A mysterious departure – and a big payout – at Rhode Island College – The Boston Globe

Sounds like the kind of glowing letter an exemplary employee would receive from an appreciative boss, right?

Well, it appears there’s a little more to it.

The part that neither Warner nor Cano Morales is willing to discuss these days is the reason for her abrupt departure, or why the college agreed to pay her up to $180,000 — a year’s salary — plus a $2,200-a-month health care stipend on her way out the door.

Those details only came to light after I requested a copy of Cano Morales’ severance agreement, which is dated May 14. The agreement also spells out specific language for the college to use to communicate her decision to step away, explaining that she was leaving to pursue other opportunities.

As is typically the case with severance agreements, the deal prohibits Cano Morales and Warner from making any disparaging statements about one another. Both sides interpret that to mean that they can’t speak about the arrangement at all.

None of this passes the sniff test.

If, in fact, Cano Morales left the college on perfectly good terms simply to pursue other opportunities, that would mean Warner signed off on a $180,000 taxpayer-funded golden parachute for a seven-year employee who wasn’t working under a contract. This wasn’t a buyout.

If something else happened, the public — including the hardworking students at this commuter school — deserves to know why their money is funding payouts like this one.

Either way, their silence is deafening.

This is where I have to show my cards: I truly don’t know what happened, even off the record. This isn’t a situation where I’ve heard rumors about an employee or employer behaving badly, and I happen to think highly of both Cano Morales and Warner.

Cano Morales has a beautiful life story, a first-generation Colombian who graduated from the University of Rhode Island and then earned a master’s degree at RIC. She has become one of Rhode Island’s most influential members of the Latino community, previously holding roles as chair of the Central Falls School Board of Trustees and at the Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University.

In Warner’s case, I was quick to call on Governor Dan McKee and Postsecondary Education Commissioner Shannon Gilkey to remove the interim tag from his presidency. They did, and by all accounts, he has delivered. Rhode Island College is in a better place than it was 10 years ago, and the future looks bright.

What I do know is that secretive year-long severance payouts to public employees aren’t very common in Rhode Island, and they usually involve the threat of a lawsuit or wrongdoing on someone’s part. In 2019, for example, I covered the city of Providence’s decision to pay its human resources director a year’s salary in exchange for her not suing the city.

In this case, I know that RIC isn’t planning to fill Cano Morales’ role, which raises some diversity questions about Warner’s leadership team. At the vice president level, the college’s leader on diversity, equity, and inclusion was part of Warner’s cabinet. Now the college is in the process of hiring a director of DEI, according to spokesman John Taraborelli, putting the leader of the college’s DEI efforts significantly lower in its leadership hierarchy.

“The rest of her portfolio has been distributed among several members of the leadership team to ensure that the projects and initiatives within those areas continue without interruption,” Taraborelli said.

When I asked Taraborelli if RIC had entered into any other severance or separation agreements with non-union employees in recent years, he was able to produce only one other example. In July 2023, Jeannine Dingus-Eason resigned from her role as dean of the Feinstein School of Education and Human Development to become associate provost of DEI initiatives at the same salary for one year. She was allowed to work remotely, and agreed to not apply for any role at RIC in the future.

Back to Cano Morales. For now, her departure remains a mystery.

She has been receiving $15,000 a month from RIC as part of the severance package, and she has been guaranteed at least eight of those payments, according to the agreement. She is entitled to four more of those monthly payments as long as she doesn’t secure employment elsewhere.

Judging by Warner’s recommendation, she’d make quite a hire.

Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.