 2021-2022. Without any, or many, staff attorneys, UTFA must rely even more on outside attorneys and cannot draw on their own, internal resources to guide decisions on strategy, or even which cases are worth pursuing. The President should disclose how much money the association is projected to spend on external legal counsel during this academic year before the end of this election campaign, rather than waiting until the AGM.

​

UTFA's executives need to let our members know how this exodus is affecting us. In June, the UTFA President initially refused to even discuss the departures when members of Council noticed that the names were disappearing from the staff directory on the UTFA website (see email below). After reluctantly agreeing to discuss the exodus at the June 2023 Council meeting, UTFA executives failed to disclose that every staff attorney had already resigned. During this meeting, the President knew that the last attorney had turned in his resignation notice, effective at the end of June, but said nothing even when I asked her what UTFA would do when there were no in house attorneys.

​

​

​

 

 

 

​

For almost two months, there was no attorney on staff, but Council nor the membership was advised as to how the association was managing. Consequently, UTFA’s Council never had any opportunity to discuss how principal agent issues might arise when so much legal assistance must be provided from one outside law firm. Furthermore, the costs of relying on outside legal counsel was either not disclosed, or disclosed in camera so no one on Council could share such information with their constituents.

​

​Even more disconcerting is that I recently learned that one of the former staffers has sought legal advice and is considering a lawsuit over workplace harassment and mistreatment.

Harassment

On January 22, 2022, a member of Council submitted a harassment complaint about another member of Council. Nothing happened, in part because UTFA had no harassment policy to apply. In March, during the campaign, UTFA’s leadership revealed an “interim” harassment and antidiscrimination policy. I immediately raised concerns: the policy allowed the president to dismiss any complaint whose motive was deemed suspect, potentially enabling an executive to silence critics, or protect bullying. There was no recusal mechanism in case of a conflict of interest. Little time was allocated for discussion of the harassment policy. I came to the meeting ready to propose several other amendments, and my colleague at UTFA Council, Andrew Sabl (Political Science, St George) provided additional ones via email. On June 15, 2022, the policy came to council, but the question was called before the proposed amendments could even be discussed. The executive claimed that legal experts had provided extensive advice and felt that the policy needed to be implemented without further delay, promising that once we saw how it was implemented, there would be opportunities to make revisions.

​

Following passage of the policy, UTFA’s General Counsel briefly met with the complainant and then referred the matter to an outside investigator. According to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (OHRT) complaint, an outside investigator interviewed the complainant twice, in late August 2022, seven months after the initial complaint was shared with UTFA. In the filing, the complainant wrote that he did not hear again about his case from UTFA despite emails to the Executive Director requesting an update. After months of inaction, the complainant filed a complaint at the tribunal. Confirmation that his case was still unresolved would only come when UTFA responded his complaint at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal on May 11, 2023. In that response, UTFA incredulously claimed that the investigation was still on-going even though the investigation commenced the previous summer and there had been no communication from UTFA to the complainant about the matter. You can read all of the publicly available filings in the case by downloading this PDF of all of the publicly available documentation that the OHRT shared with me (the file will not open in most browsers). One can clearly see in the filing that no complaint would likely have been filed if UTFA had either taken meaningful action in response to the original incident, had a policy in place to handle the initial complaint in a timely fashion, or completed the investigation in the fall of 2022.

​

Two arguments in Form #2, UTFA’s response to the complaint from May 2023, are worth highlighting:

  1. UTFA argues that it does not manage or police the conduct of its members (even though the President is on every committee and every constituency mailing list) because of its duties to uphold free speech and academic freedom. It frightens me that our faculty association cannot differentiate protected speech from harassment and bullying. There is nothing in an exchange of emails discussing UTFA activities between colleagues that is covered by academic freedom protections, nor does academic freedom insulate faculty from illegal expressions, among which is harassment. Elsewhere in the document, UTFA contradicts itself and describes efforts they made to improve civility at meetings, and nowhere does UTFA mention that provincial law long ago required UTFA to have a harassment policy in place.

