Why is anyone shocked that a donor can influence the hiring decisions at an elite Law School? That’s what it’s all about.
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As a graduate, I see the recent hiring scandal at UofT Law as part of a long-standing policy of excluding diverse voices.
There used to be an antique table in the foyer of University of Toronto Law School — a polished refectory table that taunted students looking to offload their heavy legal texts. The School administration didn’t want students to avail themselves of this obvious resting place, so it put up a sign saying “This table is for your viewing pleasure only. The Administration.” Soon after, a student surreptitiously replaced the sign with one that said “Only The Administration would get viewing pleasure from this table.”
Like the table, UofT Law School’s commitment to such things as equality and diversity of opinion is for viewing pleasure only. The School likes to have a principled veneer but as the recent hiring scandal reveals, when you poke a stick into the funding hornet’s nest, things get ugly very quickly.
For those unfamiliar with the scandal, a recent New Yorker article gives a quick lesson on the whole affair. In short, a hiring committee offered a job to a highly qualified candidate, Professor Valentina Azarova, to run UofT’s International Human Rights Program, but because Professor Azarova had published some articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that displeased some donors, pressure was put on the dean of the law school to rescind the offer. He did so, creating excuses about work permits, travel visas, bla bla bla. This prompted those who still believe in academic freedom — including some of UofT’s own Faculty members — to cry foul. An inquiry was set up headed by someone friendly to both the funding community and the dean. Predictably, it whitewashed The Administration’s decision.
After the facts of the hiring scandal emerged, an association of university professors censured UofT Law on the basis that the decision to revoke the job offer was a breach of academic freedom. Academics from all over the world pulled out of UofT events in protest. The Law School has responded by defending its decision while indicating it will reassess its human rights program.
As an alumni member of both the law school and its human rights program, nothing about this story surprised me. UofT Law — like other elite law schools — has a long history of choosing money over diversity. For example, The Administration likes to boast that it has a diverse student body, but in fact, students from disadvantaged groups are grossly underrepresented. This is not by chance. In 2003, The Administration wanted to increase tuition fees to a level that would be unaffordable to the average family. A fierce fight ensued. Petitions were circulated. Arguments were made about how this would adversely impact the legal profession. In the end, those who wanted to promote diversity lost. Tuition was increased from a few thousand dollars per year in the late 1990’s to over $34,000 by 2020/21. The Administration justified the increase in fees by promising financial aid for students from lower income families. This was a red herring. After tuition fees rose, registration from low-income families dropped drastically.[1] Successive deans did seek additional funding from both alumni and the corporate sector to fund some scholarships. This only made the law school even more dependent on donors, and when those donors disapproved of a hiring choice, The Administration had to abide. In other words, the seeds of the recent hiring scandal were planted years ago, when The Administration embraced a business model that made it dependent on the corporate class.
And like the hiring scandal, the tuition fee controversy followed the same rules for evading accountability. A report was prepared by the University’s Provost that exonerated The Administration and feebly suggested that financial aid be increased to provide educational opportunities to the Faculty of Law. This tepid conclusion was as uninspired as the report’s analysis of the problem.[2]
If the reader detects some bitterness about the fight over tuition increases, they would not be wrong. I come from a low-income family and attended UofT Law School in the early 1990’s before the increase. I would never have applied to UofT Law had I been faced with the high tuition fees it has today. Scholarships would not have helped. I happened to receive a tuition scholarship to UofT, but it was one that I had not applied for. It was granted to me automatically after I was accepted by the school. Like other students who come from uneducated parents, I would never have had the confidence or even knowledge to know that I could qualify for any scholarship. Moreover, scholarships for students who demonstrate “academic excellence” do not mitigate the harm done by high tuition fees because the concept of academic excellence is biased in itself. Scholarships are given to those who get high marks, but evaluation mechanisms are flawed and the evaluators themselves come largely from privilege. Scholarships have not worked in American Ivy League schools, and they have not worked at UofT.
So I took the decision to increase tuition fees very personally. To me, it signified that people like myself are not valued at the Law School, that the perspectives we bring to the educational experience and to the profession are not important, and that training members of all groups in society is not considered a part of the institution’s main responsibilities. Like the decision to revoke the job offer to Professor Azarova, the increase in tuition fees revealed that UofT Law does not give priority to cultivating diversity in the legal profession.
UofT Law is not alone, nor is it even the worst offender. The Ivy League law schools in the United States wrote the playbook that UofT follows. The Law School consciously modeled itself on Harvard and Yale. It chose to change the name of its degree from Bachelor of Laws to Juris Doctorate in order to emulate the American system. The objective was to groom its student for jobs on New York’s Wall Street in addition to Toronto’s Bay Street.
Part of the business model that UofT copied from the American Ivy League schools was corporate sponsorship of law school events. Corporate sponsors are a mainstay of the educational experience at UofT Law and other elite law schools. They’re present from orientation at the beginning of first year and persist until the hires at the end of third year. Students start their legal training with the names of corporate firms printed on the T-shirts on their backs. Then, when students graduate with a large debt load because of the high tuition fees, the new members of the legal profession are pressured to work in the corporate firms to pay off those debts. The corporate world gets its lawyers and the new lawyers get entry into the 1%.
