So you’ve come here. Every one of these scandals involves at least one mind, or several, making an unprincipled decision. While ethical debate often centres on the question of “what is right?” that’s not the issue in these cases. As one of the experts you’ll hear from says, “The problem isn’t the lack of understanding of what one ought to do, it’s just the failure to do it.” This mind you’re in stands on the edge of its own ethical chasm, and it’s about to make a terrible decision. Our job is to find out why.

Now, let’s understand the nature of our environment. A mind is not merely a brain. A mind is an intellect, shaped by influences. There are also emotions here, and history. The pressures of culture take up a great deal of space. And though some minds are beset by illnesses or chemical torsions that might make unethical choices more likely, this isn’t one of them. This is an ordinary mind, very much like your own. 


Some of the influences on this mind are more powerful than others. Some merely provide context, a more fertile soil in which unethical motives can thrive. We’re going to concentrate our tour on the factors that are pushing this ordinary mind toward a choice it will ultimately regret, when it has a chance to think clearly. Say, in jail.

Our first stop – a large, amorphous area – is human history. This is the context I mentioned, the loam in which the mind has grown. If you were wondering whether this era we live in is the most scandal-plagued ever, look around. It’s here that we’re reminded of the wave of corruption that roared through the United States in the 1920s, and resulted in the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934; the Windfall Oil and Mines scandal of the early 1960s, which led to an overhaul of Ontario securities laws; the Salad Oil scandal of 1963 (“one of the biggest swindles in history,” according to The Wall Street Journal at the time); the Wall Street shenanigans of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky in the late 1980s; the Bre-X scandal. It’s quite a list. And let’s not forget one of the largest financial scandals in modern history – the famous South Sea Bubble – which involved not just the South Sea Company from which it gets its name, but also the government of England, almost 300 years ago.

History doesn’t tell us why this mind we’re in is going to slip its moral moorings. It merely puts to rest the notion that ethical weakness is somehow a modern phenomenon. It reminds us that our mistakes come in waves, and that to err is, sadly, inevitable.

But even if we accept that corruption has its historic place in the world, we still reject cheating as wicked. And we celebrate the example of those individuals who refuse to be lured into the unscrupulous woods. In The Naked Corporation, a recent book by Don Tapscott and David Ticoll, the authors point to BMO Financial Group CEO Tony Comper (BA 1966 St. Mike’s) as one businessman who keeps to the narrow path. “When information comes to light that might embarrass the bank,” they write, “his staff reports they’ve never heard him ask ‘How do we get out of this mess?’ Rather he poses the question ‘What’s the right thing to do here?’ This is now part of the bank’s folklore; a culture of doing the right thing has developed.”

Experts who study the ethical makeup of societies always mark off a portion of the populace who can be counted on to do no wrong. According to Professor Leonard Brooks of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, the forensic accountant’s rule of thumb holds that “20 per cent of people in general will not steal anything, even if they have a chance.” Those are the people we want to marry our children and handle our accounts, the ones who snarl at temptation. However, we pretty quickly run out of the Tony Compers of the world and we’re left with the fallible remainder. And this is where we start to get into trouble.



Thomas Hurka, who holds the Henry N.R. Jackman Distinguished Chair in Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto, says, “Most people have multiple reasons for acting in accordance with moral principles. It’s complex, and the complex can unravel.” According to Hurka, when the mind that might decide to cheat chooses not to, there are two essential factors at work. The first is self-interest – a fear of punishment. “People decide not to cheat in business,” says Hurka, “because they think they won’t get away with it.” As rationales go, it might not inspire heroic string music, but it’s effective. 


The second reason is subtler. “There are a lot of people who will act rightly, even at some cost to themselves,” says Hurka, “so long as they believe that other people are doing it, too.” This reasoning falls into what American social scientist Jon Elster, in his book The Cement of Society, calls “the norm of fairness.” In deciding whether or not to cheat, a person looks across the desk at her colleagues; if they’re keeping their hands out of the till, she likely will, too.

But now that we understand our mind’s typical motivations for good, we can start to see how they might break down. Let’s take fear of punishment first. In order to worry about getting caught, the mind on the brink of an unethical decision has to think getting caught is a real possibility. That requires clear and effective policing, or, as it’s called in the world of business, “governance.” According to Melissa Williams, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, who has a deep interest in ethical issues, the understanding that only a watchful eye keeps the populace in line informs a good deal of constitutional thought. People are morally imperfect, goes the thinking, and well-designed institutions free us from having to hope for the best from the shady characters who run them. Immanuel Kant, James Madison, Adam Smith and other philosophers, says Williams, have fashioned arguments around the premise that “a well-ordered constitutional society could govern even a nation of devils.”

