First point: Potter stepped down from an administrative job, not from his "faculty job" and is returning to that well-salaried position he occupies in the faculty.
Second point: An administrator represents his school and its reputation in ways that go beyond what  an ordinary academic does. What he writes outside the campus is part of that mandate. He's not a solitary pen.
Third: Potter did not express thoughts that were "not necessarily well thought out." He wrote a piece of flimsy tabloid journalism, tying one event, a single communications failure, by a few police officers, to every vulgar Ontario prejudice imaginable regarding the lazy and socially irresponsible Québécois. If he'd done that to the ranchers of S. Alberta, while working at U of Calgary, he'd have been tarred and feathered by now. This editorial, then, is regrettable.