Many of you will have heard that the Federation of Law Societies has accredited Trinity Western University, a privately funded Christian university operating out of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, to run a law school. Trinity teaches through a Christian lens and requires all of its students and faculty to sign a “Community Covenant Agreement” and abide by certain community standards, including abstaining from sexual relationships outside of marriage between a man and a woman, abuse of alcohol, gambling, viewing pornography, and the list goes on. The penalties for contravention of the “Community Covenant Agreement” include expulsion. Advocates on either side of the issue have contested the accreditation publicly.
Those that defend the Christian university’s discriminatory requirement that students agree to the “Community Covenant agreement” cite that those who take issue with the covenant can go elsewhere to get their legal education. What a ridiculous defence. As a University of Toronto student opined in The Varsity in August,
if there is a single space in a Canadian law school, medical school, barber’s college, or restaurant which is not available to all people, regardless of identity, it is a national disgrace — it does not matter how many other spaces in other institutions are available to these people.
The defence of the Christian school’s requirement to abstain from homosexual relationships goes like this: you don’t like the morality clause? Just don’t go there. Trinity Western’s president Bob Kuhn states, “prospective students who do not agree with our religious views are welcome to apply to another university – and there are dozens of other universities and law schools for students to choose from.”
The fact that this has been an overwhelming response by those defending Trinity Western evidences a very troubling underlying misconception: that requiring gay people to suppress their sexuality is not discriminatory. Not to mention the fact that it places a problematic lifestyle expectation on its heterosexual students as well by imposing academic consequences for things like getting pregnant out of wedlock, effectively placing a more critical gaze on women’s bodies than on men’s. It’s not innocuous to have in place policies that impose academic consequences for choices made by students in their private lives that do not speak to their integrity or professionalism.
Jonathan Kay, in defending the school’s accreditation in the National Post, goes on to say that “TWU’s 60 first-year law-school slots would comprise less than two per cent of the country’s incoming law school cohort.” Statements like this entirely miss the point. Because there are far more applicants to law school than there are positions in law school (with most schools letting in about 10% of applicants each academic year), those willing to sign the “Community Covenant Agreement” have a wider application berth than those who are unwilling. In this way, the school creates a comparative advantage for those students willing and able to abide by the “Community Covenant”. Having any spaces that restrict the eligibility of one group of people is discriminatory.
The reality is that Trinity Western is excluding spots in their law school to people not only on the basis of their sexual activity (which is ludicrous in itself) but based on their sexuality full stop.
Equally troubling is how readily people have swept under the rug any controversy relating to allowing the accreditation of a private law school. In an era with skyrocketing tuition fees, any encroaching on the public education system by private actors undermines it. Private institutions allow for a greater amount of opportunity and choice for those who can afford it. Take Queen’s University’s commerce and engineering programs – two pseudo-private programs (they were some of the first to be allowed to deregulate and set their own tuition rates) that are top rated and more expensive than any other similar program offered. These programs also offer a greater breadth of opportunity on graduation because of their stellar reputation, which effectively gives an advantage to those students who can afford the brand.
This is not to suggest that Trinity will become that institution that confers a greater advantage to its students, it is merely to suggest that it opens the door to other private institutions to become accredited and potentially surpass the quality of the institutions that are publicly funded. Where law school tuition is already a run away freight train, private institutions could have the effect of driving our tuition costs even higher (though this is difficult to believe given the current trajectory of setting tuition costs as high as is legislatively allowed).
Lastly, I am sincerely and deeply concerned over the accreditation of a Christian law school that enables one moral viewpoint to have supremacy over others. A secular institution is less likely to suppress divergent views and where it has been found to do so, an open discussion can be facilitated. To allow one moral viewpoint to have priority over others, particularly in a legal education context, is not preferable to a system that arguably allows more space for divergent or minority opinions.
Ought law students and faculty to be protected from being exposed to viewpoints that might offend them? Trinity Western’s president explains that “[l]ike many churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, we have chosen not to bless same-sex marriage.” Because the University also states that their “founding legislation requires [them] to provide a university education from a worldview that is Christian” it is difficult to believe that the school will be interested in considering a progressive viewpoint on gay rights in Canada. And because they’ve conveniently excluded the LGBT community through the “Community Covenant Agreement”, there might not be anyone there to express that viewpoint anyhow.