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 employer-employee 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 Professor Mandel was when he invited another left-wing activist lawyer by the name of Harry Kopyto, to come to the law school and give a talk about the difficulty of practicing law “in a conservative society”. Professor Hutchinson cancelled a class so that we could all attend and have the principles of his doctrine reinforced. Professor Mandel gave Mr. Kopyto a glowing introduction. Mr. Kopyto’s speech included a discussion of his pride of representing communists in quarrels with the RCMP Security Service and his claims that the courts and the cops were stuck together “like crazy glue”. Notwithstanding his initial claim to wanting to dialogue with students, my question about how did he resolve the conundrum of using liberal democratic institutions to protect totalitarians who would destroy them (and him) if they came to power, was summarily dismissed. A few years later, Mr. Kopyto was disbarred for overcharging the legal aid system. Apparently, he charged for more than 24 hours of labour in a day. The difficulty of working in a conservative society, indeed. With the passage of time a new generation of professors will take over the teaching duties at Osgoode. I wish future students good luck!
– Andrew Kavchak
Osgoode (’85-’88)