(sent by email)
January 4, 2017
Mr. Jacques Frémont
President
Office of the President
University of Ottawa
550 Cumberland, room 212
Ottawa, Ontario
Dear Mr. Frémont,
I’m writing to you on behalf of APUO, which represents 1,310 professors and librarians at the University of Ottawa. I was pleased to hear that you created a new Budget Committee that will analyse the uOttawa budget using an academic-oriented, long-term outlook. I was also pleased to hear that the committee will include two professors although, unfortunately, these were chosen by the Administration Committee without consultation.
Since you suggested to me that you wanted the APUO to support this initiative, allow me to suggest that inviting the APUO to appoint the two professors, instead of the Administration Committee, would have been a much stronger demonstration that our input is valuable to you. It is important that the new Budget Committee is independent and appear independent of the Central Administration. While appointing professors is a good step, nominations from the Administration Committee are detrimental to that. While we are very disappointed that the professors were appointed without consulting us, we still wanted to share with you the names of professors that we would have appointed. We invite you to reconsider your decision and add two additional professors to the Committee. If this is impossible, we invite you to at least hold on to these nominations in the event that future vacancies may arise.
Therefore, I am pleased to provide you the following APUO members as candidates to the new Budget Committee:
- Tyler Chamberlin, Associate Professor at the Telfer School of Business
- Christian Rouillard, Full Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences
I sincerely hope that you will take these appointments into consideration and provide space for meaningful consultation with us in the future, so that we may give strong support to this initiative and work together on a budget that is both based on independent reflection and consistent with academic values.
Respectfully,
Jennifer Dekker
President, APUO