In a move that has sent shockwaves throughout the legal community, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law has made the bold decision to revamp its 1L ethics training program. Again.
“I thought we had a great thing going with Ethics Week, until UV published a pretty scathing editorial about it back in 2012. Apparently, it was boring!” Mayo Moran, Dean of the Faculty of Law, said in an emergency media scrum early this morning. “So naturally we decided to scrap the bastard and figure out a better way to instill a bare minimum of ethics into the teeming mass of selfishness and greed that is the U of T Law student body.”
Ethics Week was condensed into two full-day Friday programs for the 2013/2014 academic year, and presented bleary-eyed, hungover 1Ls with seminars on a variety of topics such as civility, client relations and probably at least one more thing after the boxed lunch.
“Unfortunately, I’ve boiled down cold, hard statistics that prove the 1Ls found the Ethics Days boring as well, give or take a 65% margin of error,” Ben Alarie, Dean of the First Year program, stated.
“No, you may not see the stats. They’re mine…my own,” Alarie continued, with a glint in his eye, after this reporter inquired about a copy of the data. “The administration has decided that we need a new strategy to compete with students’ ever-decreasing attention spans, and also Flappy Bird.”
To that end, U of T Law will be rolling out the creatively named “Ethics Hour” for the upcoming 2014/2015 academic year. While details of the new program are still in the works, this reporter has confirmed it will at some point include a 45-second session entitled “Truthiness: How to Not Lie”, followed by a long 3-minute workshop where students will be paired up with a classmate and must attempt to truthfully answer the question “Why did you decide to come to law school?”
“To be perfectly honest, our expectations for that one are not high,” Moran conceded.
Other topics include “Confidentiality: Is It Even Worth It?” and “Civility: Up Yours!”.
To make sure the program is as well attended as possible, the administration has decided to schedule Ethics Hour from 6:30 to 7:30 pm on the first Sunday of February.
“My data showed that, for some reason, students are never doing work on that Sunday night. So we figured we’d do them a favour and set it up so that they don’t have to take time out of studying to learn how not to be raging assholes,” Alarie said.
“I think the change is a great idea! I know I zoned out for most of my own ethics training when I was in 1L, so I don’t think I really got the most out of it,” Marissa Brock, a current 3L, said while breaking into one of her classmates’ lockers. “I’ve got a feeling I’ve been left with a few moral grey areas.”
The prospective crop of 0Ls has pledged on lawstudents.ca not to be taken in by the slick new program. Surprisingly, however, as of press time the thread has devolved entirely into inane stat boasting and circle jerking.