In a situation like this, if governance breaks down, chaos is likely to ensue. That accountant’s rule of thumb Professor Brooks mentioned earlier puts a number to the risk: Of the populace at large, he says, “60 per cent will steal if they think there’s a good chance they won’t get caught.”

Time after time, in the case of many financial scandals (not to mention situations such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib), it was the overseers who failed first. Hollinger’s board, for example, was allegedly compromised by, among other things, a lack of sufficiently independent directors. Says an official at the Ontario Securities Commission, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “If you have a company with a major controlling shareholder who is the chief executive officer and all his cronies are on the board, you then have an environment where it’s more possible to have things go wrong.”

In How Companies Lie, authors A. Larry Elliott and Richard J. Schroth set much of the blame for corporate corruption at the feet of what they call “dysfunctional governance.” And they’ve discovered that bad boards have a number of common traits, among them:

1. They are mostly old business friends of the CEO intent on cranking up the company for more money.
2. They do not evaluate themselves and have no interest in how well they are meeting their obligations as trustees.
3. They prefer short, simple board sessions at nice places close by.
4. They know few of the key managers and producers in the company

If this ethically challenged mind we’re trooping around in belongs to an executive who has no fear of being fired because her board members are her friends, might it not still be scared straight by the prospect of legal retribution? Yes, indeed. But the prospect must, in fact, exist. And here again we have a problem.

At the height of the scandal fallout in the United States, we saw images of former executives at Enron and elsewhere being taken away in handcuffs, doing the so-called “perp walk” that was meant to put investors at ease. That was thanks largely to New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who had both the power and the inclination to go after corporate criminals, and continues to do so, to the consternation of a business community that mostly resents the legal intrusion. In Canada, there are no Eliot Spitzers on the case.

Traditional law enforcement agencies have few people with the time or expertise to tackle the complexities of white collar crime. Only very recently has the RCMP set up what are called IMETs – Integrated Market Enforcement Teams – to dig into financial corruption, and they haven’t been on the job long enough to have an impact. For now, investors in Canada, where there’s no national securities regulatory agency, have to hope the Ontario Securities Commission can bring criminals to justice. Unfortunately, that’s a faint hope. “The remedies available to us,” grumbles our anonymous OSC official, “are ‘cease trade’ orders. Or we can order that [certain individuals] may no longer serve as directors or officers. Eliot Spitzer can go to mutual funds and say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing. I’m going to take assets away from you unless you agree to a settlement.’ He can do things we don’t have the power to do. Our attorney general should be doing that!”

So here’s how a scandalous scenario develops in a mind such as ours. Once the enforcement mechanism is weakened, the segment of the population that was restrained from immoral behaviour only by the fear of “getting caught” starts to get a little frisky. Our mind, ever alert to outside influences, can’t help but notice the ethical shift. And then the “norm of fairness” breaks down.

”

Once the self-interested people start to cheat,” says Professor Hurka, “that affects the people who believe in fairness, because they’re prepared to do what’s right only so long as other people are doing it. And so they start to cheat.” The norm of fairness not only allows cheating in that scenario, it encourages it. When others are cheating and getting away with it, the norm of fairness says it must be all right.

Now you can start to see how a society can experience waves of scandal, in business, in sport and elsewhere. “The existence of the motivation of fairness or reciprocity,” says Hurka, “explains why there can be these swings in moral and immoral behaviour.”



The media have a role to play here, too. In general, we have no way of knowing whether our fellow citizens are behaving ethically, but we are swayed by what we see on the news. And every time a scandal story breaks, the norm of fairness applies its effect. Even those perp walks, while increasing the fear of getting caught, reinforce the notion that everyone is cheating. “If the media concentrate on acts of wrongdoing,” says Hurka, “they will create the belief that wrongdoing is common, which will increase the amount of wrongdoing.”



This was the quandary faced by India’s four-term prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru when he was pushed to condemn corruption in his own government. In a quote remembered in Jon Elster’s The Cement of Society, Nehru complained, “Merely shouting from the house-tops that everybody is corrupt creates an atmosphere of corruption…. The man in the street says to himself: ‘well, if everybody seems corrupt, why shouldn’t I be corrupt?’”

