I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the consequences of this petition have presented an existential threat to this brand new law school Robin dittle is the globe’s corporate law reporter and she’s talking about a letter signed by over 70 students from a Toronto law school during the early days of the Israel Hamas War the repercussions that students have face students who signed and who didn’t sign have been incredibly severe they’ve lost job opportunities and mentors the law school itself has lost donors law firms that partnered with the university to offer students placements have withdrawn from the program the letter supported what it called the Palestinian resistance it was signed by students from the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto metropolitan University this letter came out 2 weeks after hamas’s surprise attack on Israel which killed around 12200 People Israel had retaliated with air strikes that had killed roughly 3,700 people in Gaza at that point the fullscale ground invasion of the territory hadn’t yet begun over the past month and a half Robin has interviewed dozens of people connected to the open letter today she tells us about the Fallout at tm’s law school and what can happen when academic free speech collides with the professional legal world I’m Mana car ramman Wilms and this is the desel from the glob in mail Robin thank you so much for being here it’s good to be here so Robin tell me about tm’s law school like when did it start and how is it different from other law schools so tmu opened its doors in September 2020 kind of peak pandemic it was it was virtual but at that first kind of big press conference the banners read set a new precedent this law school was designed to be different than every other law school in Canada and and it did this in kind of two ways one is it really openly embraced technology this was going to be very Central in the curriculum and it also tried to fix this longstanding gripe about law schools that uh students graduate ready to understand legal Theory but not ready to be working lawyers um and that’s why they do an articling year with getting some on the job experience at Lincoln Alexander students would get that as part of their regular education they would do job placements and in fact they didn’t have to complete an articling year because there was this understanding that they had Real World experience but the kind of I think central thing about what uh tmu law school was trying to do was be unabashedly Progressive this is prominent in all of its marketing materials I don’t want to be just another lawyer I want to be a link lawyer one who advocates for inclusivity amplifies the voices of the unheard innovates the legal profession breaks down barriers and expands the reach of Justice it’s on the the signs when you walk around the law school it’s in its promotional brochure it is going to use the law to change the status quo it is named for the first black Member of Parliament uh it’s Dean a black woman is the only black woman leading one of the 24 law schools in Canada it’s hard to overstate just how much of the school’s identity is wrapped in this idea of being a progressive institution W yeah so so the school positions itself as as quite different here as as you say Robin is more Progressive um so let’s look at then what happened after October 7th like how did the school respond universities historic along with many institutions have taken the position that they need to stay neutral and not weigh into Political matters but students at Lincoln Alexander really felt that because of the ideals and founding principles uh that the law school had laid out that the school really needed to weigh into this discussion publicly especially since it marketed itself as so Progressive right so I imagine students may have a slightly different expectation of it than other schools yeah so the school says no we’re not going to issue any public statement what they do do is they issue an internal note to the school Community only that expresses kind of pain on both sides and calls for peace and Justice and it’s a very middleof the road statement but for those groups that were really advocating for something more this was upsetting so you know the days go by and the situation in Gaza is deteriorating and we are watching this all unfold online and on campus students are glued to their phone and they’re they’re seeing their images but they’re also seeing what their classmates and what their faculty members and professors are sharing and liking and reposting and they’re taking screenshots of um images of students posting you know things like resistance can happen without violence no it can’t or you know this is what ISM does it villainize you and when an associate Dean at tmu was reposting images from the IDF the Israeli military and other statements they found that as very inflammatory they thought that this was you know if an associate Dean is reposting images that they find problematic that the school is taking a stance you know they the school itself would deny this and and would say that the associate Dean’s comments online are protected under academic free speech and that she was also posting from her personal account but I think this just really speaks to how much all of this was boiling over at that time yeah and so this is kind of the context in which this letter then gets written so Robin let’s talk about this letter who wrote it and what did it say at first they do sort of a letter writing campaign directly to the dean of the law school Donnie Young this is not hugely widespread but but some letters are sent to her office but afterwards a group of students decide that they want to escalate things and do a petition and this is where um a student group called the Abolitionist organizing Collective the AOC decided to put together a petition and why don’t I read uh from