The Faculty’s attempt at delivering in-person courses gets an LP
U of T Law departed from many of its peers in June when it announced its intention to proceed with a hybrid remote/in-person academic year.
While the majority of Canadian law schools had already announced their intention to proceed completely remotely, the Faculty of Law opted to allow students to attend classes in-person with a remote option for students with “health concerns.”
Though the Faculty’s plans seemed promising when they were announced, their execution has been a sore disappointment. The Faculty’s efforts to provide in-person course delivery have failed to live up to their promises. Its pandemic mitigation rules are intrusive and — in many cases — irrational.
In-Person Classes Aren’t Really In-Person
The Faculty deserves a failing grade for its efforts to provide in-person classes. Prior to the semester, the Faculty represented many of these in-person classes as conventional, lecture-based courses. However, after beginning the semester, students realized that many of these courses will be delivered almost entirely online.
For example, take the upper-year course Secured Transactions. The Faculty advertised it as an in-person course, yet the vast majority is delivered online. The course description on the Faculty of Law website states, “this course will meet two times a week in-person.” The timetable displays the same information: the course meets twice per week in room J 250. The syllabus, however, discloses that during the entire course, there will only be eight in-person lectures.
Canadian Income Tax Law is another example. Despite its representation on the Faculty’s site that the course would not be entirely remote, less than a third of its course hours are in-person. The syllabus of this course states: “This course will meet two times a week. One meeting will be in person. The other will be hybrid, rotating between AV conferences and in-class meetings.” Despite this unequivocal representation, the syllabus reveals that the Wednesday “hybrid” lecture is delivered online only.
The effect of these misrepresentations is that many “in-person” students actually attend the vast majority of their class hours virtually. Would most in-person students really have stayed in Toronto for the fall term if they knew that almost all of their lectures would be delivered exclusively online?
Many students acted in reliance on the school’s information and took on financial commitments to participate in-person for the fall semester. Yet upon arriving, they’ve learned that they have received nothing more than what they would have if they proceeded online. While everyone anticipated the risk of another Faculty-wide shutdown, that is no excuse for the Faculty’s failure to deliver in-person courses as represented.
There is No Advantage to Being Remote
Another point for which the school deserves criticism is in its treatment of remote students. Remote students pay the same fees as in-person students, yet are denied access to the building and other law school facilities. In exchange, most remote students anticipated that they would be relieved of the need to attend lectures in-person, while in-person students would be required to go.
After the fall semester began, many remote students were disappointed to learn that being “remote” confers no benefit at all over being in-person. The vast majority of “in-person” classes freely distribute the Zoom links to all of their in-person lectures to anyone who desires them. In-person students can attend remotely in the same way as remote students.
If remote students had known this prior to the start of the semester, it is doubtful that any would have elected to go entirely remote, even if they had no intention of remaining in Toronto. After all, opting to be remote simply means losing building privileges and losing the option of attending any lectures in-person with no corresponding benefit.
Some Mitigation Measures are Intrusive and Nonsensical
In an effort to limit viral transmission between students in the building, the school has introduced a number of highly visible mitigation measures. Some of these measures are reasonable, but many are intrusive, nonsensical, and even counterproductive.
Of the smorgasbord of measures available to criticize, surely the most egregious is the University of Toronto Libraries’ decision to close their stacks. “Once touched, a book needs to be quarantined for four days,” the Bora Laskin Law Library proclaimed in a September 2 email. One need not be an immunologist to see that this policy is nonsensical. The grocery store doesn’t quarantine its apples after they’re touched by shoppers looking to assess their ripeness. Even more obvious, the Library itself has left its book of campaign donors on its customary pedestal for any passerby to touch. I’m no doctor, but I’m fairly certain that COVID doesn’t discriminate between books of donors and books in the stacks.
Books aside, the university’s rigid insistence on mask-usage at all times substantially reduces the value of the library as a work space. Students are required to wear a mask at all times in the library, no matter how far they are from another student, even if they are sitting alone in a study room with the door closed.
Wearing a mask while working at a distance is distracting, and other institutions have deemed it to be unnecessary. McGill University, for example, does not require students to wear masks while seated stationary in its study hubs, as long as students are able to keep two metres away from others.
Outside the library, the Faculty’s attempt to implement one-way traffic in and out of lecture halls has caused the very congestion that the policy seeks to prevent. One way traffic does not work to reduce congestion in a lecture hall where students enter together at the beginning of a lecture, and exit together at the end. One-way traffic simply forces all entering and exiting students to use the same door while leaving another door completely unused. This causes more congestion and crowding than would occur if students were allowed to use both doors for both entry and exit.
No Excuses for Defying Common Sense
No one demands perfection from the Faculty. Students recognize that the administration is composed of lawyers rather than immunologists, and academics rather than pragmatists. But this does not excuse the Faculty from measures that defy basic common sense.
It does not take a public-health doctor to observe that many of the school’s policies are overly formalistic and defy basic common sense. Nor does it take a lawyer to observe that the Faculty’s in-person course delivery is not up to par.
“I’m just grateful the Faculty is trying to go in-person,” a colleague commented to me while I was writing this article. I don’t share my colleague’s desire to give the administration a participation medal for its mediocre performance.
Certainly the Faculty deserves some credit for trying to do what most other law schools wouldn’t. But when students pay by far the highest law school tuition fees in the country, they expect to see some results.
Editors’ note: maybe the semester isn’t so bad, read another perspective here.