If Conrad Black heard the reports of Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski using $1 million of his company’s money to throw a $2-million toga party for his wife, who could blame him for looking at the $42,870 bill for a “Happy Birthday Barbara” dinner, wondering whether he should charge it to Hollinger, and thinking, “Why not?”

Before the mind decides to cheat in order to achieve something, of course, it must already have concluded that what it’s trying to achieve is important. For surely, only if profits mattered above all would someone risk everything to show dishonest numbers in an annual report. To that end, in its slow process of breaking down the barriers to unethical behaviour, the norm of fairness has a kind of ally in something you might call “cultural conditioning.” 


The world of business has many tools to help executives get their priorities straight. Enron employed the “rank and yank” system of performance persuasion. At regular intervals, employees were rated on a scale from one to five, and the bottom 15 per cent were fired or pressured to leave. An atmosphere of ethical and emotional brutality prevailed. “The system was frequently used for vendettas,” writes David Callahan in The Cheating Culture. “Managers were known to lie and alter personnel records to get rid of certain employees.” Other companies use less violent means. One that’s particularly popular: the bonus. “If you have pay for performance,” says our man in the OSC, “and the CEO’s and the CFO’s bonus scheme is tied to continued earnings increases, then there are obviously natural pressures on executives to make sure that those corporate earnings are there.”

Like Olympic sprinters constantly under the strain of having to better their times, executives are expected to deliver ever higher returns for shareholders. They’re dragged forward by the carrot of bonuses and pushed by the demands of investors until they wind up headed into a moral tunnel that leaves them very little room to manoeuvre. “As the race for money and status has intensified,” says Callahan, “it has become more acceptable for individuals to act opportunistically and dishonestly to get ahead.”



If you’re wondering how things got this way, what softened up the cultural soil and allowed this ruthless age to take root, Professor Dennis O’Hara has an answer. O’Hara is a theologian at St. Michael’s College who teaches ecological and Christian ethics, and he sees in our money-mad society a rise in individualism, and a concurrent falling away of our belief in a higher power. We lost God in increments. “In the old days,” he explains, “we had what we called ‘the God of the gaps.’ Whenever there was a gap in our knowledge – that was God. As science progresses you eventually fill the gaps and then, ‘Oh, there’s no God.’”



When people convince themselves there is no higher accountability, says O’Hara, it’s easier to believe the universe is essentially meaningless. Once you reach that conclusion, the concept of the common good falls away, and it’s a short leap to deciding that the only purpose to life is one’s own personal gain and pleasure. 
It’s the ultimate failure of governance.

So we are down to this: a mind that has lost its sense of a higher authority and a connection to the common good – encouraged by the culture that feeds it to value money and success above all, and shown the example of others who thieve in order to achieve this success – is given an opportunity to thieve, with little fear of getting caught. It seems almost inevitable that the choice it’s about to make is not going to look good on a resumé. Nevertheless other minds on the same precipice, struggling under the same conditions, might not plunge into the darkness. What pushes our mind over the edge?

Come this way, to the situational ethics zone. Here is our mind locked in the moment, looking at its options. It isn’t measuring them against a clear ethical yardstick that defines what’s bad or good – we know it lost that a long time ago. Instead, it’s trying to assess this particular decision according to what’s acceptable under the circumstances. And because that’s not easy, it’s using a few tricks.



Rationalization is one. Joseph Wells, a former FBI agent, told David Callahan that a hallmark of high-level fraud is “the ability to call the fraud by a nice name.” Faced with a grim financial reality, a chief accountant reinterprets the acceptable rules. He rethinks the recipe for success, stir-fries a few of the raw numbers and cooks up something “for the good of everybody who works in the company.”

He may not even think of it as cheating. That’s trick number two: self-delusion. “I think people can convince themselves of almost anything,” says O’Hara. “When I listen to certain corporate leaders, I hear their positions, I hear their arguments, and I find them absolutely contemptible. And yet, do I think that they really believe what they’re saying? The answer is yes. I think that they’re convinced of their own goodness.”



One of the chief attractions of religion is its ability to make the complex clear, to provide ready answers to difficult questions and to hold out a promised land as reward for going along. O’Hara understands the need for the guidance of dogma, for the relief from having to “start from square one” in the face of every ethical dilemma. But he says, “We’ve fallen in recent times into this notion that there has to be a single right answer. It’s as if we want a catechism and everything’s going to fit into this catechism.” For corporate executives, the catechism has to do with the bottom line – what’s right for the shareholders is, de facto, right. And profit has become the new afterlife.

