Last week, the Montreal Gazette reported that McGill is filing a lawsuit against Arthur Porter, former executive director of the McGill University Health Centre, over an unpaid loan (see “News in Brief,” page 2). The unfurling fiasco has brought forward one disconcerting revelation after another.

It’s hard to choose which part of the scandal is most shocking: it could be the additional sum of $92,000 Porter was paid, on top of the publicly disclosed salary of $256,000. It could be the undisclosed amount he was paid as an assistant professor in the faculty of medicine, despite no evidence that he taught in that capacity. Most puzzling of all, though, is the $500,000 loan he received from McGill in 2008, at an annual interest rate of one per cent, for which he is now being sued.

Here, some obvious questions emerge. McGill has, to date, failed to specify exactly what the loan was for, and why such a large figure was offered to an executive director at rates far below prime. The Montreal Gazette found that the loan was part of a “housing loan agreement”—a questionable term. According to the National Post, low interest loans are apparently a standard perk for university administrators on top of their salaries. Porter’s teaching salary—for lecturing he allegedly never did—also has yet to be explained.

[pullquote]“There are some serious matters of contention still on the table, and we ask that McGill come forward with an explanation.”[/pullquote]

As paying students of this university, we feel that we are entitled to hear answers to the simple questions of what the loan was for and what teaching Porter actually did. Either something went very wrong and the university simply does not know how this all fits into a larger tangled web of deceit, or the practice of paying nonteaching executives as professors and supplying them with loans at such low rates is standard. Both are similarly disturbing and require explanation.

What concerns this editorial board most, however, is that it’s entirely likely that none of this would have gone public had it not been for McGill’s lawsuit against Porter. The affair raises a number of bigger questions about how our university manages its finances and discloses the salaries of directors and senior administrators.

Most importantly, we would like to know if other university officials have been receiving personal loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars at negligible interest rates, or been appointed to positions and paid for work they never did. Salaries of top university administrators are made public in Quebec through annual reports submitted to the National Assembly. This public disclosure, unfortunately, means nothing if the figures aren’t correct. (Salaries of directors of publically-funded institutions, like the MUHC, are similarly available via access to information requests).

McGill will do its best to brand Arthur Porter as the guilty party, and that won’t prove to be terribly difficult. Before this incident, there was much controversy around the MUHC project, including several allegations of corruption. In September, a provincial anti-corruption unit raided the offices of the MUHC. Porter left the country in 2011, after abruptly resigning as chairman of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Review committee. His departure came amidst allegations that he sent $200,000 of his own funds to a Montreal businessman, hoping to secure a $120 million infrastructure development project that would have benefitted Porter’s own company in his native Sierra Leone.

However, this affair is indicative of a broader lack of transparency. There are some serious matters of contention still on the table, and we ask that McGill come forward with an explanation. At a time when the administration cries bloody murder about underfunding, this debacle could be highly damaging to McGill’s credibility if it cannot provide answers. At the same time, if it cannot account for such large sums, it is going to have a hard time convincing major players, including the provincial and federal governments, that it deserves the additional funding it claims to need.

As students, we would like to know exactly what the loan was for, and whether offering low-interest loans to senior administrators or directors is standard practice. Similarly, we would like answers as to why there was a discrepancy between Porter’s actual salary and the publically disclosed figure, and whether such divergences are common. Assurances that posted salaries are correct—and more generally that there is transparency in compensation for top university officials—are first steps towards maintaining the trust of tuition-paying students.