by Jonathan Kay
National Post
March 1, 2001

TORONTO -- This is an excruciating time for Denise Réaume. Last week, the University of Toronto law professor was put under investigation for her alleged role in a scandal surrounding students accused of submitting inflated marks to law firms. Some students allege Ms. Réaume suggested in class that falsifying their grades would be an effective form of anti-corporate civil disobedience. But some professors at the University of Toronto Law School say the controversy surrounding Ms. Réaume is merely a symptom of a larger ideological conflict that has been building since the current dean took over in 1995. It is a conflict that has already caused one of Ms. Réaume's colleagues to leave for another Toronto law school, Osgoode Hall; and a second colleague may soon follow.

To most members of the faculty, Ron Daniels is a godsend. In 1995, the school had a $750,000 endowment and the equivalent of 33 full-time faculty. In the last five years, the endowment has grown to $54-million -- and 20 new scholars have been hired. It is expected the student-professor ratio will soon shrink to 9-to-1, the lowest of any law school in North America except Yale.

Mr. Daniels has made other important changes, too. He has brought in more visiting scholars, raised entry standards, organized high-profile conferences and encouraged faculty to write about international themes. His ultimate goal is to build a "truly great global law school." "Best in Canada," the informal title his law school has claimed, isn't good enough anymore.

"What's amazing is that [the school improved itself] at a time of cutbacks in public funding to higher education," says Sujit Choudhry, a professor. "We could have been in really bad shape today. But, in fact, we've never been in better shape. That's why I came here [in 1999]. There's a buzz about the place. A number of my colleagues have gotten very attractive offers from American schools. But they chose to stay in Canada because they believe in this institution."

In January, a five-member review committee that included Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci concluded, "the Dean has been an energetic, visionary and excellent leader." Mr. Daniels was subsequently named to his second six-year term.

But Mr. Daniels' critics -- a small core of about a half-dozen professors that includes Ms. Réaume -- believe he has undermined the law school's primary mission to promote the institution on the international stage.

"I worry that the attempt to be global comes at the expense of teaching Canadian laws and doing work in areas of interest to Canadians," said a University of Toronto law school professor who did not wish to be identified. "We had a faculty retreat [in 1999] and he told us to focus on globalization and to do law [comparing different nation's legal systems] in our courses. He also wanted us to get our material published in 'internationally recognized' [law] journals at least once a year."

"'Internationally recognized' -- i.e. American," the professor added. "This skews your research agenda. [These] journals aren't going to want stuff specific to Canada. [Mr. Daniels] acts as if globalization is a core mission of this law school. [He] is very corporate. There's a concern among the rest of us that globalization just means doing it the way the Americans do it. That's what globalization is all about."

According to colleagues interviewed for this article, Ms. Réaume, who declined to be interviewed, frequently expressed similar criticism of Mr. Daniels. In November, she and several other professors sought a meeting with Justice Iacobucci's review committee to express concern about some of the changes that had taken place under Mr. Daniels' watch.

Last summer, Craig Scott, formerly a professor at the University of Toronto law school, left for Osgoode Hall. After leaving, he told Ultra Vires, the law school's student newspaper, that his old school was "unreflectively drifting towards an Americanization of legal education." According to several University of Toronto law professors, another critic of Mr. Daniels may soon follow.

But Mr. Daniels makes no apologies for the law school's new direction. "The practice of law, whether in Canada or abroad, is going to have to respond to global pressures," he said. "If you think about someone who is doing a standard corporate transaction today, that increasingly means you have to worry about trade or investment flows across a number of jurisdictions. You have to worry about the impact of [anti-trust] and securities policy in other countries."

Globalization has affected not only what is taught at the University of Toronto law school, but also the process of recruiting students and teachers. According to the law school's Decanal Report to the Provost, submitted last November, "the strongest competition for our students increasingly is from a handful of leading law schools in the United States [including] Harvard, Yale, Columbia and NYU." Of the students who declined an offer to attend the University of Toronto law school last year, only 15 did so in favour of another Canadian law school. Twenty-five declined in favour of an elite American law school.

Professors are mobile, too, especially those who specialize in abstract areas that are not tied closely to site-specific statutes or case law. In the past few years, the University of Toronto faculty has lost two stars to the United States -- George Triantis and Robert Howse.

"We're feeling the pressure on salary competition [from foreign universities] not just on retention but on hiring," says Mr. Choudhry. "It's very hard to recruit in some areas because the market for talent is now global. International trade, intellectual property, corporate law -- the top people have an international market for their talent."