Hugh Gunz, a professor at the Rotman School of Management who studies organizational influences on ethical decision-making, has looked at what effect rank has on the situational ethics of executives. The research he and his colleagues have done suggests that an individual’s willingness to cheat is influenced by how close he thinks he is to the company’s centre of power. “The more you feel yourself to be at the centre of things, to be a member of the top management team, the more you’re likely to take an organizational, managerial answer,” says Gunz. “To say, in other words, ‘Let’s do something for the good of the company, rather than what might be professionally correct.’”


John C. Maxwell, in his book There’s No Such Thing as Business Ethics, decries the rise of situational ethics in which there is no longer any absolute good, only shades of what’s-good-for-me? He quotes from the description of a University of Michigan course entitled Ethics of Corporate Management: “This module is not concerned with the personal moral issues of honesty and truthfulness. It is assumed that the students at this university have already formed their own standards on these issues.” It may be that the university was simply admitting the impossibility of teaching values to its students, but Maxwell considers it proof that, where once our decisions were based on ethics, now our ethics are based on our decisions.

That dim assessment may actually have some foundation in fact, though not in the way Maxwell believes. We’re almost at the end of our tour, and you may have noticed there’s one thing we haven’t looked at yet – the mechanics of the mind. Since we can’t ignore the fact that the mind operates within a biological organ, we have to consider how its inner workings might influence the decision-making process. Is there anything about a well-functioning set of synapses that might contribute to a regrettable decision?



Apparently, yes. And again, its roots lie in the mind’s relentless desire to find the easy path to clarity in the midst of chaos. Donald Stuss, a professor of psychology and medicine at U of T, and director of the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, has looked at the functioning of the frontal lobes of the brain, where decisions are made. The research he and others have done suggests that as we go through life, we create models of behaviour. “That’s what the brain does,” Stuss says, “to simplify the world.” If we try something once, and the outcome is good, we’re likely to do that again. The more we do it, the less we think about it; the more the pattern is established, the less work the brain has to do.

Someone might hesitate, even agonize, the first time she crosses an ethical line. But if she isn’t caught, and no one gets hurt, she does it again, and again, until it becomes a pattern of acceptable behaviour. “If our model of the brain is correct,” says Stuss, “it could explain why people often don’t feel guilty.” In September of 1980, Brian Molony, a highly regarded CIBC bank employee with a gambling problem, made what he was sure was a one-time decision. He faked a loan in order to cover a $22,300 gambling debt, with every intention of paying the money back and erasing the fraud. According to the book Stung, by Gary Stephen Ross, by the time he was arrested, a year and a half later, Molony had committed fraud 93 times to a total of more than $10 million, and he was still convinced he needed just one good run at the casino to get back to even. “Most people who do something unethical,” says Stuss, “get to the point where the thing is explained away.”

These patterns can be established early, well before a CEO is fudging numbers and putting investors’ money at risk. In The Cheating Culture, Callahan devotes a chapter to dishonest students and reports the results of a 2001 study of 1,000 business students on six campuses. It concluded that “students who engaged in dishonest behaviour in their college classes were more likely to engage in dishonest behaviour on the job.”

It makes sense to us, intuitively, that people who have cheated before will cheat again. But we make a mistake if we dismiss the cheater as merely a bad apple. Barbara Ley Toffler knows it isn’t true. She was there, at the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, when its leaders made the decisions that linked the firm inextricably to the Enron scandal and ultimately brought it down. She went into that company with high ethical standards, and was appalled at some of the practices she witnessed. But under the influence of the corporate culture, the norm of fairness and the rest of the factors we’ve looked at, it wasn’t long before her standards changed. “I didn’t break any laws or violate regulations,” she writes in Final Accounting, “but I certainly compromised many of my values…. If you hang around a place long enough, you inevitably start to act like most of the people around you.” Toffler now conducts orientation sessions on ethics with MBA students, and one of those students told her something she wants us to hear: “I believe anyone has the potential to be a bad apple.” 

The mind we’ve been looking at has no evil intent; it thinks of itself, its motivations, as good. And the terrible choice it’s about to make? It might just seem the best decision of all.

Trevor Cole was recently nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for his novel Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life.

