Valery Fabrikant - Aftermath

Aftermath

• Concordia's Board of Governors had earlier adopted a policy banning firearms on the university campus. After Fabrikant's murders, the university joined the Coalition for Gun Control and gathered signatures for a petition calling for tougher national gun laws. In March 1994 Concordia representatives presented members of Parliament with a 200,000-signature petition to ban the private ownership of handguns in Canada.

• Concordia University commissioned two independent inquiries into events surrounding the murders. This followed university review of scholarship guidelines. The university improved its administrative procedures and research ethics guidelines, as did Canada's research funding agencies. An investigation of faculty research in Fabrikant's department revealed that some of Fabrikant's claims about mismanagement of grants funds were factually correct. But, he did not challenge colleagues' work until he was well into his attacks against the university.

• The Cowan report, which studied the interactions between university officials and Fabrikant from a personnel management perspective, found that "The warnings and strictures placed upon him which directly related to his behaviour, (when they existed at all), were too mild, too vague, or (finally) too slow and ponderous."

• The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council froze the research accounts of the three academics whom Fabrikant had accused of mismanaging funds. Two were temporarily suspended and one took an early retirement. One was re-hired as a research professor.

• In addition, the university adopted new rules governing financial accountability and scientific integrity, improvements already in process at the time of the August 1992 events. The Internal Audit function was also restructured.

• In 1995 the university adopted "The Code of Rights & Responsibilities" and named an Advisor on the Code. It set out standards of conduct for all members of the University. Further work was done on a new code of ethics, resulting in adoption in 1995 of a partial version of "The Code of Ethics: Guidelines for Ethical Actions". In 1997 the full version was adopted.

• The university created initiatives related to civil behaviour and conflict resolution, including the Peace and Conflict Resolution Series that began in 2003.

Fabrikant is serving his sentence at Archambault Institution in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec.

Fabrikant is a usenet user known for posting in newsgroups, particularly can.general and can.politics, as well as on his website, which contain trial transcripts, as well as his version of events. He has claimed to be the innocent victim of a conspiracy. From prison, he has managed to circumvent restrictions on his communications to argue his case through a website and other media. He filed numerous legal proceedings with the court system until 2000, when the Quebec Superior Court declared him a vexatious litigant. The Court dismissed his bid to clear that status in 2007.

In part because Fabrikant carried out his assault on a university campus, and societies have witnessed rising workplace violence, the case has been extensively studied. Later analysis concluded that "Fabrikant often displayed classic behavioural warning signs indicating potential violence." Within three years of the university's hiring him, Fabrikant had established a reputation of being "a difficult, argumentative and unpredictable individual- and one who seemed to set no limits on his own behaviour." The university failed to address his behaviour early on, and his harassment of students and colleagues increased over the years. The university attempted to change its guidelines for dealing with personnel. The case showed the problems of academic institutions, whose administrators were more used to assessing research, than in managing the behaviour of difficult staff.