Mr. Daniels sees his deanship as coinciding with the end of a simpler era. "Sure it would be nice if we could go back to a very cozy monopoly where we could be confident we could recruit the very best students and the very best faculty without having to worry about foreign competition," he says. "But I have to find the resources to realize our dreams."

This view explains why the dean has raised funds so aggressively and has increased annual tuition from $4,500 to $10,000 in just five years. His strategy is to attract top scholars and pay them enough so that they don't bolt to the United States. Star professors, it is hoped, will attract star students, who will in turn attract more star professors. Over the summer, Mr. Daniels jump started this cycle: He gave members of his faculty enormous raises -- as much as $28,000 in the case of junior professors -- with new money pried from the university.

Despite the higher salaries, it is easy to see why some professors would feel threatened by Mr. Daniels' program. His ambition is to turn the school into an internationally recognized academic brand name on a par with the American Ivy League. Some scholars who wish to focus on purely domestic legal issues do not feel they fit into his grand vision.

The small group of professors that oppose Mr. Daniels' program of globalizing the law school sound very much like the Canadian pundits and activists who oppose globalization in the world at large: They appear to be cultural protectionists who worry it will destroy what makes Canadian institutions distinct.

"My major concern is we're becoming too Americanized," says Jim Phillips, a professor who donated his $25,000 raise to a university research fund. "We're forgetting our roots in our own Canadian society ... We've probably, to some extent, gotten away from emphasizing teaching in favour of research and profile. Some people think that excellence is a matter of profile. But I think we should focus on what we actually do [for students] not where we stand."

Dr. Phillips is an eminent legal historian whose work focuses on Canadian topics. Presumably, his research on 19th-century Nova Scotia trials is of limited interest in the United States.

But overall, Mr. Daniels is extremely popular -- even among members of the faculty who were initially suspicious of his strong connections to Bay Street. One of the most astute moves the dean made was to spend much of the money he raised on financial assistance programs for needy students. In 1995, the law school offered its undergraduate students $102,000 in financial aid. In 2001, that figure is $900,000. Thirty-five students attend the school tuition-free -- compared to zero six years ago.

The student body has also become more diverse: Women represent 54% of new students, up from 46% five years ago; and visible minorities have seen their numbers rise from 21% to 24%.

"Daniels is a corporate guy and his politics are much more conservative than mine," says professor David Beatty, who is helping the Green Party of Canada on a constitutional challenge against Canada's election laws. "I've been here 30 years -- through [the terms of] more politically progressive deans. But he's the guy who's putting in a legal aid clinic that will be the rival of anything in the country. He's the guy who put in this national pro bono student program that runs across the country."

Mr. Beatty is also happy with Mr. Daniels' focus on international topics. "Surely, it's got to be good for our students to see what issues of, say, gender discrimination and family law are like in India compared to what's going on here."

Mr. Beatty's own course, comparative constitutional law, is a good example of the many international-themed courses that can be found in the law school's course list. "This course will examine the way different courts around the world protect human rights by a process of constitutional review," the description reads. "Decisions of the Supreme Courts of India, Japan, the United States and Canada, the Constitutional Court of Germany and the European Court of Human Rights will be analyzed and compared."

Professor Michael Trebilcock, an internationally renowned expert in the field of international trade and the cross-disciplinary field known as law and economics, believes this shift toward a global focus is for the good -- but that it is hardly revolutionary.

"When I first came to the University of Toronto [in 1972] there was very much a traditional emphasis on doctrinal law [as applied in Canada]," says Mr. Trebilcock. "Then, from the mid-1970s onward, new legal theories and interdisciplinary perspectives on law -- such as feminist theory and constitutional theory -- made [the study of law] less jurisdiction-bound. What we're seeing in the last five years is merely a continuation of the trend that started in the 1970s. It would be a mistake to think that something completely discontinuous has happened under Daniels."

But for professors whose careers in the law do not go back as far as Mr. Trebilcock's, Mr. Daniels' approach does seem revolutionary. "It's a whole new direction," says Catherine Valcke, a law professor who was associate dean from 1997 to 1999. "It's not surprising that there's going to be some dissenters. I think it's the kind of change that's exciting and a little scary. It necessarily entails higher standards. There's a fear of the unknown as well."

"I mean," added Dr. Valcke, "these are radical changes."