Talk about a rude awakening. Last December, law students at U of T woke up to the announcement on morning radio shows and in the papers that tuition at their school might more than double in the near future. Nothing about the increase had been discussed publicly at the school. No one had informed the student body.
“We woke up the day before our exams to the CBC, which had picked up the National Post story about tuition going to $25,000,” said Tess Sheldom, a first-year student at the school. She suspects a member of Faculty Council, the school’s governing body, leaked the story, but she doesn’t know who.
What’s worse, Sheldom says, is that students are afraid to speak out about the situation.
Professors are in an even worse spot, because there would be risks attached to publicly advocating against something the dean strongly supports.
Sheldom and others who share these concerns have formed the Student Working group on Tuition (SWOT) to open up discussion about what effects the increase would have on accessibility in the school.
They say discussion is being stifled. “There is a negative environment in law school right now,” reflected SWOT member Jennifer Stone.
“There are faculty members who are feeling under siege [about supporting the increases] . . . . Unfortunately, there are some students who have been battling this issue for many years, and it’s a frustrating task.”
But Ed Morgan, an international and constitutional law professor at the school, doesn’t think anyone had had trouble voicing their opinions. “The dean has held town hall meetings, and the faculty council meetings have been open to the law school. I think the debate has been quite open—I don’t sense that anyone has been shy to speak their mind,” he said, although he acknowledged that professors who endorse the plan may not want to speak up and go against their students.
“I think that opponents to the plan have been very vocal. I don’t think there’s been a chill, but that’s the nature of chill, isn’t it? We wouldn’t hear about it,” he remarked.
John Provart, a member of SWOT, believes faculty members who are opposed to the increases may not speak for fear their position might affect their standing at the law school.
“I think a lot of staff wonder what good it is to speak and drive a wedge between themselves and the administration,” he said.
Sheldom, along with the other members of SWOT, are not as timid.
“We sent an email out, and I got about 20 responses within the day,” Sheldom said. “Everyone was mad about it. We met and talked about plans—we had an idea about a dean’s forum, which turned into a town hall meeting in which Law Dean Ron Daniels talked about his defence of the plan.”
Alexandra Dosman, another member of SWOT, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the plan. Recently, Dosman published a formal critique of the five-year plan in the Globe and Mail and Ultra Vires, the law school newspaper.
“I actually phoned the dean when that story broke . . . his first point was ‘Alex, thank you for your concern, but, you know, this won’t affect you,'” she remarked. “That made me so angry, because the idea that, since our tuition is grandparented [eased in over years], we wouldn’t have any concern about the future of the institution or its accessibility is totally false and offensive.”
In January, plans to implement $22,000 per year tuition were formally articulated by the dean in the ‘Report of the 2001/02 Task Force on the Future of the Faculty.’ In its vision for an improved school, the report expressed “the need to continue to invest intellectual and material resources in the faculty to hold (and improve) our position in an increasingly competitive peer group.”
“It was only at the urging of the student members of the provostial report committee, as [the task force] was then known, that any reference at all was made to tuition in this report. . . I think the report was supposed to be more of an aspirational document, and didn’t take into account tuition as much as it should have,” said Dosman.
The dean could not be reached for comment on the report.
Provart is worried that the proposed plan isn’t doing enough to provide financial relief for those who need it. He labelled the report’s promise to put 35 per cent of tuition money back into financial aid a “big charade,” noting that the government already stipulated that one-third of tuition money go into aid in deregulated programs
“My concern, after sitting on a financial aid committee for two years, is that we’re going ahead with significant increases without taking stock of where we are and undertaking a serious study of who’s not even bothering to apply to law school because of the costs,” said Provart. He noted that the current aid proposals don’t take into account phenomena such as “sticker shock,” wherein the high price of tuition may dissuade eligible students from even applying.
