A recent case involving a student from York University who requested an alternative assignment for religious reasons has spurred a controversial debate on best practices when specific rights conflict with one another. While any situation where rights appear to be in competition is bound to be complicated, the issue becomes needlessly complex when irrelevant parts of the story are mistaken for significant information. By requiring that the course administrator comply with his student’s inherently sexist proposal, York University sanctioned sexism, and none of this case’s specific features function to exonerate such a response.
Earlier this year, a student at York University who was enrolled in an online course requested special accommodation for the completion of a group assignment because his religious beliefs prevented him from interacting with female classmates. While the professor of the course decided not to comply with the student’s request, both the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and the university’s Human Rights Centre asserted that the professor was required to accommodate the student on the basis of his right to freedom of religion.
In defense of their ruling, York stressed that if the course had not been an online course, their position would have been different.
York is a publicly funded, secular institution that is committed to gender equality. Naturally, York is equally committed to supporting religious freedom, however there is a difference between allowing for freedom of religion and instituting systematic discrimination in order to accommodate a particular individual’s requests. York should not act in such a way that women feel they are considered second class citizens.
York’s case is that because it was the student’s expectation that he would not be required to meet with other students, his request should be honoured. The reasoning behind this argument seems to be that because the student was not made aware that he would be required to work with women for an assignment, he should be allowed an alternative method of assessment, given that with full knowledge, he would have enrolled in a different course.
While it may be the case that the student was unaware that he would have to work with women, this does not make it permissible to subscribe to patriarchal thinking in order to accommodate his request. Whether or not the student knew he would be required to work with female students upon enrolment in the course is extraneous to the issue of what to do when basic human rights conflict.
Once all irrelevancies are stripped away, the only question remaining is whether or not one individual’s basic human right to exercise freedom of religion should be accommodated over the rights of female students to equality. This question is messy, but not tremendously so — in fact, it’s far neater than has been portrayed.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission clearly states, “The core of a right is more protected than its periphery”. Preventing women from being systematically devalued is certainly a core concern motivating rights protecting gender equality. The York student’s requested application of the right to religious freedom is not nearly so central.
While the right to receive accommodation in cases where one’s religious beliefs prevent them from participating to the fullest of their capacity is an application of the right to religious freedom, it is a periphery one. A periphery application of the right to religious freedom should not be accommodated over the core rights of another.
Solving these problems is not a matter of pitting one freedom against another to establish a deeply offensive hierarchy of importance. Rather, it’s about seeing if one of the opposing rights is being applied in a way that is more intimately associated with the reasons for which that right was instated. This is something that can be accomplished if there is a clear view of what is at stake.
The recent York University scandal is a case of misapplied protocol resulting from a failure to consider the salience of particular features. Perhaps such a mistake could have been avoided if the university had made a less chaotic appreciation of the situation.
Phyllis Pearson is a philosophy student at Victoria College.
