On Campus

CAUT drops censure threat

Fired medical prof reinstated at the U of M

A threat to censure the University of Manitoba over the firing of a medical professor has been dropped. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) decided this weekend not to go ahead with censure after Larry Reynolds, the previously dismissed professor, reached an agreement with the university and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. If the university had been officially censured, the CAUT would have encouraged academics to decline appointments to the institution.

“Dr. Reynolds has reached a settlement with the University of Manitoba and the WRHA that satisfied our concerns,” James Turk, CAUT’s executive director told the Winnipeg Free Press. Reynolds will rejoin the faculty of medicine after official approval from the board of governors, although the terms of his employment have not, yet, been made public.

Reynolds, who previously taught at the University of Western Ontario, was recruited by the U of M to head the department of family medicine in 2001. His five year term was not renewed, and in 2008 he was dismissed from the department altogether. In the spring, when CAUT first threatened censure, the national professor’s union alleged that Reynolds “was dismissed from the University of Manitoba’s Department of Family Medicine without formal notice and with no hearing regarding dismissal for cause, contrary to his contract and the policies of the University of Manitoba.”

No major research university has been censured in over three decades.

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