But under Canadian law, chief executive officers are required to put their companies’ interests first. The apparent conflict between doing what’s socially responsible and what’s most profitable can lead well-intentioned executives to make bad decisions, says Roger Martin, dean of U of T’s Joseph L. Rotman School of Management.

Finding new and innovative ways for companies to be more socially responsible without having to sacrifice profits is the focus of Rotman’s AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship. The institute was created early in 2004 with a $10-million gift from businessman Michael Lee-Chin, whose AIC Ltd. has become a major player in the Canadian mutual fund industry. In 2002, Lee-Chin purchased a 75 per cent share in Jamaica’s National Commercial Bank – with the aim of investing a portion of the profits to improve education and health care in that country. “He’s the perfect person to work with us on this,” says Martin, the institute’s first director. “We plan to become a global centre for thinking about good corporate citizenship and how to put that into action.”

Martin himself has thought a lot about corporate responsibility. In an article published in 2002 in Harvard Business Review, he devised a framework to help executives determine whether a virtuous action enhances or undermines shareholder value. The model challenges corporate leaders to develop strategies that enable them to undertake socially responsible actions while also generating greater profits.

Martin cites the cement industry – a major contributor to greenhouse gases – as a case in point. A cement company acting alone to reduce its emissions would incur higher production costs, have a negligible impact on total emissions and likely lose market share to its lower-cost competitors. Martin argues that, rather than waiting for governments to impose regulations, cement companies ought to act together as an industry to reduce emissions. In doing so, the companies would all earn societal goodwill without sacrificing much, if any, profit individually.

But companies can’t stop there. When socially responsible behaviour becomes the norm (or is mandated by law) the public stops recognizing such actions as “progressive.” For companies to continue to earn public credit, they must continue to lead and innovate on the “virtue frontier.” Martin says such action requires committed and visionary executives – and persuasive ones. “[The AIC institute] will encourage leaders to be more expansive in their thinking, rather than wait for governments and citizen groups to get on them.”

The institute supports research in business ethics and is developing case studies to enhance existing ethics courses. It will also help develop new programs, including an MBA major in corporate citizenship.”It’s becoming obvious that customers, employees, governments are all saying, we expect corporations to do more to be good citizens,” says Martin. “Yet the message of what executives should do is exceedingly vague and confusing. At the centre, we’re building a model to help them.”

The U.S. is not alone when it comes to troublesome CEOs and corporate transgressions, of course. In Canada, Conrad Black and his senior executives stand accused of fleecing their company, Hollinger Inc., of millions of dollars to fund personal expenses. (For his part, Black says the payments “were justifiable and disclosed by sophisticated and fully informed independent directors.”)

While many may see little distinction between the Marthas and Conrads of the world, their cases offer us different insights into preventing these situations in the future.

Martha Stewart is said to have sold about 4,000 shares of ImClone – worth approximately $250,000 US – based on insider information. The transaction had nothing to do with her own company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, or her role there as CEO. She used her own money, and only she and her stockbroker were involved in her decision to sell the shares. Martha Stewart Living was affected only when Stewart’s indictment touched off a steep decline in the company’s share price.

The allegations against Conrad Black and his senior executives at Hollinger (and they are only allegations at this point; nothing has been proven in court) involve the use of money that did not belong to them but to all of Hollinger’s shareholders. The distinction is significant: Martha Stewart played with her own money; Conrad Black is said to have played with Hollinger’s.

I don’t think we can do much more than we are already doing to stop the Martha Stewarts of the world. People, for various reasons of self-interest, will inevitably make poor decisions; in some cases, they will get away with them. Stewart’s incarceration sends a clear message that insider trading carries a harsh penalty (at least in the U.S.). It should remind regulators, too, of the need to be vigilant. Strict policing will catch those who intend to defraud our securities system, but we need to continue to invest in enforcement. The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) has recently announced that it will try to ferret out fraud by using “regulatory intelligence.” With the help of industry watchdogs, OSC investigators will try to identify questionable investment activities. This is a step in the right direction, but the OSC requires stronger enforcement powers, comparable to similar agencies in the United States.

Conrad Black is another story. We can do (and should be doing) a lot more to prevent such alleged corporate abuses. At Hollinger, and at many of the scandal-plagued corporations we’ve been reading about, the board of directors appears to have been nothing more than a rubber stamp. The controlling or majority shareholder seems to have called the shots and the board acquiesced.

