CANADA: Universities bowed to pressure from private donor

31 October 2010

It was a clash at the intersection of private money and public education, with a big-name cast of characters: BlackBerry titan Jim Basillie, Governor General David Johnston and Dr Ramesh Thakur, a former United Nations diplomat renowned as one of the world's leading scholars on peace and security studies, writes Michael Valpy for The Globe and Mail.

The story of Thakur being bounced out of his job as inaugural director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario has led to claims of violation of academic freedom and demands that Thakur receive apologies from Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, led at the time by Johnston, and the private think thank created by Balsillie, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

An academic inquiry into Thakur's dismissal, made public last Thursday, concluded that the two universities - which jointly run the Balsillie school - misled him about their commitment to his directorship and buckled under pressure from CIGI, "possibly in the form of a threat to walk away from multiple commitments".
Full report on The Globe and Mail site

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