The little university that could(n’t): UPEI’s nightmare behind closed doors

globalnews.ca:

The president of the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) had been in his role for less than a year when the school’s vice-presidents sat around a dining table and devised a plan to get rid of him.

They considered Alaa Abd-El-Aziz demeaning, domineering and too controlling over the school’s finances, two of those vice-presidents have told Global News. The final straw came when two female employees accused him of sexual harassment.

The two vice-presidents say they brought their concerns to the chair of the Board of Governors, requesting Abd-El-Aziz’s immediate removal.

But that didn’t happen. Abd-El-Aziz went on to helm the school for a decade — a period of prosperity for the small, provincial university that saw it rocket up the Macleans university rankings, its student enrolment steadily increase and a raft of high-profile expansion projects get underway. Abd-El-Aziz was lauded with awards, national praise and gushing magazine profiles.

But it was also a period that a third-party review would later characterize as a “toxic” culture of harassment and racism, with rampant allegations of sexual and gender-based violence that the school failed to address.

That review would be prompted by another allegation against Abd-El-Aziz for workplace misconduct. This time, he would end his illustrious career in the aftermath, and the small, bucolic island would be left reeling.

“I’ve never seen a report on a campus climate that was as god-awful as that one,” says Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates in Toronto.

“But this report is not just about him. … This is a cultural problem. You can’t pin that on the top guy, that is a top-to-bottom problem.”

Because behind the success story of UPEI, was an apparent