At a growing number of companies in North America, this is finally beginning to change. In some cases, shareholders (and in others, regulators) have demanded the appointment of directors who are independent from management and the majority shareholders. On properly constituted boards, a majority of independent directors meet not only with management but on their own as well. While the board requires the input and participation of key management personnel, their decisions reflect what, in their opinion, is best for the company and its shareholders, regardless of management’s view. Large institutional investors such as the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan have become more active, demanding more transparent reporting at shareholder meetings and holding directors more accountable for a company’s results.

Important board committees should be composed entirely of independent members. Effective and forward-thinking boards are inviting experts in areas such as compensation to guide them through deliberations. On properly constituted boards, directors can scrutinize management’s actions, ask for further information, and challenge management’s decisions without being hampered by friendships and ill-placed loyalties. While directors are being encouraged to own shares, stock options – the ability to invest should market conditions make it prudent to do so – are being eliminated. Directors, such as those at TD Bank, are now putting themselves in the same position as the average shareholder, rather than a superior one.

I believe that the vast majority of people in business want to do the right thing. But I also believe that as university educators, we have a critical role to play in the development of socially responsible and ethically minded business people.

Most people develop the ability to judge between right and wrong long before they come to university. What we do during grade school and high school – and the feedback we get from our teachers and mentors – reinforces what we think of as fair and unfair, just and unjust, acceptable and unacceptable. I don’t think universities can do much to teach people the difference between right and wrong. But we do have an obligation to provide students with the tools to help them make ethical decisions – often under pressure and with a lot of competing information to distil. And we need to investigate a variety of models of corporate governance to determine which are the most effective under differing circumstances.

A component of every undergraduate business program in Canada now deals with ethical decision-making. At the University of Toronto, entire courses are devoted to the subject. By studying the mistakes of the past, we hope to positively influence the decision-makers of the future. At the MBA and executive MBA levels, the story is the same.

Courses integrating ethics and corporate governance are required components of the curriculum. The Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in conjunction with the ICD Corporate Governance College, has established a unique directors education program to meet the needs of both current and future corporate directors.

Interestingly, Conrad Black is quoted in a recently published book by Richard Siklos (Shades of Black: Conrad Black, His Rise and Fall) stating “I underestimated the force of the corporate governance movement.” Indeed.

Richard C. Powers is a senior lecturer in the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management and vice-chair of the division of management at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

Yet much of what passes as corruption in this country is actually waste or mismanagement rather than thievery or skulduggery. We ought not to excuse waste or mismanagement, but lesser misdemeanors should not be confused with more heinous felonies.

The Canadian government is, arguably, more transparent and sanitary today than it has ever been. We now have ethics commissioners, conflict-of-interest guidelines, access-to-information laws, as well as intrusive auditors and aggressively suspicious media. Canadians – reminded daily on our currency that Macdonald, Laurier and Mackenzie King were our nation-builders – forget or have not learned that corruption and patronage as practised by these leaders were part of the creation of the modern Canadian state. The sponsorship scandal, to use one recent example, pales in comparison to the Pacific Scandal that led to Macdonald’s dismissal from office. Consider, too, that compared to most countries, Canada is remarkably clean: Transparency International, an organization devoted to fighting corruption, ranks this country 12th and the U.S. 17th in a survey of 146 nations on integrity.

Intense competition among media contributes to our malaise with politics. Sleaze, scandal and sensationalism sell papers and attract viewers. The media make front-page news out of proposed salary increases for politicians but fail to point out that most are paid less than many middle-tier corporate employees, and earn a fraction of what movie stars and sports celebrities do. Media also do not report that many politicians take substantial pay cuts in order to serve the public and subject their private lives to intense scrutiny, the kind that most Canadians would find intolerable.

Our expectations of politicians have risen but human nature has not changed. We expect government to operate like an infallible machine but neglect to appreciate that government is run by people who get their work done by “networking” and building “strategic alliances,” just as they do in a corporate setting. And these people, just like their corporate counterparts, are no less flawed. But nor are they any less capable of noble, selfless service for the common good.

Advances in the physical sciences have prompted us to promulgate unrealistic, utopian ideals about humanity and its very human governments. More than ever, politicians have become convenient scapegoats for whatever we are unhappy about. And our discontent is heightened by journalists and pundits who pose as neutral, presumably flawless, observers.

