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On Nov 14, students, staff and faculty learned that Peggy Shannon, the current president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, would be leaving the job “soon” to “round out her career at another art school,” specifically the Kansas City Art Institute, and to reunite with her family in the US. NSCAD’s board of governors chair, William Barker, was the one to deliver the news through an email shared with the school’s community, as well as a follow-up announcement shared online.
week, “soon” became in a few days On Monday, Barker sent another email to the NSCAD community announcing that Jana Macalik, who is already serving two interim roles at NSCAD—provost and vice-president (academics and research), would be stepping in as interim president starting Saturday, Feb 1 while the search for a new president gets underway.
According to Barker’s email and the announcement shared online, Shannon will work with Macalik throughout February as Macalik “assumes the president’s role for the coming months.” The Coast has asked NSCAD how Macalik will balance this newest role with her duties as provost and vice-president, but the school hasn’t answered.
Barker wrote that the BOG has approved a new Presidential Search Committee that will begin working with an “executive search firm to find the next university president.” He says the committee will “solicit feedback from the NSCAD community to better understand what it needs to prepare for a creative future, and who can best lead us on that journey.”
Another early departure
Shannon was recruited in 2021 following another early departure of a NSCAD president—Aoife Mac Namara. On June 26, 2020, Mac Namara was ousted by the board without explanation less than a year into her contract, and replaced by interim president Sarah McKinnon on July 15, 2020 while the search for a new top executive began.
NSCAD’s faculty union voted 96.3% in favour of a no-confidence motion with the board at the time, demanded Mac Namara be reinstated, protested with students against her dismissal and called for the board to resign.
In June 2021, the Globe and Mail’s Greg Mercer reported that the move to replace Mac Namara began after she had resisted a plan to sell NSCAD’s heritage buildings to Halifax developer Scott McCrae, CEO of the Armour Group, because of what she saw as “potential perceived or actual conflicts of interest of some governors—and potentially breaking public procurement rules that regulate infrastructure spending by universities.”
The vice-chair of the board at the time was Sean Kelly, a lawyer whose firm represented Armour Group and leased space from the company.
According to internal emails Mercer obtained and reported on, Kelly introduced the motion to fire Mac Namara “during a closed-door meeting on June 25, 2020, after 10 months marked by friction between the new president and some members of the board—acrimony that led Dr. Mac Namara to complain that she was being bullied and harassed.”
In response to questions surrounding her firing, then-board chair, Lousie-Anne Comeau in a message dated Aug 11, 2020, that “we cannot and will not get into details on decisions made regarding confidential personnel matters that rest between the board and the president of the institution.” Comeau shot down the idea that the university was favouring the Armour Group in any upcoming infrastructure plans, writing that “under no circumstances would we ever engage in a ‘backroom deal,’ [or] consider any concept without a process of review in line with policies and best practices.”
Less than a year later, Mercer’s article from 2021 mentions the school’s “repeatedly blocked efforts to seek more transparency into the firing, earning a scolding from Nova Scotia’s privacy commissioner for failing to respond to two access-to-information requests for NSCAD records on the issue.” He wrote Mac Namara’s dismissal had “stunned Canada’s arts community and fuelled anger on campus over what some saw as the influence of commercial interests in board decisions” to remove a president who was “celebrated by NSCAD students and faculty for trying to bring in changes to address systemic racism at the institution.”
This was and continues to be controversial in NSCAD’s recent history.
The task of replacing Mac Namara fell to a Presidential Search Committee, made up of seven NSCAD constituents: four members of the board of governors, two faculty union representatives and one student. On Dec 1, 2021 they announced they had completed their mandate and found a new president—Shannon. The committee had worked with the executive search firm Perrett Laver in April and May 2021, the school wrote, to “consult broadly with the NSCAD community to guide the evaluation and recommendation of candidates” through online forums, meetings and phone calls—and posted an overview of the search process and the core principles of the committee.
This page has not been updated since.
Shannon would begin her role as president in July 2022. Her contract was meant to last from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2027. How long will it take to find her replacement? Will it follow the same process as in 2021?
In response to Coast questions, NSCAD sent an email on Tuesday, Jan 28, to say that it is still deciding on an executive search firm to assist with recruiting a new president. It also said that the Presidential Search Committee page on its website would be updated once committee members were chosen, its terms of reference were confirmed and the executive search firm had been selected, which was “not expected until late January,” which is now.
The school also wrote that it “wouldn’t publicly speak to the search for a new president until we have had more to share with our internal audiences, which will take some time.”
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