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Excellent Barriers

Build the wall

You may have heard about the campaign to raise money [subsidize increased tuition] called Excellence Without Barriers and the “so-called” counter-campaign Barriers to Excellence. Well now, the Faculty* would like to announce to you, our lovely donors, a counter-counter fundraising campaign called Excellent Barriers.

Yes, you heard right. This is the long-awaited Phase 2 of the building renewal plan. Essentially, we are fundraising to erect the most excellent barriers of any Canadian law school. This can include razor wire, steel-reinforced bollards, a moat, or—if the campaign goes poorly—simply stacking the unused treatises from the library in front of all the doors.

Excellent Barriers would accomplish several of our strategic objectives:

1. Academic Excellence  

As you know, 99% of our faculty members believe that they are living in New Haven, Connecticut. To discover that they have, in fact, spent the last 20 years teaching law in Canada’s largest public university just might kill them, or worse, lead them to accept a tenured position at the University of Michigan. More money for more barriers (ideally high enough to block the CN tower entirely from view) will help maintain the illusion that our faculty members are, in fact, American professors. This will also prevent them from flocking south of the border when they discover that their salaries are in Canadian dollars.

2. Faculty to Student Ratio

Offsetting costs by increasing the number of students in each class is unacceptable. Instead, we are looking at increasing the quality of our incoming class by reducing the number of students admitted. Our proposed renovations seek to address this issue by constructing a “Wipe Out” style obstacle course that will be integrated into our admissions criteria. Not only will we expect applicants to have a 4.0 and 180 LSAT, but also transferable skills such as the agility, balance, and grip strength necessary to navigate a grueling obstacle course where one misstep results in their falling neck-deep into mud. (The children of appellate-level justices and managing partners of downtown law firms will instead be directed to play a game of hopscotch).

3. Career Opportunities

U of T Law has an unparalleled reputation for matching students with articling positions and summer jobs. However, we wouldn’t want the burden of paying off private loans to prevent students from taking on jobs in their field of interest. That is why we are restructuring the debt forgiveness program to be more accessible to debt-saddled alumni. Graduates who have decided to pursue delusional career fantasies such as family law, criminal defense, or refugee and immigration law can pay off their loans by putting in 40 or so hours a week of honest labour digging a moat around the law school. Not only will a moat allow students to maintain their physical fitness by adding a brief swim to their morning routine, but it will also be a great place to house the law school’s beloved wellness-sharks.

We would like to thank all our donors for their continued support of University of Toronto Faculty of Law. We are currently soliciting naming rights for the aforementioned excellent barriers. Bennett Jones has already claimed the obstacle course, but shark-naming rights are currently selling for 10k a pop.

*The Faculty is not, at this time, actually financing a system of physical barriers for the law school. However, we hope this does not preclude future deans from committing to such a campaign.

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