There have been four presidents of Kwantlen Polytechnic University since I was hired eleven years ago. Our current one, Dr. Alan Davis, seems to me to have been the best. Why? He understands how our university’s future will never be a break from its past: a community-focused, rigorous institution devoted to providing students with real-world expertise – from fashion and interior design to horticulture to business to criminology and, now, even to beer-brewing and to Chinese medicine.

He has been a superb hire. In his previous post – president of the State University of New York’s prestigious “university without walls” – he demonstrated his commitment to cool and interesting innovations, humanism, and technology.

How Dr. Davis got hired is not controversial, but how he got paid *before* he started his job as President has. Today he released this statement:

Colleagues,

 

I am very troubled by aspects of administrative compensation at KPU that have recently come to light. It is clear that, prior to my arrival at KPU, there was an established pattern of issuing pre-employment consulting contracts to people being hired to senior positions. The recipients of those contracts, including myself, were unaware that these contracts might be non-compliant in some way with BC public sector regulations.

 

Assistant Deputy Minister Rob Mingay found in his recently released Compensation Review of Kwantlen Polytechnic University that the mis-reporting of two of those contracts (including my own) was not in keeping with the spirit and intent of government standards.

 

Similar conclusions could be drawn about other such contracts that were issued before my arrival.

 

I am therefore conducting a review of these issues, using independent external resources as required.