UPEI Action Plan and Reconciliation Update

The following message and response was also emailed to faculty, staff, and students on January 5, 2026. 

Message from Chair of the UPEI Board of Governors: UPEI Action Plan and Reconciliation Update

As we begin the new year, I’m writing to share an update and a brief reflection about our reconciliation work with Dr. Wendy Carroll and Ms. Erin Casey, while also looking ahead to the year before us.

In July 2023, we began a reconciliation process with Erin and Wendy, the women who brought forward allegations against the former president in 2012. The University released Erin and Wendy from their Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in June 2023. However, the agreement was tri-partite, and they remained bound by an NDA with the former president. We came to understand the importance of obtaining a full release—both for Erin and Wendy’s healing and for the process of reconciliation—after they read victim impact statements to the Board of Governors in November 2023. We then became committed to helping them to achieve full release and regain their voices.

We would like to share with the campus community that, after a taxing and emotional two-year process through which we remained committed to our goal, Erin and Wendy are fully released from their NDA as of December 29, 2025. This is a significant accomplishment and represents a successful reconciliation process, with considerable dialogue, solution-oriented approaches, and collaboration. This process required trust, courage, and transparency from us all. And we are—rightly—proud that the process resulted in this outcome.

Our reconciliation with Erin and Wendy has been one of many steps to help remediate wrongs of the past. And, with their full release, the University no longer holds any NDA contracts, fulfilling our commitment to past survivors.

We apologize to Erin and Wendy for the wrongs done to them in 2012 and 2013, as well as subsequent wrongs that resulted from inappropriate comments, wrongful information, or exclusionary behaviour, and the limits imposed on them by the NDA that prevented them from telling their own truth. Welcoming them back to our community and having their support on many of our current initiatives has been of great benefit and value to the University. I thank them wholeheartedly for their patience with me and their learnings shared with me over the past two and a half years.

Among the many areas in which Erin and Wendy have contributed time and support to the Board during this reconciliation process has been advising on the needed revisions to the Fair Treatment Policy and its replacement with a contemporary Discrimination and Harassment Policy—along with revisions to the Sexual Violence Policy.  

We have acknowledged through the sharing of their experiences, and the experiences of others who have been survivors of abuse, that the Fair Treatment Policy is lacking. We have been directed by this policy for over 20 years, despite countless efforts to have it revised. For the sake of our community’s safety, I do sincerely aspire to have 2026 be the year that the University community comes together and finally makes an important step towards safety, together, by repealing this policy and instating the two much stronger replacement policies. This remains a top priority of the Board of Governors.

Happy New Year to all,
Shannon

Shannon MacDonald, FCA, CPA, ICD.D (she/her)
Chair, UPEI Board of Governors

Response to UPEI Board Chair’s Message

As of the 29th of December 2025, we are no longer bound by the tripartite NDA that has silenced us for 12 long years. We are grateful to Ms. Shannon MacDonald, UPEI Board Chair; Dr. Wendy Rodgers, UPEI President and Vice-Chancellor; and the UPEI Board of Governors for their work as part of our reconciliation process. We are now released not only by the University, but by the former president of UPEI. This has been an exhausting, frustrating, and incredibly intense couple of years. We thank our supporters in PEI and elsewhere in the country who provided expertise and guidance. We cannot thank you enough.  

This NDA and the events that led to it dramatically and negatively impacted our personal and professional lives, and we plan to use our voices and our experience to help reshape the public discourse around NDAs.

Our goal has always been to build understanding of the harms of NDAs, to dispel the myth that they benefit victims of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, and to focus attention on the burden carried by other survivors who remain locked in historical NDAs. We can now pursue this goal freely.

We've heard over and over that being released from our NDA was impossible. Yet we persisted, and we've shown it can be done.

We wish the UPEI community well as you continue to address the pain and injustice of the past and build a new future.  

Erin & Wendy

Dr. Wendy Carroll and Ms. Erin Casey