Brock gets a do-over in search for new president

Image-wise, it’s been a year to forget for administrators and the board at Brock University. So the announcement Friday that a new interim president and interim vice-chancellor have been appointed to see the school through the next year makes sense for numerous reasons.

Tom Traves, who worked for 18 years as president of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, is the interim president while the interim vice-chancellor is Tom Dunk, currently dean of faculty of social sciences at Brock. Both appointments took effect Oct. 1. Given that they are expected to be good for a year, Brock in effect has given itself a re-do on the previous search for a president that ended so badly when the agreement with Wendy Cukier, just days from taking office, was rescinded by the school’s board of trustees.

No proper explanation was ever given for the abrupt step back, but it was sudden and unexpected.

Cukier went back to Ryerson University, where she came from, and Brock went back to the drawing board.

That mess was preceded earlier this year by the controversy surrounding two female students’ complaints of sexual harassment — made several weeks apart — against a professor (who denied any wrongdoing).

The fallout called into question Brock’s system for handling such complaints and in some minds, how serious it was about handling them right. There were student protests and Canada-wide media coverage.

Brock promised to come up with improved policies and procedures for complaints like these, and this week hired a sexual violence and education co-ordinator.

Not only did the situation mar the exit of outgoing president Jack Lightstone, who retired June 30, but it made the school look bad from coast to coast.

It has all made 2016 a year to forget for Brock, except issues like these cannot be forgotten. Those are serious hits for any school to take — events that call into question its ability to keep its students safe, and to carry out a proper job search at the highest level.

“I plan to spend a lot of time talking to people,” Traves said this week, about his plans for taking the helm at Brock. “Leaders have to earn their position every day by being trustworthy and building relationships.”

Wise words, as a starting point for moving beyond the year that was.

With a year of stability at the top, Brock can prove that 2016 was just a bad year, that it recognizes what went wrong and that it knows how to make it right.