​

Form2-Pt8.jpg

2 . UTFA did not disclose this information to Council. I do not recall Council being told that the impetus for the harassment policy and the rush to implement it before the summer of 2022 was because there was already a complaint filed but no official policy to guide how to respond to such a complaint. Months later, Council was told by Executives that the harassment policy was flawed and was no longer considered to be functional, and Council was promised that the Executives were working with UTFA’s external attorneys to craft a new policy. Almost two years later, there is no new policy. Shockingly, UTFA’s leadership told the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal one thing – that there was a policy in place (see PDF or image from Form 2 below), and that an investigation was on-going, and told its own Council something else. The case may have been open, but clearly there was nothing actively being investigated. Pity, because UTFA could have investigated and brought this case to a resolution long before the complainant brought his case to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, and before UTFA hired two different sets of external attorneys to respond to the matter (after hiring an external firm to investigate). None of this behavior should be tolerated by our membership, as this would never be tolerated if such delays were perpetrated by our employer.

Form2-43-49.JPG

Discrimination & Bias

In 2021, a separate Ontario Human Rights Tribunal complaint was filed against the UTFA President by eight faculty members. Due partially to a backlog of cases at the tribunal, but also because the President's legal team challenged the standing of some of the complainants to bring the complaint forward, this complaint has still not been adjudicated. A mediation between the complainants and the President organized by the OHRT failed to reach a solution.

​

Although the complaint, and much attention surrounding the complaint has focused on concerns raised by antisemitic comments made by Professor Zorić, one aspect of the complaint deserves attention here: the complainants allege that in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding the offensive remarks, in the summer of 2021, UTFA feared that some Jewish faculty members would stop paying their UTFA memberships and direct those funds to charity instead. In a functional membership organization that puts into practice principles of equity and inclusion, one might expect the organization to reach out to such members and assure them that the association would still serve them and their interests. That is not, though, how UTFA under the current leadership handled this problem.

 

The facts are not in dispute: in the summer of 2021, UTFA revised its policies regarding access to UTFA services like consultations with our attorneys for non-members. Until that point, non-members who approached UTFA for help needed to pay one year's worth of dues to access our services. The UTFA leadership proposed that such faculty and staff should instead pay THREE YEARS worth of dues. I opposed the measure because I thought that was punitive. Most people who come to UTFA for help are in a vulnerable place in their careers. Better to help them and win their loyalty than punish them for opting out of paying dues.  The initiative was pitched as a way to deter free riding, which I contested since there already existed such a deterrent (the one - year penalty). 

​

What is in dispute is the motive: did the UTFA leadership raise the penalty to retaliate against Jewish faculty who either left the association or they feared would leave the association? The complainants allege that was the motivation. UTFA denies that claim, and says the motivation was a desire to increase revenue. 

​

I participated in those discussions. I do not recall anyone suggesting that the policy change would be a major tool to increase revenue. For one, very few non-members ever come to UTFA to seek assistance. When the proposal was made, I asked the UTFA leadership how many non-members had become members in such circumstances and they said they did not know, but that the figure was very small. In subsequent years, no one at UTFA would respond to questions as to how many non-members paid three years worth of dues to resume their membership in order to speak to one of our attorneys. It is difficult to conceive of a revenue generating scheme that did not know how much revenue was likely to accrue as a result. Second, the penalty was so onerous, that I expected anyone in that situation to likely just hire their own attorney at a much lower cost. Third, UTFA is a large organization. In 2021, UTFA reported over $4.6 million in revenue, and over $5.3 million in assets, and an annual increase in revenue of over $600,000. Three years of dues from even three members would hardly make an impact on such numbers. Much like in the harassment complaint at the OHRT, I am concerned that what the UTFA leadership told, or tells, Council, is different than what they claim in their filings with OHRT.

​

If the complainant's case succeeds, it will represent a stunning case of actual discrimination against Jews. If elected President, I will ask Council to vote to revert to the older policy.