this petition which I have in front of me because they use extremely inflammatory language please yeah please read some it starts by expressing unequivocal support for Palestinians and then it says quote Israel is not a country it is the brand of a settler Colony so-called Israel has been illegally occupying and ethnically cleansing Palestine since 1948 when the British unlawfully conceited palestine’s territory we the undersigned recognize that the apartheid state referred to as Israel is a product of settler colonialism we stand in solidarity with Palestine and support all forms of Palestinian resistance and efforts toward Liberation the petition goes on to refer to the events of October October 7 as a war crime but it also is very clear that in the letter writer’s view what happened on October 7 was a direct result of Israel’s actions in the last 75 years so the students go on to call on on the administration to drop its neutral position and to publicly call for a ceasefire and to speak out on behalf of Palestinians and they post the document in a Google Document um and there’s a public link so anyone can access it although only those with tmu email addresses are able to sign it it goes uh kind of live on October 20th which is a Friday and within two days more than 70 students had signed this petition about half used their full name and sometimes even year of study and another half uh signed anonymously with monikers like in solidarity with Palestine or uh with initials okay let me just back up and look at what the purpose of the letter was supposed to be like this supposed to be a public letter well it’s a really interesting question because the majority of students that I spoke with said that their understanding was that the document was going to be internal only and privately sent to the dean and the signatories really fall into sort of two groups a group that would sign the letter again tomorrow and a group that says that if they had written it it would have been very different that they didn’t actually agree with a lot of the language and wording but that they in general wanted to show support for Palestinians and that because they didn’t think the document was going to ever be made public they weren’t concerned about endorsing absolutely everything one student said that he saw it as a way to quote open a conversation with the dean and that it wasn’t supposed to be some big official thing now the AOC which organized the petition when they sent it to Dean young the accompanying email said this is an open letter and so this I think just speaks to the fact that this petition really wasn’t super thought out so as you can imagine this quickly leaked online I mean this is an open link these are students with cell phones um it started spreading through group chats and text messages but it quickly left the law school and by Sunday afternoon it was on Twitter the organizers had taken down the petition by this point but you know it’s the internet people took screenshots and were widely reposting it students were being called terrorist sympathizers they’re being threatened that they’ll never get jobs the other side of this is there’s you know Jewish students at Lincoln Alexander who told me that when they saw the petition on the Friday they’re just horrified watching their classmates names be added to this slowly one after another I think something like 74 students signed this document and that represents about a sixth of the the entire law school is there something I guess unique about this petition coming from a law school like has it seemed I guess different than another University petition law schools they straddle these two worlds right they straddle the academic world where there’s a lot of discussion about the importance of free speech and academic freedom exploring different ideas and the professional World law firms the legal Community it’s it’s very risk averse they don’t to do anything that might cost them a client down the road other pressures on Law School are the fact that you know who’s teaching their classes often it’s working lawyers Lincoln Alexander specifically relies on law firms to give their students placements so that they can take that box in their curriculum if you upset the legal World never mind donations by the way and scholarships and all those other things that universities rely on but if you upset the legal Community Lincoln Alexander is going to have a very hard time functioning we’ll be back in a minute how did the University respond how did the law school respond this this letter comes out gets public what what do they say the law school got a copy of the petition right away the student group that organized it sent it to the dean on the Friday so students are signing and the law school administration is watching this kind of all unfold they have an e emergency meeting as soon as it leaks there is you know widespread condemnation and uh you know using Freedom of Information requests I I got samples of the emails that were coming into both tm’s president’s office as well as the the law school and people are just furious they’re calling for the students to be immediately expelled they’re calling for immediate action donors are withdrawing support on the Monday the law school issues a statement condemning the sentiments in the petition and labeling the petition itself as anti-semitic and this was a real betrayal for the students who signed it because at the same time they are being doxed and harassed and they felt that the law school was kind of putting their finger on the scale and making it worse wow and at the same time there was um many in the legal Community he felt that it didn’t go far enough um Jonathan Rosenthal who is a a prominent um defense attorney in Toronto he’s a member of the the Law Society he’s a a prophet Osgood he co-wrote this letter really sharply criticizing the administration expressing grave