None of this is natural. It’s not natural that we should become familiar with the names of corporate firms even before we learn the names of major constitutional cases. It’s not right that the names of donors are plastered throughout the school but not the names of those who have fought for social justice. This is a conscious choice. It’s a choice to make these law schools into training camps for the legal soldiers that go on to defend the capitalist fortress. A few members of less privileged groups may be allowed to pass through, giving the schools an air of legitimacy. But at its core, the model is anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic.
It begins with the entrance criteria. The students at these law schools are largely from higher-income and educated families. At UofT, even long before the increase in tuition, my classmates came from a long line of lawyers and judges. The very dean who revoked the job offer to Professor Azarova attended UofT Law at the same time as me. He is the son of a Supreme Court judge and former dean. Students from these privileged backgrounds tend to perform better academically, to trust the existing system, and then to assume positions that give them the power to reproduce it.
Students from underprivileged backgrounds have a different perspective and a different trajectory. Their arguments and points of view don’t resonate with those who are personally shielded from the inequalities in society. For this reason, they are often dismissed, belittled, and evaluated more harshly. But it is precisely this diversity of perspective that is needed both in the hallways of academia and the hallways of power. Underprivileged voices, as unrefined as they may be, fill an important pedagogical role, particularly in the institutions training our future policy-makers. Privileged people may have opinions and a command of language that is mistaken for intelligent, but they are oblivious to things that seem obvious to people of colour or low-income groups.
One experience I had in the early 1990's is illustrative. I attended a barbeque with a group of classmates. As we sat enjoying the food and warm weather, the topic of police violence came up. I remarked that police officers are disproportionately violent against people of colour. The mood at the party immediately turned very dark. My friends became offended at my suggestion that police officers were racist. An argument broke out and people stormed out of the party furious. Now in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, some of these people would have a different reaction. Some might forget that they reacted with hostility, or believe that somehow it was the way that I made my arguments, and not the arguments themselves, that offended them.
I have no doubt that my arguments were unsophisticated, but this in itself is a symptom of inequality. Part of the elite playbook is to exploit the clumsy attempts to attack the existing power structures. Back in the 1990’s, I was unarmed with the requisite statistics. Thanks to the hard work of many critical race scholars, activists and progressive journalists, the body of evidence to support the BLM movement has grown. And when something such as the murder of George Floyd happens that makes civil society erupt, the evidence is at hand. We now have the data to back up what seemed to many of us to be self-evident.[3] But the fact that my classmates could not even fathom this reality without statistical proof was a symptom of their privilege. And this is one of the problems with a system that excludes diverse voices. Society remains divided. The elite continues to be baffled by the opinions of the underclass while the underclass continues to be frustrated that the elite doesn’t accept the things that we know to be true. Like at the barbeque, there is a breakdown of social order.
Some people still hope that the job offer to Professor Azarova will be reinstated. The University Teachers’ Association, for example, says it will continue the censure until this is done.[4] While it is important to seek justice for the individual involved in this incident, this is not enough to “right the wrong” because the wrong is so much bigger than one faculty position. A few jobs or a few scholarships here and there won’t cut it. We do not need charity. We do not need a course correction. We need a complete 180. We need an overthrow of the business model that dominates schools like UofT Law. It is interesting to note that south of the border, there is increasing political support for free university education, something unfathomable just a few years ago. This is the result of an increasing recognition, in response to the crisis of democracy in the US, that barriers to education are a threat to the values of a democratic society, and ultimately, to democracy itself.
The current dean of UofT Law has promised a few reforms, but an important achievement of the Black Lives Matter movement is that incremental changes are no longer seen as sufficient. Disadvantaged groups increasingly demand changes to the underlying causes. For academic institutions, it is not enough to just add a few diverse voices and stir. They must reform their governing structures, change admission criteria, abandon corporate funding, change evaluation methods, and above all, make tuition affordable. Education has to be put to the service of society at large. The current business model of elite schools — corporate sponsorship, private funding and high tuition fees — is failing to serve the needs of society. The Administration no doubt believes they can continue to play by the old rules. Perhaps they’re right. Or perhaps they are disregarding dangerous forces that are building in response to a deeply unjust and unequal society.
Notes
[1] See “Missing Pieces IV: An Alternative Guide to Post-Secondary Education,” May 2003, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, at https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/National_Office_Pubs/mp4.pdf; and “Tuition Fee Increases and the History of Racial Exclusion in Canadian Legal Education” by Charles C. Smith, December 2004, at http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/book/export/html/8976.
[2] See “Response to the Provost Study of Accessibility and Career Choice in the University of Toronto Faculty of Law”, Canadian Bar Association, April 2003, at https://www.cba.org/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=0994e78c-a58e-44c5-868d-f94e0ea9a351.
[3] Even the Supreme Court of Canada has now recognized racial profiling by police: https://ablawg.ca/2020/06/26/supreme-court-of-canada-finally-addresses-racial-profiling-by-police/.
[4]“U of T could right the wrong — by hiring the ‘highly qualified’ human rights scholar whose appointment it scuttled.” by Shree Paradkar, Toronto Star, 1 April 2021, available at https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2021/04/01/u-of-t-could-right-the-wrong-by-hiring-the-highly-qualified-human-rights-scholar-whose-appointment-it-scuttled.html