Of course, we need to be vigilant about corruption and malfeasance in order to expose and rectify them. Let us acknowledge, however, that politicians such as Tommy Douglas and Stanley Knowles struggled to bring us medicare and improve pensions. Former premier Bob Rae is labouring valiantly in the interests of Ontario’s system of higher education. We should extend kudos as easily and as quickly as we offer criticism and complaint. More humility and less sanctimonious outrage are necessary from us all: citizens, politicians and the media.

Nelson Wiseman is a professor in the department of political science.

Bryan Walls has been operating the John Freeman Walls historic site and Underground Railroad Museum in Puce, Ontario, since 1985

In African culture, the storyteller – the keeper of oral history – holds the title of griot. A prestigious position, the griot acts as a guardian of family memory, ensuring the lives of ancestors aren’t reduced only to marked graves, single epitaphs.

And when Bryan Walls – author of The Road That Led to Somewhere, an account of his great-great-grandparents’ escape from slavery – was growing up in the 1950s, the family griot was Aunt Stella Butler. At gatherings at her home in Puce, Ont., a small town outside of Windsor, Aunt Stella would set the table with fried chicken, sweet potato pie and peach cobbler. Sometimes she and her visitors would play the tiny wooden piano, soulful voices singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and other spirituals from days past. And she would share the stories of her ancestors, whose journeys began on the continent of Africa, wound through the plantations of North Carolina and continued to the rural lands of Canada.

She would tell Bryan how his great-great-great-grandparents, Hannabal and Jubil, were forced from their homeland of Africa and sold as slaves to a tobacco plantation owner in North Carolina. And how Hannabal escaped from the plantation in his later years, running from bounty hunters and “negro dogs” – bloodhounds trained from birth to track the scent of fugitive slaves – until he died of a heart attack in his pursuit of freedom.

She also told him stories of his great-great-grandfather, John Walls, who was born a slave on the same plantation in 1813. But, remarkable for the time, John formed a deep friendship with the slaveowner’s son, Daniel. When Daniel became fatally ill in his thirties, it was John he turned to, asking him to care for his white wife, Jane, and their four children. He also declared John a free man.

Months later, John and Jane fell in love and decided they would travel to a free state and marry. But the journey would be a seditious undertaking: in North Carolina, not only were interracial relationships illegal, but they were sure to unleash a maelstrom of fury from the community. The couple, along with the children, fled the plantation at night and headed toward Canada.

Slave owners quickly put a bounty on John’s head. The group travelled at night, veiled by the forests of North Carolina, Kentucky and Indiana. They also travelled incognito: at times, Jane pretended that John was her slave, rather than her companion. In one case she tied him to a wagon wheel and whipped him to satisfy Kentuckian slave patrollers’ curiosity.

The fugitives were sheltered and fed along the way by white and black volunteers on the Underground Railroad. In Indiana, a white Quaker abolitionist married the couple in a quiet outdoor ceremony known as “jumping the broom.” They crossed the Detroit River on an abolitionist-run boat, finally finding safety in Puce in 1846.

Over his lifetime, John accrued 200 acres of land, much of which remained in his family’s hands for generations. The couple also had six children of their own. And – never forgetting their own complicated journey – their home became a refuge for other emancipated slaves, a final terminal on the Underground Railroad.

In recounting these stories, Aunt Stella also passed down the words that John told his own children: “You are a black, be proud and strong. Remember, you are a slave’s descendant, just as good as anyone.”
“The story, for its time, was stranger than fiction,” says Bryan Walls, who graduated with a doctor of dental surgery degree from the University of Toronto in 1973. “But through genealogical research, I’ve been able to underscore that it’s not only true, but it’s unquestionably true.”

For more than 25 years, Walls, 58, has been preserving his family’s history in various forms: in 1980, he published The Road That Led to Somewhere, an account of Jane and John Walls’ journey through the Underground Railroad. He recently finished writing a libretto based on his book, which is set to be produced on Broadway in 2006. And he has been operating the John Freeman Walls Historic Site and Underground Railroad Museum in Puce since 1985. Intertwining the story of the Walls family with the larger history of North American slavery, the site relates the struggles of the estimated 40,000 African-Americans who followed the path to freedom in Canada.