Easy Edu Lawsuit vs Faculty

 

An undisclosed potential conflict of interest occurred in 2023. When the new Vice President, Salary, Benefits, Pensions and Workload, was elected to his role by Council, no conflicts were declared to Council to ensure transparency. When one colleague learned that the new Vice President had been part of the legal team working for Easy Edu in its lawsuit against three faculty members, he sent an email to ask if the Vice President was continuing to work for Easy Edu. He later received a response from an attorney working for an external firm (and not the firm that handles most of UTFA's legal work), that said that "no Council or committee member has raised any issue of possible conflict of interest." That claim is not exculpatory. Since the VP did not disclose the connection, UTFA Council members did not know to raise the possible conflict of interest.

​

The lawsuits pertains to copyrights claimed by the university and these faculty members of their course materials as part of a dispute with Easy Edu, who sells these course materials to students. The administration alleges that Easy Edu sells course materials created by UTFA members to third parties without fairly compensating the faculty members.

 

If the Executive or Council discussed copyright issues without discussing whether or not the VP's legal work presents a potential conflict, that would be one issue. If such issues were never broached, then one must wonder if that too is a conflict of interest, since it could be in the VP's interest to avoid any discussion that might impact his clients (or former clients). 

 

Every membership organization must strive for transparency. That potential conflicts of interest were not disclosed may be totally benign, but the optics are awful since the failure to disclose could be suspicious in-and-of-itself,  or could reinforce concerns that the leadership is not very keen on following by-law rules and requirements. UTFA members deserve reassurances that nothing is suspicious and rules are being carefully followed. Such reassurances are absent at UTFA today.

Conflicts of Interest

In the summer of 2022, as UTFA and the administration fought over a new agreement before heading to arbitration, the administration stopped allowing people with children attending university from applying for university tuition benefits. That brought UTFA back to the table, and led to UTFA and the administration quickly agreeing on much of the benefits that had been disputed and enabling these parents to access the tuition benefits just as the new term began. 

​

At the Council meeting discussing the agreement, I asked UTFA's lead negotiator how many members of the negotiating team personally stood to benefit from the tuition subsidy that year or in the next academic year. The lead negotiator said, "I don't know."

​

If true, this is problematic for two reasons:

  1. The administration surely knew how many of members of UTFA's negotiating team would be affected by their tuition-subsidy stunt, giving them a substantial advantage over our negotiators.

  2. If the lead negotiator didn't know, that meant that no one had declared a potential conflict of interest. The by-laws are quite clear (Article 15): 

The Council/Committee shall be conscious of and sensitive to the issues of conflict of interest and apprehension of bias. A Council/Committee member who perceives an issue of possible conflict of interest or apprehension of bias on their own, or on the part of another member, whether it arises from a personal involvement or through the involvement of the member's constituency, shall raise it. The matter shall be discussed and then resolved by the remaining members of the Council/Committee who may direct the member to absent himself/herself, impose specified limitation on the member's involvement, or conclude that no action needs to be taken.

​

The by-laws clarify the possible courses of action, including the conclusion that no action needs to be taken. The lead negotiator and the president of UTFA (and - I think - at least one other member of the negotiating team) should have declared conflicts because their families would be directly affected by the administration's games. The answer that would have improved the position of the association at the negotiating table, and clearly indicated that the by-laws were followed, was that everyone declared conflicts, and the rest of the negotiating team or the Executive Committee concluded that no action needed to be taken.

​

'quoniam,' inquit, 'meos tam suspicione quam crimine iudico carere oportere' (Suetonius)

For any organization, conflicts of interest issues need not involve any impropriety, but the need to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Not UTFA. In September, 2022, a few months after the last Presidential election, the UTFA President asked Council to approve a payment of $5000 for the Chief Returning Officer (CRO). Normally, payment for the job of regulating in an election is agreed upon before the election, but not in 2022. The CRO agreed to serve as a volunteer. Interestingly, the payment was not determined immediately after the busy and contentious election Presidential campaign in the spring, but only after Council elections in the summer, where the President intervened in a race to select new representatives for the retired members. The CRO decided not to intervene, but would later recommend explicit rules that would prevent any UTFA President from such actions in future Council elections (I appealed, and received a letter telling me that I was "there is no basis upon which you are at liberty to lodge a formal complaint"). It was only after this controversy was there a move to give the CRO $5,000 retroactively. Would the CRO have received executive support for the same amount of compensation if he had ruled differently? One cannot say, but no one can deny that the optics of the winner of an election determining the compensation of the election regulator is awful. 

