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Although everything Fabrikant wanted was within his grasp, he was nonetheless terrified that he might be denied again. It was at this point that he tried — unsuccessfully — to get a gun permit. He began calling Rose Sheinin’s office, making veiled threats to her staff. When she came home one night, she found a message on her answering machine from Fabrikant, saying, “You know who I am and you know what is going to happen.”
The ante had clearly been raised. Sheinin was already concerned enough about Fabrikant to have been doing some homework. In August, she had consulted Concordia’s legal counsel about the procedures involved in dismissing someone who did not yet have tenure. She was informed that a written record of complaints, warnings and discussions with the employee needed be kept on file. The disciplinary procedures set out in Concordia’s collective agreement, Sheinin was told, meant the university could dismiss an employee after two written warnings. She was also told that Concordia could not exercise its normal right to discipline people if its criteria for imposing discipline weren’t clear, or hadn’t been communicated to its employees. The same thing was true if the university overlooked rule violations, or permitted a course of misconduct to continue. By not taking action in the case of Fabrikant, the legal counsel wrote, the university could be seen to have “tacitly tolerated [his] disruptive behaviour.” The disciplinary procedures set out in Concordia’s collective agreement, Sheinin was told, meant the university could dismiss an employee after two written warnings. She assumed that all it would take was two letters from her.
Sheinin had also met with Warren Steiner, the consultant psychiatrist. He told her what he’d told MacKenzie and Haines. Fabrikant had a personality disorder; he needed clear boundaries. No one at Concordia had ever told him, “You can’t behave this way.” Sheinin asked whether Fabrikant’s behaviour would change. Why should it? Steiner replied. It works. Was it possible someone like Fabrikant could become violent, Sheinin asked. Unlikely said Steiner.
She responded to Fabrikant’s most recent threats with a strongly-worded letter: “ ... the frequency of [your] telephone calls, the tone which you use, your warnings that you intend to tape record ... conversations, etc. are totally unacceptable. The veiled threats conveyed through my staff and through Grendon Haines must stop immediately [or] I will be left with no alternative than to seek protection through the University’s policies concerning discipline.” This was the first time anyone at Concordia had dealt with Fabrikant so firmly. And in writing. Fabrikant apologized to Sheinin through Grendon Haines, saying he regretted his dysfunctional behaviour.
Sheinin then met with senior members of the mechanical-engineering department and attempted to persuade them to reverse their recommendation; she wanted them to document Fabrikant’s abusive behaviour. They demurred. She had the impression his unpredictability spooked them. And Sheinin’s poking her nose into the almost-all-male world of engineering irritated them. No woman, even if she was the vice-rector academic, was going to tell them what to do. Fabrikant’s behaviour shouldn’t be a factor in getting a tenure-track job, they said. Osman insisted that giving Fabrikant what he wanted would “bring out the best in him,” and he made it clear that if Sheinin attempted to overturn the department’s recommendation, he would make use of the university’s grievance procedures to oppose her.
On November 16, 1990, Sheinin sent a memo to the rector, Patrick Kenniff, reporting on her meeting with the departmental members. “All members of faculty were adamant that Dr. Fabrikant was an asset,” she wrote Kenniff, but “none of them wanted to work with or near him.” She herself was convinced, she said, that “whatever problems we have been presented with by Dr. Fabrikant will continue ... . My gut feelings tell me that he should not be taken onto the full-time faculty.” Nonetheless, she wrote, she wasn’t prepared to take on the mechanical-engineering department.
Before becoming rector in 1984, Kenniff had been a deputy minister in the Quebec government. Hired by Concordia’s Board of Governors because he was well-connected and would help the university’s profile, he was seen and heard in all the right places. But he did not run a particularly tight or happy ship. Though he seemed to be off campus more than he was on, he had trouble delegating authority. His first vice-rector academic, Francis Whyte, quit the university in frustration before the end of his term.
If Sheinin was hoping for support from Kenniff, she didn’t get it. So she settled for telling the department that if it hired Fabrikant, he was their problem. She added a rider to Fabrikant’s contract. He would have to wait three years before he could be considered for tenure. His new contract would run for two years, until June, 1992 at $59,677 a year; the possibility of extension would come up for review in the fall of 1991.
Dr. Fabrikant's Solution, continued >
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