Amir Eftekarpour (1L)
An open letter to the SLS about the future of student advocacy at U of T law
Yesterday, the Students’ Law Society (SLS) announced the cancellation of the Spring Pledge Drive. As relieved as I am about the outcome, the tone and reasoning in the cancellation email sends a worrying message about the state of student engagement at the faculty. More broadly, this process has raised questions as to whether our student government is set up for effective advocacy. Before saying anything more, I want to say explicitly that I think the members of the SLS have been acting with the best of intentions and have been looking to help their peers with the Pledge Drive. My concerns relate to the culture and governance of the overall organization.
If you have not read the email, take a look, particularly at the last few paragraphs. The SLS spends most of the email reiterating its views on the Pledge Drive. The SLS maintains that the program is primarily a community-building initiative that will also help students fund public-interest gigs. The campaign would purportedly not affect the SLS’ ability to advocate on issues like tuition, financial aid, and funding sources. This was in response to concerns about whether asking students for donations for work placements, when we already pay $30,000 for those and other services, is problematic and contradictory to the principles we should stand for as a student body.
The SLS does not list or analyse any of those concerns as the reason for the cancellation. Instead, the campaign was canceled because the “controversy surrounding the program has made it impossible for the Pledge Drive to fulfill its purpose of building community or to raise the required funds to achieve its goals […] continuing the Pledge Drive would only exacerbate divisions within the law school community unproductively at the present time.” That’s it.
Basically, if it was not for the criticisms of us meddling kids, this program would be running just fine. Students who raised concerns about using institutionalized charity to pay for services at a school that charges $30,000 in tuition have unfortunately been cast as malcontents who created “unproductive” divisions and “controversy,” ruining an otherwise wonderful community-building effort.
The SLS’ communication about the Pledge Drive has not changed at all, in either tone or substance. Compare the cancellation email to the one sent last week announcing the Town Hall. It is effectively the same. Not a single idea, concern, or principle raised by students has actually been constructively engaged, let alone acknowledged as legitimate.
Maybe you are thinking, “Amir, you got what you wanted. Eat a snickers bar, man. You’re not yourself when you’re hungry. What more do you want?”
I want our student body to challenge itself to develop a strong, permanent advocacy program to address current and future issues relating to the experience of U of T students.
I want us to challenge each other to really think about what role students should play in governance of this Faculty. Concerns about the building, curriculum, obscenely high tuition, and the state of articling and the job-market are shared by many. We need to engage in consistent, principled, and pragmatic discussion to ensure student interests do not get lost in the shuffle.
The SLS must encourage students to speak up on these issues, and to dissent and provide feedback on its programming and advocacy.
The SLS must listen to student concerns and communicate those concerns to the Administration. Even if the SLS disagrees with some students, it has an obligation to engage with those students on their ideas.
If the SLS does not engage in a respectful back-and-forth with its students and simply criticizes some for creating an “unproductive” and “disruptive” situation, can students really rely on it to act as their representative to the administration?
Lastly, I heard from many SLS representatives that they were acting with the best of intentions and had simply not foreseen the principled or pragmatic issues that students later brought up. I think this is because of a lack of governance and policy knowledge at Student Affairs and Governance. Any student, with a minimum amount of policy training, would be able to recognize potential program pitfalls in the future.
I have one simple idea to foster a more consistent basis for dialogue between students, the SLS, and the administration. It is the “Principles, Concerns, and Recommendations” (PCR) model of student advocacy, used by student advocates around Ontario.
First, the SLS needs to identify a set of Principles to advance across issue areas, ranging from tuition to accessibility. For instance, “Law students should be admitted on merit, not ability to pay.” Second, the SLS should use the available data sources on each issue to identify Concerns (obstacles to achieving those principles). For instance “The Faculty effectively turns students away due to insufficient access to credit.” Third, the SLS should identify a course of action: “Admissions should be needs blind and financial aid should be entirely need-based.”
Through the PCR model, the SLS can both signal what it stands for to students and the administration, and make concrete progress on student priorities. This sort of codification also massively increases institutional memory, while allowing each year’s SLS the flexibility to establish its own PCRs.
