Is McGill failing crisis management 101?

McGill University has said it is studying whether it is possible to amend the code of conduct to also apply to incidents that occur off campus. in Montreal

The dust had barely settled on the Andrew Potter affair when McGill University found itself embroiled in a new controversy.

Chemical engineering student Kathryn Leci stepped forward to charge that the university had not done enough to support her after another student punched her outside a party in 2015, causing her to suffer a mild traumatic brain injury.

Conrad Gaysford, who will graduate from McGill next month, has pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm and will be sentenced in Municipal Court on May 26.

The university told Leci it could not take disciplinary action against Gaysford because the assault occurred off campus, according to the McGill Tribune, which broke the story.

The issue was just the latest event in what has been shaping up as McGill's annus horribilis.

There was the 2015 hazing incident involving the varsity basketball team that came to light last month — despite McGill's zero-tolerance policy on hazing.

There was the student who resigned from the executive of the Arts Undergraduate Society on March 8 after inciting people on Twitter to punch a Zionist.

There was the student politician who stepped down from the Students' Society of McGill University (SSMU) on Feb. 22 amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

There were the swastikas scrawled on desks in the Arts Building in February.

And then there was the uproar over Potter's resignation as head of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), after his infamous March 20 Maclean's magazine article criticizing Quebec as “an almost pathologically alienated and low-trust society, deficient in many of the most basic forms of social capital that other Canadians take for granted.”

While the article, parts of which he later retracted, was widely panned, many academics and pundits decried his subsequent resignation as an attack on academic freedom.

McGill isn't alone in facing controversies.

In 2015, a task force at Halifax's Dalhousie University released a scathing report on sexism, homophobia and racism in the dentistry faculty. A sex scandal disgraced the University of Ottawa hockey team in 2014, while the University of British Columbia has come under fire for scandals including the firing of the head of its creative writing program for alleged sexual misconduct.

But critics say McGill has been particularly inept at handling recent storms.

With campus controversies in the news more often than ever before, the need for universities to communicate effectively has never been greater, said Adam Galinksy, a crisis-management expert and professor at Columbia Business School in New York.

Too often, officials issue a terse “no comment” or minimize the incident in the hope the storm will blow over, Galinsky said. But those reactions are usually a mistake.

“When something bad happens, the natural instinct for everyone is to want to make it to go away as quickly as possible,” said Galinski. But ducking questions or attacking the source are usually poor responses, he said.

“I always tell people to take a step back and ask themselves, ‘What is the core value that we stand for?' Whatever our response is, it has to be articulated in the context of those values.”

While institutions routinely refuse to comment on cases before the courts, McGill should have addressed the assault that left Leci with post-concussion syndrome, causing her to take time off from her studies and undergo rehabilitation, he said.

The Potter case ignited a firestorm of criticism. McGill University and Potter both declined interviews about the situation.

A panel discussion on academic freedom organized by McGill's Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship April 10 failed to settle the question of how far academic freedom extends in the light of the Potter case, with speakers coming down on both sides of the issue.

Could McGill have made the incident a teachable moment? Should Potter have been given a second chance? Arguments could be made for both sides, Galinsky said.

“The more context and the more explicitness you give about the dilemmas that you're facing as a decision-maker, the more people understand why you made the choices that you did and the more likely they are to accept them,” he said.

McGill's response to the Potter controversy — beginning with an unsigned tweet on the @mcgillu corporate account dissociating the university from the views expressed in the Maclean's column — lacked leadership and allowed the issue to spin out of control, Galinsky said.

A statement two days later by principal Suzanne Fortier, defending the university against the charge of infringing academic freedom, was too little, too late, Galinsky said.

“In Crisis Management 101, one of the core principles is you never wait for the next day to respond,” he said.

“When you don't respond for a day you look weak... And then when you do respond, you just look reactive. The story's controlled you rather than you controlled the story,” Galinsky said.