TORONTO - Enough is enough.
It’s all well and good to be a welcoming, multicultural society that bends over backwards to respect everyone’s faith and belief. But there are certain inalienable, bedrock truths that go along with living here that cannot and should not be bent to “accommodate” different value systems.
Gender equality is one of them.
And so it’s shocking that a secular, publicly-funded school of higher learning such as York University would insist that a professor agree to a male student’s request to opt out of a group project because he doesn’t want to interact with his female classmates due to religious reasons.
To his credit, sociology professor J. Paul Grayson has defied the decision by dean Martin Singer, and with the backing of his department, told the student he must participate with women in his focus group assignment.
“We have to make a value choice,” he told the Toronto Sun. “What’s more important, the rights of females who make up 54% of the population, or those of individuals with religious notions incompatible with egalitarianism?”
Since going public about his battle with York, the 40-year veteran professor has been overwhelmed with hundreds of e-mails of support for not backing down and agreeing to the student’s request. “I think this case is the first of its kind in Canada. Everybody’s absolutely astounded,” he said.
Among the many students and faculty who applauded his stance was a female Muslim. “She said she has to live with this sexism all the time and she’s fed up.”
The issue arose in September when a male student in Grayson’s online sociology course sent a note asking to be excused from a required learning group: “One of the main reasons that I have chosen Internet courses to complete my BA is due to my firm religious beliefs, and part of that is the intermingling between men and women,” he wrote. “It will not be possible for me to meet in public with a group of women (the majority of my group) to complete some of these tasks.”
Grayson’s first inclination was to deny his request but decided to forward it to the dean as well as the director of the Centre for Human Rights. He was shocked by their response.
The vice dean said he must accommodate the student in the same way he would make other arrangements for someone who lived too far away to participate in the group project.
“Can I assume that a similar logic would apply if the group with which he did not want to interact was comprised of Blacks, Moslems [or] homosexuals?” Grayson asked in a written reply.
In fact, the professor added, such religious accommodation would require York to agree to segregated seating, separate tutorials and even gender-specific instructors.
Surprisingly, the university’s centre for human rights took a similar position as the dean’s office, saying the Ontario Human Rights Code requires accommodation based on religious observances.
“You lose sight of the values you try to protect and you cling to the procedure,” Grayson complained.
He refused to be an accessory to sexism. With the backing of a resolution passed by his sociology department, the professor wrote the student in October and told him he’d have to do his group course work with females. The man — “a decent, polite guy” — told him he understood. “I thank you for the way you have handled this request, and I look forward to continuing in this course.”
Shamefully, it’s the university which still has a problem with it.
On Oct. 18 Grayson received a confidential letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies telling him he had a “legal obligation” to excuse the student from female interaction because of his religious views.
The senior professor has refused to change his mind. “They can come after me, I don’t care,” he said. But he worries that a younger faculty member would be intimidated into a different decision.
“Do we want our daughters going to universities where it’s OK for male students to say that we don’t want to interact with you?” Grayson asked. “I have a granddaughter. I certainly don’t want her ever going into that situation.”
The days of segregation are over. The religious student gets it. Why can’t his university?
