A professor had circulated an attendance sheet and urged everyone to sign it because 'if we did not have proof of attending, "all manner of bad things will happen" '

First-year law students at the University of Ottawa appear to have been threatened with having their final grades withheld if they didn’t attend a mandatory sexual assault prevention program.

The National Post has learned that on Feb. 14, assistant dean of the faculty’s common law section, Amanda Turnbull, sent an email to all first-year students, telling them that if they failed to attend a workshop, they would need to justify their absence just as they would have to do for missing an exam.

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It fits into the trend of Canadian law schools – such as the University of Windsor’s, which recently rued the verdict in the trial of Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley as evidence of how “Canada has used law to perpetrate violence against Indigenous Peoples” — as being more interested in social justice than legal principles, as Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy recently wrote.

“Attendance will be taken,” Turnbull warned in her Feb. 14 note. “Those who do not attend the workshop will be asked to find and undergo similar training prior to grade entry in April 2018.”

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In other words, there would be no “grade entry” for any student who didn’t complete either the workshop or comparable training.

The last of 10 training sessions was held Friday, Adam Dodek, the new dean of the common law faculty, said in an email. He disputed the interpretation of Turnbull’s email, saying, “No communication states that grades will be withheld.”

He also disagreed with alumnus Andrej Litvinjenko, who said “the university doesn’t have the administrative authority to threaten such a consequence, much less carry it out.” Dodek said since the workshops were held during class, “that is the basis for them being mandatory.”

Now 28, Litvinjenko graduated cum laude just last year from the joint “Juris Doctor/Master of Arts” program between the Ottawa law faculty and Carleton University’s school of international affairs. He is completing his articles-of-clerkship with a major law firm.

As he told the Post, “To be clear, I have no concerns with respect to the subject matter. I am strictly concerned with the faculty’s irregular and ultra vires (without legal authority) conduct in pursuit of their social justice policies.”

In a series of recent emails to Turnbull, in which he said directly that he didn’t quarrel with “the content of the workshop,” Litvinjenko raised his concerns.

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In response, he received a snippy reply from Turnbull, who first told him: “I’m sorry to hear that you are having a hard time coming to terms with the idea of mandatory sexual violence training.”

He was not.

If we did not have proof of attending, 'all manner of bad things will happen'

What he was having difficulty with, and his letter made this clear, was the arbitrary nature of the program.

Turnbull said the faculty had received “overwhelmingly positive feedback” about the sessions.

In emails Friday, Dodek, who is just two months into the dean’s job, said much the same thing, telling the Post that “no one has objected to this initiative” and that the only complaint the school received was from Litvinjenko.

He said he has met at least three times with the Common Law Students’ Association and with other students and “the issue has simply not come up.” He said he takes “strong issue” with the assertion students would be asking for trouble by complaining.

Dodek cited “orientation” as an example of another mandatory student commitment that is outside the curriculum but, when Litvinjenko was at the school, he skipped orientation and was neither sanctioned nor threatened with sanction.

Litvinjenko first heard rumblings about the workshop from friends in first year. He then specifically asked for comment from students on a private Facebook group.

He received two sorts of responses, first from students reporting what their professors had said about the workshop, then what the students thought themselves.

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The Post has seen screen captures of some of the responses, with the names blocked out for privacy.

At least one student said he or she was “very disappointed in the school. I deeply regret going.”

Another said while he “wasn’t told explicitly what the consequences of failure to attend would be,” his professor had circulated an attendance sheet and urged everyone to sign it because “if we did not have proof of attending, ‘all manner of bad things will happen’.”

Another told Litvinjenko, “Admin has compared missing the workshop to missing an exam and has said we won’t get our grades unless we do it.”

That student had a mandatory lecture and the mandatory sex assault workshop at the same time, and his professor told him “to go to the workshop instead.”

The Post has a copy of an audio recording of that class, in which the professor said she has “read that email (from Turnbull) and it sounded to me like the consequences of not going are significant and potentially very inconvenient.”

She told students who were double-booked for a class and the workshop should go to the latter.

Dodek told the Post that the school “took on a commitment to prevention education beyond the university level since as students of law, we believe they ought to be held more accountable … We want to be able to publicly report that all of our first-year class took part in sexual violence training.”

That, Litvinjenko told the Post, is “dispensing with the rule of law … on the basis of a noble goal.

“If they wish to deprive students of their discretion to attend,” he said, “they cannot do so on a whim.”