I love the punch, counter-punch in the article.

In this corner, Acadia University: “The conduct giving rise to [the police's] ongoing investigation is utterly incompatible with the purpose, principles and operating imperatives of Acadia University.”

And the challenger… Dr. Colin Wightman (actually Tom MacEwan, his lawyer): “You can’t take a person’s private life, put it under a microscope and determine whether or not the employer agrees with it.”

Acadia: A termination letter claimed he had used his work-issued laptop to engage in “highly inappropriate communications of a sexual nature.”

Wightman: “If they’re suggesting that students and administration and faculty can only use computers for school-related purposes, that’s a bit hard to take. [...] The ability of an employer to curtain the private lives of its employees I think is very limited. For good reason.”

Acadia: A section of the university’s code of conduct that states employees shall not “engage in community or personal activities in which there could be a conflict with the best interest of the university.”

Wightman: “The letter of dismissal drips moral disapproval. [...] Whether it’s my age relative to the other woman, or my marital status, or the fact that bondage was involved, I have no idea.”

No TKO – looks like this one is going to the judges…

I suppose you need to weigh the legal costs vs. the intrinsic benefits you get from the firing. I would be somewhat concerned that firing employees could come back to haunt the firm. Other employees could start foreign for their own jobs and may not give maximum effort. Everyone has skeletons in the closet, don’t they?

I went and read the report referred to in the Globe article (It’s on the Canadian Association of University Teachers website: caut.ca ) and discovered that Wightman actually made.his arrangements via his home computer and ISP, not Acadia’s…misuse of his Acadia computer is something that the university first alleged in his firing and doesn’t appear to have provided any details of.

Also, it looks like they fired him last September but my google searches didn’t find anything about this case until he filed his lawsuit ten months later…If there wasn’t any publicity about his.indiscretion or the RCMP investigation that cleared him of illegality, its hard to see how he could be fired for damaging the university’s reputation or anything like that. Surely nobody could be employed if they can fired because they *MIGHT* embarass their employer!

But the real question for me is why my employer can expect to invade my personal life but expects the reverse not to happen. I answer business-related email and.phone calls via my personal cell phone from 6am until late at night. My boss regularly calls me at home after supper to talk about work things, my personal laptop is filled with documents that I am reading/writing for work, etc. My employer expects that I will interweave my personal and professional lives for its benefit…I’d get fired for insubordination if I didn’t…so how can they be so innocently surprised if I use my work computer to order gifts, or to access my gmail to send a message to my girlfriend?

[...] 31st, 2008, 06:04pm After reading Ian’s post last week about how in the new age of connectivity the lines between what is work related and what is [...]

Theres a couple of corrections/comments i need to make. First of all, Mr.Wightman made all of this very public. Talk to the globe and mail, the chronicle herald, the advertiser, and frank magazine. He could have filed this quietly he brought the publicity on himself. As for the last comment made by mark, he was looked at for sexual assault, not consenual bondage, and planning that kind of thing on the computer, is a little different than using your work computer to order gifts.