Nabila Pirani (3L)
At the last Faculty Council meeting, Associate Dean Kerry Rittich introduced the sessional dates for the 2016-2017 school year. Like this academic year, classes will be scheduled on a number of Fridays—these Fridays will be “deemed” to be Mondays, Wednesdays, and so forth, for class schedules. Associate Dean Rittich noted that the deemed days exist to accommodate on-campus interviews (OCIs), public holidays (such as Thanksgiving), and Jewish holidays. It is official U of T Law policy “to cancel classes on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur.” The policy “makes no special provision for other Holy Days.”
Having been at the law school for almost three years now, I still have not wrapped my head around this deemed days thing, especially the ones for religious reasons.
U of T Law’s religious accommodations policy treats students wishing to celebrate religious holidays not accommodated by deemed days the same as those who skip class because they are too lazy to get out of bed. The accommodations policy merely allows affected students to “request permission” for a classmate to record the lecture, with no guarantees that it will be granted. Essentially, this creates an unequal system in which the religious practices of some are accommodated by the rescheduling of classes, and those of others are accommodated (maybe) by class recordings or by notes from friends.
As an added barrier, permission for class recordings must be requested at least one week in advance. For certain religious groups, the one-week requirement is impossible to comply with. Hands up if you belong to a community in which you do not know the actual date for your holiday until the night before.
The universities I attended prior to law school—one in Canada, the other in the USA—did not have deemed days. The University of Toronto does not have them for its undergraduate and graduate programs. The schools our administration continuously compares us to—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—do not have them either.
Perhaps most importantly, in 2008, an Ontario Human Rights Commission investigation found that York University’s deemed days policy of cancelling classes on Jewish holidays resulted in “differential treatment on the basis of creed” in contravention of the Ontario Human Rights Code. York no longer has deemed days for religious reasons. Our school, as far as I can tell, seems to be the last public post-secondary institution in Canada to persist with deemed days for religious reasons.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course Jewish peoples should get robust accommodations for religious observances. Legally and morally, they must. I cannot emphasize that enough. I only wonder why peoples of other faiths and cultures do not get accorded the same standard of accommodations.
So, what’s the solution?
The idealist in me says, deemed days for all! Wouldn’t it be great if we got Rosh Hashanah, and Chinese New Year (happy year of the monkey, by the way), and Eid ul-Fitr, and Easter Monday off? Yes, it would mean a lot of forsaken Fridays, but hey, our Admin could really call us “diverse” then!
Sadly, that is probably not practicable.
If the goal is equal treatment for all in a manner that is implementable, there is really only one solution: no more deemed days for religious reasons, and a robust accommodations policy that actually works.
Post-Script: A group of students has been thinking about religious accommodations policies at the law school – the way they work, the way they don’t work, what to do about them. If we haven’t yet had a chance to speak with you and/or you have something to contribute to the conversation, send us a note at [email protected].
