A Canadian art school has fired its president less than one year after hiring her.

Aoife Mac Namara was dismissed by the board of governors of the Nova Scotia College of Art, which issued a brief statement calling it “a personnel matter” and offering no explanation.

That led to protests including an  with more than 700 signatures calling on NSCAD to reinstate Dr Mac Namara and dismiss the board of governors. The petitioners credited Dr Mac Namara with initiating work “to recognise and redress systemic and structural racism at all levels of the university”.

A report in the  said that Dr Mac Namara’s initiatives included pushing ahead with an Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, and it cited unnamed sources as saying the governors were “lukewarm to those efforts”.

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The board voted 12-5 to remove her, with opposition to her firing coming from the board’s two faculty representatives, two students and the one black member of the board, the Examiner�������ǰ��ٱ��.

NSCAD officials declined to comment on the matter.

Dr Mac Namara, born in Nova Scotia and raised in Ireland, came to NSCAD in August 2019 after serving as dean of faculty of Communication, Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University.

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Ann-Barbara Graff, NSCAD’s vice-president for academic and research, and a professor of art history and contemporary culture, has been named acting president, said Louise Anne Comeau, chair of the governors, . The board soon plans to name an interim president and begin a search for a full-time appointment, Ms Comeau said.

The statement described Dr Mac Namara as “playing a valuable role in the university’s future”, a reference understood by faculty to mean that she would take a teaching position.

The petitioners protesting her firing described their organisers as including faculty, staff, students and alumni. They accused the board, by acting during a pandemic, of “recklessly endangering the future of the university and exposing it to significant financial and future risk”.

NSCAD, with enrolment typically near 1,000 students, is facing a particular challenge during the pandemic of adapting studio-based arts to an online environment, the petitioners said.

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The firing, with no advance notice, comes “at, possibly, the worst time imaginable”, said Mathew Reichertz, an associate professor of fine arts who serves as president of the NSCAD faculty union.

Professor Reichertz said Dr Mac Namara had made public her plans to address institutional racism at NSCAD, but said it was impossible to know if that was related to her dismissal.