ULTRA
VIRES
THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO FACULTY OF LAW
VOLUME 12, ISSUE 1
Effie’s firing sparks outrage
www.ultravires.ca
September 22, 2010
O-Week: 1Ls run wild at Loose Moose
BY RENATTA AUSTIN (2L)
This past summer, law school administrators made the decision to terminate the employment of Admissions Advisor Effie Koutsogiannopoulos, as part of a larger reorganization of the administrative staff structure. For twenty-two years, Effie provided front line services to prospective law students. Many students felt she was uniquely suited to the role and carried out her duties with patience, civility, and grace. Many also appreciated her sense of humour, genuine interest in their well-being, and ability to relate to a diverse range of individuals. Effie had been known to often go out of her way to make students and their families feel welcome, organizing personalized tours and connecting them with current students, providing them with information about school and community services available to them, and following up with them throughout their years at the law school. The decision to terminate Effie was met with protest. As word of the impending termination spread, the wall of the Facebook group "Save Effie" filled with posts from current students and alumni about their positive experiences with Effie and feelings of disappointment that she was being laid off. In mid-August, 200 current and former students sent a letter to Dean Mayo Moran requesting that the administration reconsider its decision. At least five students sent additional letters, and one current law student arranged to meet with her personally. Professor Jim Phillips also sent a strongly worded letter to Dean Moran expressing his disapproval (the letter is reproduced on page 18). No report on the restructuring has been made available to interested faculty members or students. CONTINUED at page 6
UV INDEX
• REMEMBERING BETTY HO...P.4 • O-WEEK REFLECTIONS...P.5
• OCI FASHION ADVICE....P.8-9 • O-WEEK PHOTOS.....P.12-13 • MAYORAL RACE.....P.14
• LEGAL SEX SCANDALS.....P.19
• IN-CLASS GAMING.....P.20
L-R: Promise Holmes Skinner (1L), Lane Krainyk (1L), Noah Dolgoy (1L), Kimberly Knight (1L), Charlie Hatt (2L): For more pictures from Orientation Week, see the centre spread.
Dean likens self to bobcat Also talks about the law school
As part of our first issue of the year, UV sat down with Dean Mayo Moran to discuss the direction of the law school, student concerns, and her performance so far. AC: What's new this year at the Faculty of Law? MM: So, a number of things that we have coming up that we'll be active on: the building project – so it looks like the economy is pretty good – we're ready to go into another fundraising initiative. We've sorted out some financing with the university, which is great. So that's one thing we'll be very active on this fall... working with firms and other individuals trying to build support and get some commitment to the building project so we can move that forward. [When will shovels hit the ground?] A lot will depend on how things look in the next 18 months, but I would say 24 months – something like that. We hired an Aboriginal student program coordinator [Lisa Del Col], which is terrific. We got independent funding
BY AARON CHRISTOFF (3L)
to do that, which is something we wanted to do for a few years... On the curricular front, the curriculum committee is going to deal with legal research and writing, which was something that came up last year. People weren't happy with the SUYRP, but we want to create some alternatives so we're going to have the curriculum committee take a hard look at legal research and writing across the spectrum. The international advisory committee is going to do some work on enhancing the international opportunities that we have for students. AC: Financial aid – last year some first-year students felt misled by provisional assessments. How has the administration responded to concerns about the financial aid process? MM: Well, you might remember that in response to student concerns we very significantly revamped the process last year to make it much more responsive to need, because what we discov-
ered last year was that there was a big drop-off not based on need between people who got full tuition bursaries and the next neediest students who often were very similar in terms of need but had very different bursaries. So we worked with students and with the financial aid committee. We passed a new policy at faculty council last year that really is purely needs based so it's a just a nice smooth continuum according to need so we think that's going to make a big difference. I should say, we did a lot of work with those students and actually managed to redirect some resources to them. We did a lot of other work with that particular group of students because it happened to be an odd year last year, but we also changed the policy to avoid the problem. AC: We’re one year into replacing the global perspectives elective with administrative law. How’s that going: was it the right choice? CONTINUED at page 6