I like reading the Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA) blog even though most of it is about education administration. Their recent post is about “Carleton’s Loyalty Oath” and basically outlines how Carleton University’s Board of Governors is struggling to address the behaviour of one professor on its board. To the blog’s eye, they’re behaving like “goons” and thugs. The issue surrounds Root Gorelick as the university faculty’s representative to the Board of Governors (BoG). He represents the faculty and feels he should blog to the community about the discussions, his positions, and even his objections to Board decisions. 

Yet part of being part of ANY board (co-op, school council, parliament, NGO, business, etc.) is joint responsibility. You individually contribute to joint discussions, you exercise your personal voting powers, but you make collective decisions. And once a group makes a decision, the members of that group collectively made that decision. It’s even part of your legal responsibility in some cases. And the short version is that if you cannot abide by the group’s decisions, you resign as a member of the Board. That’s the job. Since Gorelick hasn’t come to heel at the Board’s insistence, the Board is revising the Code of Conduct to make it a formally recognized duty. … Read the rest