concern if there was a similar racist letter written about any other group than Jews there wouldn’t have been any discussion they would have used the process that they had in place to investigate and potentially discipline students they wouldn’t have had to call for an independent investigation it would have been action and particularly that the school didn’t mention any consequence quences that the students were going to face and this letter was signed by 20 other prominent lawyers in Toronto so we’re starting to see kind of this this fall out here that’s happening as a result of this there there were more consequences for the students right Robin we talked about the initial you know kind of being doxed online but there were wide-reaching consequences beyond that even so this petition lands in the middle of the summer job hunt for law students the petition goes viral on Sunday this is the that students are supposed to be notified about summer job interviews and many had already been told that they would be interviewed and within days some of the country’s largest most prominent law firms you know Miller Thompson Castle’s Brock eron Burless um they start sending any tmu student who has been tapped for an interview notices saying did you sign this letter and if you did you should consider withdrawing your application was also interesting is Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General started emailing tmu students asking them to sign an attestation that they had not been involved in the petition so students are losing potential job opportunities they also lost um mentors there was a student who had signed up for a mentorship program with a crown attorney that evaporated with these students they have some of the most prominent lawyers in the country telling them that their lives are over yeah wow and I understand that these consequences wen’t weren’t just for the students who signed the petition right can you tell me about that yeah that is such a good point part of the crisis has been that because half of the students that signed this document did so anonymously the entire school is quote unquote tainted in the eyes of some there was a feeling within the firms that we can’t hire anyone from tmu because how do we know if they’ve signed this letter and within the law firms there were many particularly Jewish Partners who were extremely upset about the sentiments expressed in this letter and very surprised that a law school had this many students who would endorse something like this and they’re saying we don’t want people who feel this way in our office you know they don’t want to upset potential clients and it’s not everyone for sure the uh there was actually a backlash to the backlash 700 members of the legal Community a lot of academic mics lawyers um some other students signed a letter supporting the students and saying what was happening to them and the blacklisting was very unfair and that the whole thing kind of wreak of a a quote new McCarthyism but there’s no doubt that in the corporate law firms in particular and in government there was a real uh sense that what do we do with this law school and so the rest of the school that didn’t sign many students were just absolutely Furious that they’re you know they’re paying $25,000 a year to go to a law school and now their degree is Tainted that their job prospects are going to be impacted and it just created this intense division within the school Community as well oh I know you spoke to some of the students who signed the petition um what did they say about why they signed it because you read out some of the segments before you know a lot of people might look at that wording and say this is pretty extreme there’s a lot of incendiary things here but what was the thinking behind why they put their name to this so there’s one group that you know would has no regrets about signing the document and I asked them about some of the the phrases that have garnered the most attention and the most blowback so for example the sentences that question whether Israel is a legitimate country and to this students told me well Israel isn’t a country and by the way neither is Canada these are students who really uh believe in decolonization they would say that not critiquing Israel as a colonial state is in fact discriminatory because the only reason you wouldn’t critique it is because they are Jewish as for the line about all forms of resistance this is something that I think you’re hearing at a lot of the student encampments in the Pro Palestinian solidarity movements the Lincoln Alexander students would say that what that means is that it is not the position of them to tell an oppressed colonized people how to resist and they also say that the letter is very clear that October 7 is a war crime and some will say that people who are upset about that line are purposely misreading the document that’s their position and did you speak to any Jewish students Robin I’m just curious like the Jewish community at the school what did they say about how they felt about what was being said here so the Jewish students said that the letter is extremely anti-semitic that when they read that their classmates were supporting all forms of resistance the only way to understand that is that it is justifying violence murder rape against innocent Israeli civilians um in in their mind when you’re questioning the legitimacy of Israel to exist you’re questioning their right to be safe because the Israeli state is the place where Jews are supposed to be safe and that when there was no Israel Jews had nowhere to go and Canada turned away Jews around the time of the second world war so that there’s no way to read this besides it being deeply hateful and and sympathizing with terrorism I can I can imagine how tens this would get within the school then so so let me ask you Robin about the school’s further response because