Valery Fabrikant - Background

Background

Born in Belarus (in the Soviet Union) to a Jewish family, Fabrikant earned the equivalent of a doctorate in engineering. He emigrated to Canada in 1979. While he claimed to be a political dissident, journalists from the Montreal Gazette later researching his academic credentials found he had been dismissed from numerous positions in the USSR because of disruptive behaviour.

Fabrikant was hired at Concordia University in 1980, where he worked first as a technician under limited grant money. After several years, he was promoted to academic positions included in departmental funding. He taught students and conducted independent research, despite students, staff and faculty having reported behavioural problems ranging from "undesirable to intolerable".

He attempted to collect information to blackmail officials into promoting him, threatened officials and colleagues and blamed others for all his problems. Fabrikant blamed his peers for his being denied tenure and for seeking to have his employment terminated.

Over several months of escalating charges from late 1991 into 1992, he accused the university of tolerating the practice of academics' being listed as co-authors on papers to which they had not contributed. In 1992, in the midst of an email campaign against numerous university officials, Fabrikant went to court to try to have the names of several colleagues removed from research papers he had written in the 1980s. That case was not concluded until November 2007. It was dismissed by Quebec Superior Court Judge Nicole Morneau under a provision of the Quebec Code of Civil Procedures designed to treat cases found to be frivolous or unfounded. It was later reopened and eventually dismissed in March 2011.