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When Colin Wightman was informed by the RCMP last June that he was the subject of a sexual assault investigation, he was forced to make two very uncomfortable phone calls.

Upon leaving the police station where he had described a “consensual one-time fantasy encounter” involving bondage and a woman he met on an Internet dating site, he called his wife and asked if he was allowed to come home.

The other phone call was to his employers at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., where he had worked for a year as a tenured professor and the director of the school of computer science.

“It was a very difficult phone call to make,” he said this week. “The only phone call that was more difficult was the one I made to my wife.”

More than a year after disclosing his affair to his family and employer, and almost 12 months after he was informed by the RCMP that they would not press charges, 48-year-old Dr. Wightman is still married, although the father of two is receiving counselling.

Things have not worked out so well with his job.

Last September, he was fired by Acadia in light of his “aberrant behaviour.”

A termination letter claimed he had used his work-issued laptop to engage in “highly inappropriate communications of a sexual nature,” and that “the conduct giving rise to [the police's] ongoing investigation is utterly incompatible with the purpose, principles and operating imperatives of Acadia University.”

Dr. Wightman is suing the university for wrongful dismissal, and he is just one of several individuals to recently find private aspects of their personal lives explode into highly damaging professional nightmares.

It is a strange new world for employers, who must be ready to protect their own image when embarrassing details of their employees' lives become known.

“We're living in a more media-crazy world, where what your employees do can potentially have very bad implications for you,” said Claus Rerup, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. “But people have not put two and two together that this could happen.”

There also seems to be no overarching attitude about how to deal with these scandals, and whether personal revelations should be discussed in the HR office or the boardroom.

In Britain, Max Mosley, president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, which oversees Formula One racing, has remained in his job despite a highly embarrassing lawsuit against a tabloid that published photographs of him engaging in sadomasochistic activities with several prostitutes, in what the paper dubbed a “Nazi sex romp.” (Mr. Mosley denies that the S & M session had a Nazi theme.)

In the United States, CBS war correspondent Lara Logan found herself at the centre of a tabloid sex scandal when it was reported that she is pregnant with the child of a married man she met while on assignment in Iraq. News of the affair eclipsed statements she made chastising the American media and general public for ignoring the ongoing war.

And U.S. senator Larry Craig has struggled to rebuild his reputation and retain his seat of power after being arrested for lewd conduct in an airport bathroom last June.

But Dr. Rerup believes it is companies who need to change their behaviour, not employees.

With people living more of their lives online, engaging in e-mail communication, chat rooms and social networking sites, it has become increasingly likely that companies will have to contend with the private behaviours of their employees becoming public, possibly to the detriment of the organization.

This new reality should be factored into human resources planning, he said, with policies developed for almost every potentially scandalous scenario.

“As a company, you have to decide on a process of how you'll deal with everything from drunk driving to rape, to cheating on your partner to taking to narcotics,” he said. “It's like having a faulty product – are you going to withdraw it from shelves or are you going to try and manage the media storm?”

In Mr. Mosley's case, the FIA held a successful confidence vote in June ensuring his presidency would continue until October, 2009.

CBS has also expressed its ongoing support for Ms. Logan and played down attention to her personal life.

“All the distractions happening now will, at some point, be behind her and behind CBS News and she will succeed based on the quality of her work,” said CBS News president Sean McManus.

Scott Roberts, the executive director of communications and marketing at Acadia University, said the school would be responding to Dr. Wightman's lawsuit through the courts.

According to his statement of claim, filed on July 7, Dr. Wightman asked to be placed on leave, referred to a counsellor and prevented from visiting campus after informing his employer of the RCMP investigation.

But he said this week that he fully expected to “come out of hiding” after his name was cleared and to go back to work at the school.

At worst, he thought he might lose his positions as director of a faculty and acting dean, but said he was confident in the protection afforded him as a tenured faculty member.

Instead, he was told that he “was done,” and was referred to a section of the university's code of conduct that states employees shall not “engage in community or personal activities in which there could be a conflict with the best interest of the university.”

“The letter of dismissal drips moral disapproval,” he said. “Whether it's my age relative to the other woman, or my marital status, or the fact that bondage was involved, I have no idea.”

Tom MacEwan, Dr. Wightman's lawyer, said he does not believe the school had legal grounds to fire Dr. Wightman for a private affair conducted on his own time.

“You can't take a person's private life, put it under a microscope and determine whether or not the employer agrees with it,” he said. “We think that Acadia just rushed to judgment.”

His client was under no legal obligation to tell his boss about the RCMP investigation, he added, because it was in no way related to the university.

And Dr. Wightman's use of the university computer was within the bounds of acceptable behaviour, he said.

Under common law, Mr. MacEwan says that employers who allege a breach of internal policy must be able to establish that they monitor and police that policy.

Employees must also be told they are doing something wrong and given an opportunity to correct their behaviour, he said.

“If they're suggesting that students and administration and faculty can only use computers for school-related purposes, that's a bit hard to take,” he said. “The ability of an employer to curtain the private lives of its employees I think is very limited. For good reason.”

A report on Dr. Wightman's case by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, released last week, also found that he was fired without cause and recommended he be restored to his position and compensated for his financial losses.

“The termination of any employee who is innocent of criminal behaviour, but of whose personal beliefs and behaviours the administration might disapprove, is an extraordinary breach of employer-employee relations,” the report concluded.

Dr. Wightman still hopes to return to his job, and said he feels a palpable sense of loss when he looks at the campus, which he can see from his window.

The revelations about his life have been embarrassing enough, but he cannot imagine allowing them to lead to the end of his career with the school.

“This was my academic home,” he said. “To be cast out is quite hurtful.”