I understand that there is an external review that the school wanted done so so what happened there so in November tmu the university not the law school announces that it is bringing in the former Chief Justice of Nova Scotia Michael McDonald who most recently led the mass casualty commission to investigate whether the students had violated the code of conduct so the report is released actually just a few weeks ago and Justice McDonald concludes that the petition is not anti-semitic he highlights the fact that it is a critique of the state of Israel and not Jew or Judaism he has a lot of criticism for the way that the students kind of positioned uh their arguments and he actually lays out some advice for advocacy in the future but in general he says that um what they wrote is protected under the University’s code of free speech and that students are given a wide latitude to explore different ideas um Perfection is not the standard he says so students are entitled to make mistakes and his conclusion you know is met with great Relief by many who signed the document and with deep anger in in some corners of the legal Community who say that this is insane the letter is of course anti-semitic and they say that the fact that there was no consequences for any of the students who signed this is actually going to make moving forward more challenging this is really at the core of this the what is anti-Semitic is anti-zionism or criticism of the state of Israel anti-semitic and I spoke to academics and lawyers and people with opinions on this on all sides and there is this deep divide of opinion you know one of the lawyers that I spoke to Adam Wegman who uh he’s been very vocal on this issue his firm was one of the ones that withdrew a donation to tmu after the the letter he finds it very frustrating that in an era when we’ve been talking so much about anti racism and microaggressions that other people get to tell him a Jewish man what is anti-Semitic and he he says as many have said it’s also important to contextualize that the Holocaust was not hundreds of years ago this happened in his parents’ lifetime this is very real and that that is why critiquing Israel is challenging his right to be safe I also spoke with um an Associate law professor from the University of Windsor who’s member of the Jewish faculty Network and she said it’s very frustrating when people collapse this idea of anti-Semitism and anti-zionism and that you know to her criticism of Israel even if it hurts Jewish people who really identify with Israel is just a difference of political opinion and that the Israeli government purposely has tried to link anti-zionism with anti-Semitism as a way to Shield themselves from scrutiny Robin we started this conversation by talking about tm’s law school how it wanted to do things differently how it wanted to be more Progressive and and I guess I’m just wondering after this situation has played out this year where does that leave the school and and its mission that it wanted to be different I think the lasting component will be that Lincoln Alexander is not going to be able to kind of position itself in the same way I think there’s real questions of whether a law school can ever be truly different Progressive I think it’s worth noting that while some students were attracted to Lincoln Alexander because they thought it was a place that they could really you know learn about and and do the work that they wanted in in areas like human rights law and immigration refugees helping unhoused people um there are people who want to be corporate lawyers there are people who who are interested in commercial law and as a law school you want to have that full range open to your students so where I mean where does this all leave the students then I mean that’s a really good question uh I think there is going to be an asterisk beside many of the students who are there right now um I did try to figure out uh around summer jobs had things Chang for students I asked uh Lincoln Alexander for for their stats because they do track it they wouldn’t provide it however anecdotally it does seem like a lot of of students uh got summer jobs um but not necessarily in those kind of risk averse corporate firms I guess it is also worth mentioning though that the Jewish students that I’ve talked to said that they’ve um you know had a lot of support within the legal Community particularly senior Jewish members of the bar who have reached out provided support and help I think some of them have have been able to get jobs for sure as well I think for some students what this has presented is is a choice that maybe their career path is going to go in a different direction than they might have thought previously Robin thank you so much for being here and for taking the time to walk us through all of it thank [Music] you that’s it for today I’m Manar ramman Wims our interns are Aza saer and Kelsey arnet our producers are meline white Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Adrien Chung is our senior producer and Matt frer is our managing editor thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you soon
Canada’s newest law school is in crisis. After an open-letter called for the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at Toronto Metropolitan University to drop its neutral position on the Israel-Hamas war, donors pulled funding and law firms withdrew summer internship placements – leaving students feeling ostracized and abandoned. The fallout has left the law school asking questions about who and what they represent and where they go from here.
The Globe’s corporate law reporter, Robyn Doolittle, breaks down the rift within the school, what the self-deemed progressive law school is doing to mitigate the damage and the letter’s consequences with the professional legal world.
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This has me smiling from within! ?