Public Policy Sources 25:
Implications

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Some specific lessons

One major practical benefit of this analysis is to provide a guide for what not to do. Those dealing with harassment programs or cases could draw cautionary instruction from this case. To summarize points that may be gleaned, I have provided a list of suggestions for policies, all of which are related to the issues and problems of the Donnelly case. These points are given in the Conclusions section.

Allocation of blame

There can be no legitimate defense for violating the basic rights of the accused in the manner shown to have occurred. There can be no legitimate secret defenses involving additional evidence against Donnelly, since SFU had the clear duty to display the evidence used to convict him. On the other hand, actions that I have attributed to incompetence and prejudice could have been deliberately malevolent, and thus ethically worse than portrayed here.

Still, subject to this limitation, I would like to note the following.

1. Other than O’Hagan, harassment office employees appeared to have been competent and to have behaved reasonably under the circumstances.44 The problems came from the top, not from the bottom.

2. Three mitigating factors limit the culpability of the Panelists, who are not nearly as responsible for the travesty as Braha and Stubbs. First, their obvious lack of ability speaks to a bad selection and training system more than to their turpitude. Second, they were victims of bad legal advice from Braha, which they lacked the expertise to question. Third, the extent to which the PR reveals anomalies argues for sincerity, even as it argues against other virtues. Yet even if their sincerity is granted, the Panelists are at fault because they indulged their prejudices to the extreme detriment of an accused person, which is an ethical offense in and of itself.

3. Attempts to allocate blame between Stubbs and Braha are pointless. Never has the phrase, "joint and several" been more appropriate.

4. The problems cannot be attributed to John Stubbs’ mental illness since many of his behaviour patterns were established long before the Spring of 1997, the claimed time of the onset of his clinical depression. Further, there have been no claims that Braha, the Panelists, O’Hagan, and those who gave Stubbs too much of a free hand also suffered from clinical depression.

5. Governmental influences have not been analyzed here, but even if causative, they would not provide an ethical defense for the wrongs that occurred, nor excuse those who assented to the wrongdoing without any apparent protest.

J’Accuse

The actions taken against Donnelly were unconscionable. No one should ever be subjected to the sort of evidence used against him, let alone convicted by it. Acceptance of such evidence as proof in a case of a professional death sentence would have been utterly reprehensible, even if no other problems were present. Further, his dismissal was undertaken with knowledge of numerous known major violations of fair procedure as well as abundant indications his accuser was lying. The ethical failure is immense.

There has been little ethical accountability. Although Stubbs lost his presidency, he was given a sweetheart deal, better than the average even for an executive who was removed without cause. None of the main perpetrators: Braha, Eix, Hafer, Hinds, O’Hagan, or Stubbs, have offered the slightest apology for their actions. Nor have any of the Board members repented for their lax supervision of Stubbs and their rubber stamping his attempt to remove Donnelly.

Nor has SFU accepted moral accountability as an institution. There has been no formal investigation of what went wrong, and the Administration still maintains that the Panel was blameless. SFU continues to fail in its ethical obligations to Donnelly by protecting his persecutors, while awarding him nothing for suffering that was maliciously inflicted.

Nor has SFU apologized to Donnelly or to the other victims of the hysteria. The lack of contrition indicates that although SFU has moved somewhat away from the fanaticism of the Stubbs regime, it has not moved far enough. Those responsible are unrepentant. The dangers for innocent victims of false accusation persist.

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