UBC Law: History

Chapter 8: Experiences at Law School

Practising Profession as Part-time Teachers, part 1

THE EARLY UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA law faculty could not have functioned without the active support of the local legal profession, many of whom taught at the faculty on a part-time basis and without pay.

The 1945 entry class had eighty-six students (counting both beginning law students and some who, midway through professional qualification, attended under special transitional arrangements) and all were taught by only two full-time faculty members: the Dean George Curtis and Professor "Pappy" Read. Although the full-time faculty complement was increased to four the next year (adding George McAllister and Gilbert Kennedy), student numbers threatened to entirely overwhelm an institution that, as a matter of principle, would not turn down any qualified applicant. The four met that fall with a student body of some 240. Despite doubling in faculty strength, the student–faculty ratio worsened from 43:1 to 60:1 in a single year. The full-time faculty met a student population of 409 the next year for an entirely intolerable student–faculty ratio of 100:1. New hiring was authorized during 1948. Malcolm MacIntyre and John Westlake (Vaselenak) came to the faculty, soon reinforced by Fred Carrothers, who began his distinguished career as a lecturer on a one-year appointment. Even at that, student–faculty ratios were miserably inadequate and Dean Curtis was never able to let up his pressure on the university administration to increase staffing.

Achieving tolerable conditions for teaching and scholarship was one thing; mere survival quite another. It seems highly unlikely that the faculty could have provided a credible education of any sort without the support of a small army of lawyers who contributed their time to the cause of legal education. Practising lawyers moved quickly to fill the breach in 1945 and have consistently done so ever since. Faced as he was with impending crisis attempting to staff a law faculty with only a month’s lead time the new Dean found that:

[t]he response of members of the bench and bar to requests for their help was exemplary. They wanted the law school to succeed. There was not only the particular obligation which all felt toward the returning veterans but the sense of seeing a long hoped-for faculty make the grade. I asked the Bar Special Committee on the Establishment of a Law School for names of possible instructors. Every one of their nominees accepted readily. The interview with M. M. McFarlane remains etched in my mind. I sought his help with a course on company law. He listened attentively, expressed his interest and willingness; but indicated a reservation. He hesitated a minute; then went on to say he found it wise to speak bluntly when delicate points were to be faced. He proposed to be blunt. He did not know what the university’s financial practices were and would not wish to do anything to disturb them. But he must make it a condition of his acceptance that he neither expected nor would he take any financial remuneration. He wished his work to be a contribution to the profession and to the university.
I assured him that I was confident MacKenzie would not suffer the slightest embarrassment from such an arrangement.

In 1946 alone the Victoria Times reported on "seven prominent jurists who will lecture in the faculty of law. They are Mr. Justice H. I. Bird, Judge J. M. Coady, Senator Wallace Farris, S. J. Remnant, F. A. Sheppard, Mr. Justice Sidney Smith and Mr. Justice J. O. Wilson".

With the best intentions in the world, more than one Canadian law dean has discovered to his or her chagrin, that it is one thing to persuade busy practitioners to teach on a part-time basis and another altogether to encourage them to take sufficient time out of their working lives to prepare adequately for the classroom. There was apparently no difficulty of these sorts at the early faculty of law for Dean Curtis’s impression has been that these teaching assignments:

were taken very seriously by the members of the profession. They were not treated as tag-end engagements. One day I met Mrs. J. W. de B. Farris, wife of Senator Farris, the leader of the bar. The Senator had agreed to give a special lecture to our students on constitutional law, he having recently returned from the Privy Council where he had argued a difficult constitutional case. I was always on good terms with Mrs. Farris. This day she bore down on me. Her annoyance was that "For the last week Wallace has been like a bear with a sore paw around the house. Every time I protest, he replies—But don’t you understand—I have to get a lecture ready for George Curtis’s students."

Despite the dire situation in which the practising Bar was first called upon to teach, Dean Curtis’s reliance upon them was not simply opportunistic. The relationship was one he very much sought to foster, and fifty years later he expressed his delight that "the close and cordial relationship between the profession and the law school has ever been an energizing feature of legal education in British Columbia". Post-war Ontario was already notorious for the acrimony that had developed between law teachers and the practising profession, and Curtis quite consciously opted to follow a rather different model. He knew that:

Dalhousie from its beginning days followed the practice of having a number of Judges and practicing members of the Bar teaching subjects which their experience particularly fitted them to do. I saw every reason for replicating this practice at UBC. Besides the value, in certain subjects, of having a teacher in charge who is daily meeting the problems raised in the area, the visits of the practitioners are a visible and outward sign of the unity of interest between the School and the Bar . . . .

Part-time teachers have given freely of their time, and through their services students have learned about subjects that full-time faculty could not possibly have covered. Often, they have gained access to some of the finest jurists and practitioners in the province. Mr. Justice Lloyd McKenzie recalled that "the students were especially appreciative of the practitioners". "Med" McFarlane (later Mr. Justice Meredith McFarlane), for example, taught at the University of British Columbia for a full seventeen years, where he was, Chief Justice Nathan Nemetz recalls, "an excellent teacher". Even in light of so distinguished a record, however, he told Professor Tony Sheppard in 1995 that he never considered himself to be "a proper good teacher or educator, but I think I knew what I was talking about". The full-time faculty, he said, did "a much more important job than mine".

Coming as it does from a long-standing legal educator of fine reputation and outstanding professional achievement, this self-assessment suffers from a surfeit of modesty. Nevertheless, every silver lining has a cloud and Mr. Justice McFarlane’s reflections on his teaching career provide a good deal of insight into the difficulties that inevitably arise when busy practitioners become part-time educators.

Most of the problems encountered by part-time teachers in the early years were a natural consequence of the competing demands on their time: with the best will in the world they could not reasonably be expected to put time and effort into class preparation, course design, or student contact equivalent to that of full-time faculty members. The extensive preparation required by Socratic teaching effectively precluded part-time teachers from presenting their classes in that way. Asked about the teaching materials he relied upon in the early years, Mr. Justice McFarlane responded simply: "I just had my own notes, which I did myself, that’s all." "My contribution," he said, "was to go out and do those morning lectures and that was about it." Other part-time teachers, too, seem to have had to rely on a straight lecture method. Professor Diana Priestly recalled that another early teacher taught his subject from a textbook that he simply "went straight through". It was not uncommon for part-timers assigned to a 4:30 p.m. teaching slot to miss classes altogether and "when they came", she said, "there was no time wasted. They reeled off cases . . . . Their personality didn’t come across. They weren’t part of the school."

Equally, pressure on their time meant that part-time lecturers were unable to participate significantly in the collegial life of the faculty. Although relations were cordial, they had little to do with the full-time professoriate. In general, they were unavailable to students outside of scheduled class times ("I usually went in the mornings before I went downtown, I always liked to get out at eight-thirty in the morning, spend an hour there and be in my office by ten", said McFarlane) and part-timers were too busy with practice and the other demands on their time to participate in the extra-curricular activities that enrich student life. In the early years of the faculty, the full-time academic staff both set exam questions and marked the answer papers in subjects taught by judges or practising lawyers.

Despite these acknowledged problems, the participation of practising lawyers as volunteer teachers was a life-line for the early University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. It gave the practising profession a sense of ownership in the new institution and did much to cement good ongoing relations between "town and gown".

Chapter 8 continued