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L E T T ERS
Michael Mandel
Dear Editors,
I recently became aware of the passing late last
year of former Osgoode Hall Law School professor Michael Mandel. Many of the hagiographic
obituaries, such as that in the Canadian Lawyer
Magazine, portrayed one element of his impact on
legal education at Canada’s largest law school.
I attended Osgoode in the mid-1980s and had
a different perspective on the quality of education
offered by professor Mandel and other members
of the staff. After having studied political philosophy at the undergraduate level where left-wing
ideology was always in fashion, I was happy to
be able to go to Osgoode where I expected and
hoped to acquire a solid grounding in the technicalities of law and prepare for a career providing expert advice. It did not take long before I
succumbed to the disappointing realization that
a number of professors at Osgoode at the time
were more obsessed with the promotion of their
own extreme left wing views and impregnating
students with the seeds of their own cynicism
against “the system”. Not only were they not
focusing on law, but the public policy discussion
in class was excessively loaded with irrelevant
and anachronistic Marxist rhetoric. While universities should promote intellectual inquiry and
critical thinking, some of this stuff was simply
embarrassing and inappropriate in any serious
institution of higher learning.
In my labour law class I remember professor
Harry Glasbeek responding to a question by suggesting that the only way to improve employeremployee relations was to have a revolution and
abolish private property. When I pointed out
that this had been tried in places like Russia with
no clear improvement in the plight of the working class, the professor replied that “real communism” has not yet been attempted. What about
the use of martial law to squash the Solidarity
Trade Union in Poland? Again, that was not
“real communism”.
In criminal procedure class professor Alan
Young repeatedly told the students that the
greatest threat to our civil liberties was the
police and CSIS. He entertained the class once
by playing a punk rock song and distributing the
lyrics, which included a passage about confessions made under duress. I wondered how much
this would have made Andrey Vyshinsky convulse in fits of laughter.
In first year civil procedure Professor Alan
Hutchinson peppered his class with denunciations of the legal system using different words
under the umbrella of the “critical” school of
thought. It did not take long to figure him
out. On the exam at the end of term I shoveled as much communist propaganda about the
bourgeois oppression of the proletariat into my
answers as I could within the time allotted (my
previous degree in political philosophy and visits
behind the iron curtain came in handy). I was so
grateful that the exam writers were only identified through anonymous numbers. When I
thanked Professor Hutchinson for the “A” that he
gave me as my course grade, his jaw dropped and
he said “If I had known it was you, I would not
have given it to you”.
I disliked many of these teachers for spoiling my law school experience with their own
personal political agendas and wasting precious
time. However, the question that bugged me the
most was “who hired these guys?” It seemed
to me that they would be more appropriately
giving lectures at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. In my third year of law school
a new Dean was appointed and I asked for a
short meeting. In his office I told him that I had
a suggestion for improving the quality of teaching at Osgoode. “What is it?” he asked. “Fire
half the faculty,” I told him. He quickly showed
me to the door. I was thinking about writing an
article about the degeneration at Osgoode, but
subsequently read William F. Buckley’s God and
Man at Yale and realized that the same tragic
phenomenon of the quality of university education going down the drain had already been brilliantly described decades earlier.
However, my favourite memory of P ɽ