Canadian Lawyer

November 2020

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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16 www.canadianlawyermag.com FEATURE CROSS EXAMINED professors who were subject matter experts, but "administrations were not listening to the faculty in exactly the areas where the faculties were the experts. "The problem in the United States was essentially that tenure was disappearing, and academic freedom was being threat- ened because tenure is the protection for academic freedom." Administrators were often taking harsh action against faculty critics, including closing departments and imposing standards without faculty consultation. Some critics of legal academia say that tenure can make laws schools too slow to evolve. Young strongly disagrees. "Tenure is actually protective of exactly the kind of activism that people are saying that law professors should engage in," she says. What Young also learned from her experi- ence at the AUP was that she had no interest in working as an administrator. "I was so turned off administration. It was eye-opening how bad administrators could be and I really was more of a critic of administration." So why has Young returned to Canada and taken on a role as an administrator given her experiences with both? "I think Ryerson was doing something kind of unusual. They appointed a founding dean who had never been a dean before. And I think that they saw in my candidacy some promise, in terms of my research area, in terms of my commitment to [equality, diver- sity and inclusion] and in terms of my kind of leadership role as a faculty advocate. "I've seen law schools commit themselves to these things. But to begin a law school, where 1,953 Number of applicants 170 Size of inaugural class 18 Number of full-time faculty (including cross appointments) 14 Number of adjunct faculty (co-teachers) teaching in fall semester 30 Number of adjunct faculty (co-teachers) teaching in fall semester RYERSON LAW BY THE NUMBERS

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