College wildlife teacher challenges termination

Rod Cumberland says the Maritime College of Forest Technology (MCFT) fired him for speaking his views on spraying forests with the controversial herbicide glyphosate. Cumberland, who grew up just outside St. Stephen and has been an instructor on wildlife at the college in Fredericton since 2012, says that executive director Tim Marshall and academic chair Gareth Davies told him he was terminated for cause on June 20.
Marshall lists eight reasons in a letter for firing Cumberland: preventing students arriving late from attending class; intentionally adjusting the classroom clock ahead by a few minutes to make students think they were late; physically removing hats from students and demanding apologies before returning them; "inappropriate and offensive comments" in his classroom; "undermining the content" of a seminar on the science of vegetation management and "actively discouraging students from attending the seminar, despite the fact that the seminar was vetted and approved by the MCFT;" communication and conduct constituting "harassment," thus causing "embarrassment and damage to reputation of MCFT;" "disparaging remarks" about the MCFT, its executive director, management and instructors; and failing to adhere to instructions from the academic chair, his immediate supervisor.
Marshall states that the MCFT would not normally comment publicly about a personnel matter but felt compelled to counter "inaccurate and untruthful information" from politicians and in media stories.
Cumberland believes the college wanted to get rid of him for linking low numbers of deer on New Brunswick Crown land to using glyphosate to kill hardwood, which these animals eat, in softwood plantations. Marshall denies this in his letter, but Cumberland and Gerald Redmond, the MCFT's retired executive director who hired Cumberland in 2012, say they believe it.
Enforcing rules on punctuality and telling students to remove their hats "was obviously just fluff around the real reason, which was that bullet number five that dealt with glyphosate," Redmond says, referring to the seminar on vegetation management. Cumberland and Redmond both say the seminar dealt with glyphosate.
Redmond started the Facebook site, "Friends of Rod Cumberland," on July 3. He got a terse email the next day informing him that the college no longer needed his services teaching a continuing education course on wildlife awareness and bear safety. Redmond emailed back telling the college it could not offer this course, which he created, without his permission.
On August 3, the Facebook site announced a trust fund aiming to raise $75,000 for a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal. "So that backfired, on them," Redmond says. "It just shows a pattern of action that is very suspicious if nothing else."
Marshall confirms in his letter that the MCFT "no longer requires his services" but states that Redmond recently disclosed confidential information he obtained during his employment as the college's executive director. "The confidential information he disclosed was not contained in his comments to the media," the letter states.
Marshall states that he, as executive director, deals with personnel issues including termination and that the college's board did not vote on the decision to fire Cumberland. Marshall confirms that board member Andrew Fedora applied for one of two recently advertised vacancies at the MCFT but was not being interviewed for Cumberland's former position and, further, that Fedora withdrew from the competition.
Both Green Party leader David Coon and People's Alliance leader Kris Austin have called for an independent investigation into the entire file. Premier Blaine Higgs leads a minority government, but Coon says he would not force an election over the issue. He does expect a lively discussion when the New Brunswick Legislative Assembly sits in the fall.
Cumberland grew up in Mayfield, graduated from St. Stephen High School in 1983 and later got a degree in forestry from the University of New Brunswick. Redmond, working for the provincial Department of Natural Resources, now the Department of Energy and Resource Development, hired Cumberland as a young biologist. He stayed with the department for 22 years, the first seven as fur bearer biologist, the last 15 as deer biologist.
Redmond left the department for the MCFT in 2000 and recruited Cumberland in 2012. Cumberland recalls that he used Redmond as a reference when he applied for a job in Minnesota. When the would-be employer called Redmond to follow up on the reference, he called and offered him a job, Cumberland says.
Redmond, who became executive director of the MCFT in 2014, says that he and his immediate predecessor felt pressure to deal with Cumberland. "There were direct and indirect concerns raised by the board members of his outspokenness on this subject, so after I left, I told Rod to watch his back," Redmond says.
He refused to sanction Cumberland as long as he did not purport to represent the college officially when he spoke publicly, a line he never crossed, recalls Redmond, who says he was no longer there to intervene on Cumberland's behalf once he retired in 2017.
Cumberland says he never told students what view to take on glyphosate or any other issue but encouraged them to look at all the information and make up their own minds.
As professional foresters, Cumberland and Redmond both acknowledge glyphosate as an excellent product for its intended purpose of killing hardwood trees to allow planted softwoods to grow to ultimately feed mills to keep people working. With careers devoted to wildlife management, they question whether this is necessarily a good thing.
In Cumberland's words, the answer to most questions in forestry is, "It depends." He and Redmond have looked into research raising concerns about the effects of glyphosate on human health, but Cumberland links killing hardwood to crashing deer numbers.
Figures published by the Department of Energy and Resource Development show that hunters tagged 31,205 deer in 1985 out of an estimated herd of 286,894. The same table shows that, in 2016, hunters tagged only 5,386 out of a total herd estimated at 67,796. Meanwhile, in Maine, hunters continue to harvest on the order of 30,000 deer a year, Cumberland says.
New Brunswick dropped doe tags for seven years starting in 2000 to increase the number of deer, but the harvest reached only 10,570 by 2007 before numbers started dropping again due to a hard winter in 2007-2008, he says. Yet numbers of deer are increasing in some New Brunswick towns, notably St. Andrews, Rothesay and Quispamsis.
The state and the neighboring province have similar winters and coyotes, "which told me we have a habitat problem," Cumberland says. "Why are the deer in the urban areas and they are not in the deer yards? What became quite obvious is we were removing tons and tons of deer food every year from Crown land," planting the best sites with softwood, killing hardwood and leaving areas not so good to the deer, Cumberland contends.
Maine's Board of Pesticides Control did not get back with information on the use of glyphosate in the state. An Environmental Protection Agency document available online calls glyphosate the most commonly used herbicide in the United States, including 113,937,000 pounds on 117,400,000 acres of soybeans alone, compared to only 3,646,900 pounds on 757,000 acres of forest.
According to information posted online by the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, forestry companies intend to spray glyphosate on more than 15,000 hectares, or close to 38,000 acres, in this province in 2019.
Redmond thinks the college made a mistake in firing Cumberland, whom he calls "a very excellent communicator, a terrific teacher." He went on, "Rod's a fighter, and I don't like to see him bullied and intimidated, and so I'll work with him until we can get some resolution to this. I think they misjudged."