It’s been a months-long story watched with fascination at the University of Toronto: the acrid conflict building between the president of U of T’s St. Michael’s College and members of its faculty, senior staff and some of its student leaders.

Now it has become noisily public.

At a speech last month, college president David Mulroney accused the St. Mike’s academic establishment of letting the college, which was founded in the 19th century by Basilian priests who remain its “canonical sponsors” and therefore answerable to the Vatican, slide into mediocrity and of being embarrassed about being Catholic.

Mulroney, who was speaking at an international conference of Roman Catholic educators and communicators in Quebec City, also denigrated St. Mike’s students as having a “negative” culture of partying and excessive drinking with “women being objectified,” a culture he illustrated by showing a short video commissioned by the St. Mike’s student union titled “Cowboys and Schoolgirls.”

On Monday, professors and professional staff fired back, publishing an open letter to Mulroney signed by more than 20 current and former leading academics and staff — including former St. Mike’s principal Mark McGowan, college registrar Damon Chevrier, senior librarians from the college’s John M. Kelly Library, and past and current directors of several academic programs — accusing him of dishonouring the college and its alumni and doing a disservice to 5,000 undergraduate students and 200 graduate students in its faculty of theology.

Mulroney’s speech ignored the fact that St. Mike’s students “routinely win academic accolades, present papers at international conferences, contribute to (U of T) athletics and offer services to their community within and outside of the university,” the letter reads, adding that St. Mike’s students produce journals “that are great beacons of communication and hope, befitting a world class post-secondary institution.”

Letters of concern about Mulroney’s speech also have been sent to St. Mike’s Collegium, its governing body, by former president Anne Anderson of the Sisters of St. Joseph and Very Rev. George Smith, superior-general of the Basilian order of priests, formally known as the Congregation of St. Basil.

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Mulroney, a career diplomat and Canada’s former ambassador to China, said in an interview that he came to the job in 2015 for a three-year term with a clear understanding that he would be a change-agent.

What he found, he said, was a college — the largest of the university’s federated colleges — whose academic and intellectual achievements had slipped behind those of others such as Trinity and Victoria, whose identity as a Catholic institution had become foggy, whose students tended to refer to St. Mike’s as the university’s “party college” and whose student council had been engaged in financial mismanagement that Mulroney called corrupt.

In addition, the conflict has brought to light allegations of discriminatory treatment toward LGBTQ and Muslim students under Mulroney’s leadership. There are also reports of a struggle for control of the college between Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Catholic archbishop of Toronto, and the Basilians.

St. Mike’s, like all but a very few Catholic universities in Canada, is affiliated with a provincial public university. Its faculty are U of T faculty and its undergraduate students are U of T students with the rights and privileges of U of T students (all of the university’s undergrads are registered in a college). The college retains a measure of independent church control as well as an imprecisely defined Catholic identity.

According to several sources, Collins has asked three times that the Basilians turn St. Mike’s over to him. The dispute was taken to Rome for resolution several months ago where the cardinal’s request was rejected and a Basilian was appointed auxiliary bishop of Toronto, in effect Collins’s second-in-command. The cardinal’s attempt to take over the college has been interpreted by a number of faculty as the heart of the St. Mike’s dispute — with many seeing Collins’s vision as more traditionalist and more interventionist than anything that St. Mike’s has experienced over the past 100 years.

Added to what one professor has called “ecclesiastical turmoil” at St. Mike’s, Angelo Minardi, fired several months ago as the college’s lay chaplain, has lodged a human rights complaint against the college that alleges Mulroney ordered him to take down a “Golden Rule” poster that declared that the world’s major faiths adhere to the principle of treating others as one would wish to be treated. In the complaint, Minardi claims that Mulroney told him Catholics are not equal to other faiths and the poster would mislead Catholic students.

Faculty members familiar with Minardi’s complaint say Minardi also alleges he was told by Mulroney not to organize a prayer service with Muslim students after the shootings at a mosque near Quebec City, and that a Mulroney aide told him “students who are of other faith traditions can be accommodated across campus at the University of Toronto’s multifaith centre, not at St. Michael’s College because we are a Catholic college.”

Minardi says that, on the advice of his lawyer, he won’t speak publicly about his human rights complaint or produce documentation until the college files a response. Mulroney said that he will not talk about a “management” issue, but insisted St. Mike’s meets U of T standards on student rights.

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Several LGBTQ students have complained that during the past academic year they have experienced hostility at St. Mike’s because of their sexual orientation and asked to be transferred to another college, according to a senior U of T administrator who asked not to be quoted by name because he was referring to confidential student enrolment data. The administrator added that this would be an unusual and possibly unprecedented occurrence at the university.

The Catholic Church considers homosexuality to be “an objectively disordered” state. Pope Francis last year said the Church should be more accepting of gays and lesbians.

Mulroney said he’s received no complaints from LGBTQ students, adding that St. Mike’s has met U of T standards with regard to protecting minority groups.

Mulroney described the student video he showed at the Quebec conference and to a meeting of the St. Mike’s Collegium, as “a powerful narrative about St. Mike’s, but not the narrative I thought we needed” — with students dressing up “as sexualized schoolgirls.”

In the video, several students wear costumes that resemble Catholic school uniforms with the kilt hems hiked.

The “ecclesiastical turmoil” at St. Mike’s also has swirled around Collins, who is the college’s chancellor. Mulroney described the cardinal as a friend and spiritual adviser but insists he is not pulling strings at the college. Collins was appointed head of the Toronto archdiocese by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who is seen as more conservative.

Mulroney said he is concerned with the supposed ideological hue of the college’s faculty and what Mulroney would like to do about it.

“If I’ve been concerned about anything at St. Mike’s, it’s this,” he said. “It’s that we have gravitated to a situation where only one perspective was possible, and that is a perspective found at a lot of Catholic universities which is a sort of left, progressive agenda.

“That’s wonderful and beautiful and I like it, but we should also have space for other perspectives, and it’s those other perspectives that I’ve found less present at St. Michael’s.”

A plane needs two wings, he said. “I want us to recognize the richness — Catholic means universal — of the Catholic tradition and not only one particular perspective. And that’s where I found St. Michael’s was deficient.”

Asked if he would have given a speech as an ambassador stating that his predecessors had lost sight of their mission and his staff had lost their diplomatic sparkle, he replied: “One of the reasons I left government service when I did was so that I could finally speak freely in my own voice. That explains why, instead of going into the private sector after my retirement, I have spent the last five years at a university where such freedom is the norm. Speaking honestly is central to the role I was asked to take on at St. Mike’s.”

Michael Valpy taught for eight years as a sessional instructor in St. Michael’s book and media studies program. St. Michael’s replaced its sessional instructors in the spring with a “teaching stream” professoriate.

The open letter to St. Mike's President David Mulroney

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