NEWS
4 Obiter Dicta
Every Day is Monday Morning
The travails of resuming law school on a struck campus
parmbir singh gill › staff writer
editorial note: Parmbir’s article was originally
published on the Obiter Dicta website on 11 March,
prior to the resumption of classes on 16 March.
R
ecent developments at Osgoode Hall are
conspiring to introduce an unseemly inno vation on 16 March 2015: two-tiered legal
education.
But first, a brief recap on how we got to this point.
On 6 March, following four days of strike action,
CUPE 3903 leaders agreed to put the York administration’s latest offer to a ratification vote. The offer,
while providing job security for dozens of highseniority contract faculty (Unit 2), left over two thousand TAs (Unit 1), GAs, and RAs (both Unit 3) without
secure tuition indexation language, thereby sealing
the fate of current and future international graduate
students gouged by a $7000 tuition hike in 2014. At
the administration’s behest, the offer also maintained
the exclusion of “LGBTQ” as an employment equity
group, unless and until another collective agreement on campus included it—a position as difficult to
explain as it is to countenance.
Not surprisingly, then, CUPE 3903’s 9 March ratification vote resulted in a split: while sixty-five per
cent of Unit 2 members voted to ratify, Units 1 and 3
rejected the offer by fifty-nine per cent and seventyseven per cent, respectively.
With almost three thousand education workers still on strike on 10 March (and gaining public
support from faculty, undergraduates, and law students), the administration’s next move was unexpected: it passed a motion through York Senate to
resume five major academic programs, including the
Lassonde School of Engineering, the Schulich School
of Business, and the still-in-search-of-philanthropist School of Nursing. 11 March thus bore witness to
the first throes of academic activity since the strike
began eight days earlier, adding strain and subtracting safety from already assailed picket lines.
As it happened, 11 March was also the day Osgoode
Hall’s Faculty Council met to determine the law
school’s position on the work stoppage. After a tense
and protracted three-hour discussion with more than
twenty spectators in the audience, FC voted 34-17
(with four abstentions) in favour of resuming classes
on 16 March, in accordance with the broad-strokes
“Resumption and Remediation Plan” (RRP) prepared
by Dean Lorne Sossin, Associate Dean Trevor Farrow,
and Assistant Dean Mya Rimon. To move forward,
the RRP required official approval from York Senate,
which was secured at a special meeting held on 12
March.
This brings us to 13 March. Unless circumstances
change dramatically over the weekend, Osgoode
Hall will reopen Monday on a struck campus replete
with seven picket lines, no TTC service, and dozens
of non-operational programs. It will be a morning of
decisions and divisions, of resumption in the context
of a legal disruption—a morning that will recur every
school day on loop until this strike is over.
Besides undermining the collective bargaining
process, this premature restarting of classes poses
several dilemmas for Osgoode students. First, it forces
those who support CUPE 3903 to resume academic
ê Photo caption goes here.
activity in one way or another. Nowhere in the Plan
are students afforded an opportunity to obse 'fRF