Vindication for UTT dismissal

THE EDITOR: Justice Frank Seepersad’s excoriation of the 2015 UTT board in the Fazal Ali wrongful dismissal case should put all state boards and their chairpersons on notice.

There is no need to repeat the justice’s comments here. They have been widely circulated in social media and reported in all the daily newspapers. Still, the public should not treat this as a nine-day wonder but should stay aware. After all, UTT is supported almost completely by the Government and so by the taxpayers.

We can glean quite a lot from the reported newspaper details of the case. Important takeaways for me were the following:

1. This board acted almost immediately, just about three months into its tenure, to oust Dr Ali, then provost of UTT.

2. It went back in time more than three years to "investigate" Ali’s conduct under another board, to whom he had to answer at the time, thereby inserting itself into a relationship which surely should have been out of its purview.

3. It charged that he had fired a senior professor, ignoring that she was actually past the board-mandated retirement age and that her contract had not been renewed by the previous board, and a programme administrator.

4. It claimed that the firings left holes in the academic environment. Its solution was to remove the provost himself immediately from the academic environment by sending him on administrative leave.

In the process, the board left a gaping hole in UTT’s academic administration, leaving the institution to limp along for nearly another four years with a president acting as provost through the rest of the then president’s tenure and deep into the tenure of the next – a non-national with probably limited grasp of the TT society or of the national university’s place in it.

So, the two most powerful positions in the institution, president and provost, were allowed to be held by one man, causing an administrative bottleneck, something which in some hands can be much worse than a hole. To this day UTT has no provost, a post most academic institutions recognise as key to academic administrative quality and as an important check and balance in administrative authority.

5. According to one recent news report, UTT released to a reporter the news of Ali's suspension before telling Ali. Supposedly, that reporter’s article hinted that the UTT audit of Ali was "financial in nature," creating the false impression of "fiscal impropriety" on Ali’s part. There was no mention that the UTT board took pains to correct the article.

Perhaps, recognising the weakness/invalidity of a solution which created a real hole to solve a trumped-up hole, it thought it might stack the deck with a little extra. In TT, hints can often be stronger than fact. Slurs stick.

6. Finally, there was the tribunal. Hmmm! According to the newspaper accounts, its minutes were never admitted into evidence. Yet its decision was. Hmmm again!

My own musings about these details led to these questions which all thinking people should ask. Could a board so willing to pursue "improper behaviour" that early in its tenure ever change its tactics? Or will the success of its early efforts empower it to continue along its proven path?

It took seven years for Justice Seepersad to sum up as "reprehensible" the UTT board’s behaviour – seven years before anything approaching accountability kicked in. That is a lot of time to act with impunity.

Time will eventually reveal all. Nothing remains hidden forever.

V STOUTE

Port of Spain