​

The solution in cirumstances where there may be a perceived conflict of interest, is always to be transparent and up front about any possible conflicts of interest. For example, the current UTFA speaker and the moderator of the presidential debates' spouse is an employee of UTFA whose job is at the full discretion of the President and the Executive Director. It is unusual for a moderator, or the UTFA Speaker to be in a situation where a conflict of interest could be a problem, but in 2020 the UTFA speaker resigned after he ruled that a motion by the UTFA President was out of order and there was a fall-out. Would the current speaker have a disincentive to overrule the President if that move put his spouse's job in jeopardy? I was pleased to see that at the first candidates' forum, the moderator revealed this potential conflict.

Opaque Budgets

The UTFA Constitution states:

12.3 Once each academic year, the Treasurer shall present to Council, for approval, a detailed budget for the Association setting out actual income and expenses, including Officer stipends (if any), for the current fiscal year as well as predicted income and proposed expenses for the next fiscal year. From time to time, as is necessary, the Treasurer shall present to Council an interim or revised budget.

-----

Since Terezia Zoric took over as UTFA President with Maureen Stapleton as UTFA Treasurer in July 2020, the budget process has changed significantly, as has most everything at UTFA!

​

For many, many years before 2020, a very detailed budget (find an example here) and budget process - with a draft budget being presented each year to UTFA for information only at the June Council meeting, and a final revised version presented for formal Council approval at the  October Council meeting was replaced with a process whereby a much shorter summary version (see example here) only was provided. Further, past practice of providing the budget to Council several days before these meetings to give Council members the opportunity to review and prepare questions was replaced by a process where the summary budget was simply presented on a screen at the meeting with essentially no time given to absorb the essence and to ask questions about the few consolidated line items that were presented.

​

When the Treasurer or President were challenged about this new and ineffective approach, their answer appeared to be some combination of an assumption that most Council members were not interested, and that UTFA did not want to share financial information that the University of Toronto administration could use somehow against UTFA.

​

One might expect oversight to be provided by a formal committee called the Financial Advisory Committee. The committee's role is to advise and support the Treasurer and the President in responsibly managing the financial resources of UTFA, including its annual operating income and expenses as well as its investment portfolio which exceeds $4,000,000. This committee is required to meet at least twice annually - in October and March, and more often if circumstances require it. Typically, the Treasurer reaches out to call for meetings in the appropriate timeframes. This committee has met only two or three times total since the start of 2021, more than three years ago! UTFA's Members deserve to know how their association is spending their money!

​

The example described here is merely one of many problematic practices that have dogged UTFA over the last four years. A desire for control and the lack of transparency by the incumbent UTFA president reflects an erosion of democratic control, the centralization of power, and the usurping of the supremacy of UTFA Council to the UTFA President. When a small group of UTFA Council members pushed back against such practices, they were vilified, their questions labeled as disruptive and ignored. As a result, some of these UTFA Council members have left their roles on UTFA Council in despair rather than to be subjected to continuous abuse. This is very problematic because UTFA Council acts like a Board of Directors for UTFA. If they are not given the time and information to properly provide oversight, there is no other safeguard. 

​

I stand behind the information I provide here about the state of affairs at UTFA, and the ensuing consequences. The links included provide evidence, as have conversations I have had with multiple people involved in each of these circumstances. Ad hominen attacks on me and disparaging claims about the complainants at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal do not provide any contrary evidence. The loss of the entire legal team, the two OHRT complaints, (which have not been summarily dismissed), and interpersonal unpleasantness that has driven away Executive Committee, Council Members, and UTFA employees are all substantiated by multiple sources including documentation provided by the OHRT above. Here is an email exchange regarding member quotations. If any PDF files do not open, please try to download them and open them outside of your browser.  

bottom of page