Dear Colleagues

I am writing in response to the Dean’s letter of January 10 in which he

outlines his reasons for supporting a student who for religious reasons

requested that he not be required to interact with females for the

completion of a group assignment. There is a great deal that I could say

in response to the Dean's letter; however, in the interest of brevity I will

only comment on five specific matters that he raises. More detailed

documentation is available upon request.

Before I concentrate on these five matters I should specify that

throughout my actions were governed by two considerations. First,

York has a commitment to gender equality. Second, while the Ontario

Human Rights Code allows accommodations for religious reasons, such

accommodations must not have the effect of restricting the rights of

others. In the situation under consideration granting the male student’s

request for an accommodation would have been inconsistent with

York’s core values and would have infringed upon the right of female

students to be treated with respect by males.

1. The Dean states, "the course was listed and coded as being

offered exclusively on-line. Thus the student registered in the

course in the reasonable expectation that he would not be obliged

to come to campus to interact, in person, with other students." (In

actuality the student does come to campus to participate in at

least two other courses that he is taking.) In fact, in a letter to the

Vice Dean on September 27 I pointed out that the official

departmental description of the course included the sentence,

“course participants will actually conduct focus groups and

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analyze survey data using SPSS.” In module 1 of the course this

point is reemphasized. Students are told, “you will use members

of your group as subjects for your focus group meeting.” In short,

the student should have been aware that he would be required to

interact with others in the course, even though it was online.

In order to avoid any possible ambiguity in the future, the Vice

Dean, in a letter of October 4, suggested that, “in future offerings,

your section of [the course] ought to be coded as a blended

course, that is, as a version with required live elements. This

coding ought to preclude any future student's mistaking of the

course for one that can be done fully and exclusively on-line.” In

response, for the coming year, I attempted to list the course as

blended; however, I was then told by the Vice Dean that I could

not do that. In a letter of November 21 he wrote, “a course that

does not involve the CD in scheduled on-campus interactions

with his or her students is not blended.” This being the case, it

seems that the Vice Dean is now agreeing with my original

classification of the course as fully online, despite the fact that

students are required to meet for the completion of one of the

assignments.

2. In my course I provide an accommodation for students who live

at great distance from the campus. Although not optimal (as they

are denied the opportunity to be both a participant in, and

facilitator of, a focus group) I allow them to conduct their focus

group with friends or co-workers. For example, at the beginning

of the year, one of my students was in Egypt. (Although the Dean

alleges that the student requesting the accommodation was aware

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of this, I could find no indication of that knowledge in any of the

communications I had with the student.) It is the Dean’s position

that as I made an accommodation based on the GEOGRAPHICAL

inability of a student to interact with his group, I should also have

made one for the student who on the basis of PREFERENCE did not

want to interact with the females in the class. The situations are

not at all parallel.

Last year, in the same course, for the same assignment, I had two

students who missed the due date. One provided a death

certificate verifying the death of a parent. Under these

circumstances I gave the student an extension. Another student

who missed the deadline reported that he had been on vacation

and returned to Toronto too late to complete the assignment.

Consistent with the Dean’s logic, because I gave an extension to

the first student, I should also have given one to the second;

however, I did not. As professors we make judgments, and one

accommodation does not set a precedent for another based on

different circumstances.

3. The Dean points out that under the Code institutions must try to

accommodate if three conditions are met. One of these

conditions is that, “the accommodation must have no substantial

impact on other students’ experience in the class.” Consistent

with this principle, in his communication to me of November 25,

the Dean argued that, “I am unpersuaded that it is even arguable

that the non-participation of this one male student in group work

affects in any way any other student’s human rights. Even

assuming that it did…the effect does not, in my opinion, qualify

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as a ‘substantial impact’ on any other student’s rights.”

Unfortunately, the Dean provided no evidence for this opinion.

By contrast, I have empirical evidence indicating that the

granting of the accommodation would lead some female

members of the class to feel belittled and humiliated. In other

words, the accommodation would have a substantial impact on

other students’ experience of the class. This alone should have

been sufficient to deny the accommodation.

4. The Dean argues, “had the course been listed as anything other

than an exclusively on-line course, the student would presumably

not have enrolled.” In fact, the student is taking, as a minimum,

two other sociology in-class courses at the current time. He is not

only taking online courses.

5. The Dean writes, “the sole grounds for different treatment was

the professor’s disapproval of the student’s beliefs.” It would be

more appropriate to say that consistent with York’s core values

and those of the society in which we live, the grounds for my

denying the accommodation were my beliefs that the rights of

female students should not be compromised and that they should

be treated with respect by male students.

I will conclude by stressing that like the Dean I regret the negative

publicity that this event has caused York. It is for this reason that when

the Dean first insisted that I accommodate I wrote to the President to

ensure that he was aware of the possible consequences of the

accommodation. On October 12 I wrote:

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I tried to reason with the Dean's Office that because of its

implications such an accommodation should be denied; however,

I was overruled, and the decision was taken out of my hands. I

know that you have a commitment to diversity but presumably

not to the extent where meeting a student's religious needs

detracts from the status of female students. I do not believe that

we want to be known as a university in which the rights of female

students can be compromised by religious concerns.

I did not expect a response and I did not get one. I also asked the Dean

about the possibility of a meeting that would include my Chair so that I

could outline the reasons for my discomfort with the course of action

he proposed. In response, the Dean assigned someone from his office to

deal with the issue, as is his right. I also requested a meeting with the

Vice-Provost; however, because the matter was being dealt with by

another office, she declined. I am stating these facts lest it be assumed

that I acted in haste by contacting the media three months later.

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