It was announced internally (see below) by Allan Rock that the dean of the Faculty of Science, Andre E. Lalonde, will step down at the end of the university academic year.
Lalonde was the dean who accepted to participate in the University of Ottawa administration's coordinated campaign under Allan Rock to dismiss tenured physics professor Denis Rancourt.
The campaign was ordered by Allan Rock, largely coordinated by then VP-Academic Robert Major, and involved regular meetings and communications with hired corporate lawyers, University Legal Counsel, several VPs, several deans, several department chairpersons, retired professor Raymond St-Jacques hired as a consultant, human resources bosses, the director of the Marketing Services and Communications Office, and several administrative assistants.
By contrast, workplace procedures foresee an independent investigation by an independent dean (the dean of Science for a physics professor) who would write his own letters.
In a public report about the Rancourt dismissal, academic workplace expert Professor Kenneth Westhues called it an "administrative mobbing". See the Westhues report HERE.
Lalonde will go back to being a regular professor.
The announcement comes in the midst of a large Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) adjudication involving Lalonde (LINK) and after he was found by UofOWatch to have lied in his dealings related to a previous IPC adjudication (LINK).
[2012-05-09 correction: In the paragraph above, "he was found to have lied in a previous IPC adjudication" has been corrected to "he was found by UofOWatch to have lied in his dealings related to a previous IPC adjudication".]
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Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010
Subject: Message from the President
After a full and successful five years in his position, Dean André E. Lalonde of the Faculty of Science has asked to be replaced as of July 1, 2011. Let me therefore take this occasion to thank him for his outstanding work and to remind you what a contribution he has made.
André E. Lalonde (BSc Honours ‘78) joined the Faculty in 1985 as a lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1986, granted tenure in 1990, promoted to associate professor in 1992 and then to full professor in 2001. In August 2006, he became the acting dean, a post he held until July 2007, when he was appointed dean. An accomplished geologist, he is one of the few people who can claim to have a mineral, lalondeite, named in his honour.
Dean Lalonde has presided over a period of growth and accomplishment in the Faculty. He has shown himself to be capable of handling the challenges of being a leader with the highest degree of professionalism, a "people person" who values and celebrates the contributions of all those he works with. He is responsible for hiring over 30 professors in his faculty. This includes 9 science lecturers involved in a highly successful pilot-project in science pedagogy, 5 Canada Research Chairs and world-renowned researchers such as Paul Corkum and Robert Boyd. Under his leadership, his faculty recently received over $35M in research funding from two major combined Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund grants and a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics. He believes that science can be taught and researched in a fully bilingual setting, thus assuring the continued relevance of the French language in this field.
While we will miss his contributions as dean, we are happy that André Lalonde will be returning to the classroom, where he has achieved national recognition for his rapport with students, teaching mineralogy and geology in the Department of Earth Sciences. I know he's excited to be teaching once more, and students will be fortunate to have him as their professor, cultivating their love of the sciences.
A selection committee will soon be struck to hire a new dean for the Faculty.
Allan Rock
President and Vice-Chancellor
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