Dalhousie dentistry students prep for graduation after scandal

It has not been the final year they must have imagined, but fourth-year students from Dalhousie’s Dentistry School will don graduation gowns this month and bring an end to what has been a year many in the Class of 2015 likely can’t wait to put behind them.

Most of them will graduate, anyway.

University president Richard Florizone has suggested that not all of the male students who posted sexually violent comments about classmates on a Facebook “gentlemen’s club” have qualified for graduation.

With spring convocation on May 29, it’s unclear how many will don caps and gowns.

“Dentistry students can work on clinic requirements right up to the day before graduation,” university spokesman Brian Leadbetter says in an email response to a request for an interview.

“As is the case every year in the Faculty of Dentistry, some students may not have completed their clinical requirements in order to graduate in Spring Convocation. That may be the case this year, but it is premature to speculate at this time.”

Thirteen male students at the dentistry school were suspended from classes in January, after one member of the group brought the page to the attention of a female classmate.

The comments included reference to using chloroform on women, “hate-f*cking” classmates and having sex with unconscious women.

After widespread media coverage, 12 of the men and 14 female students at the school agreed to a restorative justice process. Two months later the men were back in clinical practice.

Leadbetter says the restorative justice process will continue until mid-May.

“Our Dalhousie community is engaged in a journey to address the issues that arose last year; to heal and learn from the experience,” he says. “The goal is to emerge from this experience a stronger, more united community – one that values and is committed to a culture of respect, diversity and inclusiveness.”

A task force is to deliver its report on the incident to the university president by June 30.

Dalhousie not alone in scandal

Sadly, the Dalhousie dentistry school is not an anomaly.

In recent years, knuckle-dragging stupidity – and worse - has rocked campuses coast to coast.

At the start of the fall semester in 2013, the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia was shamed when first-year students were caught chanting the following gem during Frosh Week:

“UBC boys we like them young. Y is for your sister. O is for oh-so-tight. U is for underage. N is for no consent. G is for grab that ass.”

The same charming ditty dragged Saint Mary’s University in Halifax into the fray.

The same year, UBC’s main campus was haunted by a series of late-night sexual assaults.

The previous year, three members of the McGill Redmen were charged with sexual assault with a weapon and forcible confinement. The charges were later dropped, though the woman maintained she was the victim of a sexual assault and the decision was a miscarriage of justice.

At the University of Ottawa, the men’s hockey program is suspended this season, for the second year in a row, after two players were charged with sexual assault in March 2014.

The coach was fired after investigations uncovered “widespread behaviour that was disreputable and unbecoming of representatives of uOttawa and suggested an unhealthy climate surrounding the team,” university president Allan Rock wrote in a letter to the Globe and Mail.

That case was still in the headlines when the female president of the university’s student federation went public about sexually explicit and violent comments made about her by fellow student leaders.

Like the Dalhousie case, the comments were on a “private” Facebook page.

The school launched a task force that reported back in January. The university president has accepted all 11 recommendations.

Gary Slater, associate vice-president of student affairs, is co-chairman of the team responsible for putting those recommendations in place by February of next year.

They include a program for coaches and athletes and for the campus as a whole. They also include a better system to track data on sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus.

“We’ll never know if we make progress if we don’t know how many incidents take place,” Slater says.

High-profile incidents make issues hard to ignore

Wayne MacKay, a law professor at Dalhousie University and chairman of the task force at St. Mary’s, says there has been significant increase in awareness about sexual violence both on campus and in society at large as a result of these incidents.

“There is a much larger problem of sexual violence and misogyny than most people realized but these high-profile incidents (in both Canada and the U.S.) have made the problem harder to ignore,” MacKay says.

“These are deep-rooted problems and we still have a long way to go. At least the journey has begun.”

At the Sauder School of Business, the disturbing frosh-week incident led to a host of changes, including a new senior associate dean who will join the staff this summer to focus on equity and diversity.

Dalhousie officials await their own task force report.

In the meantime, the Dental Board of Nova Scotia, which regulates dentists in the province, has taken its own steps, revising rules of membership.

Dentists do not apply for membership until after graduation, so none have yet submitted to the board. When - or if - they do, they will have to include an explanation of any academic misconduct charges and two character references.

“The Board has made a number of improvements to the application process to ensure that it is well prepared to thoroughly review and adjudicate an application,” registrar Martin Gillis tells Yahoo Canada News. “Our priority in adjudicating any application for licensure will be to make a decision that protects the public interest.”