The clandestine network known as the Underground Railroad was run by abolitionists who helped fugitives escape to the northern United States and Canada. Existing from the early 1800s to the end of the Civil War in 1865, it operated on railroad terminology: conductors were black and white abolitionists who helped usher passengers to stations (safehouses, usually 25 to 30 kilometres apart, which provided shelter and sometimes food) until they reached their final terminal of freedom. Fugitives moved most often at night, usually by foot, and always under the threat of punishment or death from slave patrollers eager for a $10 reward. Navigational tools were few: the North Star – the Underground Railroad’s most powerful metaphor for freedom – proved a steadfast guide. Moss, which often grows on the north side of trees, also served as a compass. Survival lay in one’s ability to remain invisible, to rely on instinct and to tap into the arcane network of supporters. “Riding this train broke the laws of the land, but the laws of God are higher than man’s,” wrote one balladeer.

In the ninth grade, his family moved to the city of Windsor, where Walls attended the all-white Catholic Assumption high school, which he describes as “a real culture shock.” But he excelled, playing football and becoming class president in his senior year. In Grade 10, his dentist noticed the teen’s interest in his profession and invited him to a banquet featuring the dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Dentistry. “I said, That’s what I want to be, I want to be a dentist.” He never veered from his declaration. In 1969, he graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the University of Windsor, and subsequently earned a doctor of dental surgery degree from U of T. At the age of 27, he opened his own dentistry practice in Windsor.

It was three years after Walls opened his dental office that the history of his ancestors took hold of him. It was the fall of 1976, and he had cast a new set of dentures for a cousin, who had shown up at the appointment with tears running down his face. “Aunt Stella is selling the family property,” he said.

Thinking her family would not want to keep the acreage, Aunt Stella, then 92, had given power of attorney to her lawyer, who sold the land for $35,000. The thought of losing his great-great-grandfather’s homestead was unbearable to Walls. He negotiated with the lawyer and the new owners, and eventually reclaimed the land for $40,000. “They [the new owners] didn’t realize the significance it had to our family. It represented freedom. And our ancestors’ burial ground was here …” He stops. “We couldn’t get to a point where we had to ask permission to come back and visit the graves.”

On a warm November evening, the first night of his ownership, an elated Walls took his two young sons out to sleep in the log cabin. Around 2 a.m., he was startled awake. “I thought I heard something at the door, and I checked to see if anyone was there.” No one was, but he was left with a current of strange emotions running through him, and the feeling that something – possibly the spirits of his ancestors – had been present.

The next morning, full of exuberance, he ran through the property and along the site’s creek. He knew that he wanted to write a book based on his ancestors’ history – that it was “part of my destiny, and God’s purpose for my life.” “They weren’t really famous figures of that period of history, not like Harriet Tubman or Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass, but they were like many, many thousands who felt that freedom was important, that making the best of their talents was important.”

That same day, he began collecting from Aunt Stella the details of his great-great-grandparents’ journey. Over the next four years, he wrote the manuscript for The Road That Led to Somewhere. “It all stemmed from these strong emotions that come – people can call it inspiration – when you’re given a thought you can’t get rid of, and it just keeps churning inside of you.” “That,” he says, “became the starting point of my writing journey.”

At the same time, Walls, along with his family, decided to develop the property into the John Freeman Walls Historical Site. He calls it “a family labour of love.” Over a series of years, his father, brother and uncles constructed almost every building on the site. They stripped the modern siding off the log cabin, and restored it to its original 19th-century state. They laid a foundation and erected a new roof on a large log cabin donated by the Ministry of Natural Resources. The cabin now serves as home to an international gospel concert every August. Walls’ daughter Brittany, an aspiring singer, has opened every concert since the age of three, delivering poignant renditions of “O Canada.”

The men also crafted the furnishings for the buildings. During a trip to Memphis in 1985, Walls and his uncles stopped at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The motel – now a civil-rights museum – was at that time in a state of disrepair. They asked permission to take a small number of bricks from the building.

On their return to Puce, Walls and his uncles fashioned the bricks into an elegant four-foot-high cross. It hangs between the chapel’s two tiny windows, surrounded by rays of sunlight.

In 1991, Walls was involved in a car accident that left him with fractured vertebrae, and a legacy of chronic pain. Shortly after the collision, he began to lose dexterity in his hands. Walls began dropping his dental instruments, and realized he could hurt his patients. Six months later, his doctor ordered him to stop working. Many nights he sleeps sitting up. Some nights he sleeps for two hours; others, not at all. “You learn to live with the pain,” he says. “I do it through my faith by saying, Lord, command me to do the impossible, to overcome it.”

Somehow, through his ordeal, he has continued to impart his message of racial equality. He has earned both an Order of Canada and Order of Ontario for his promotion of black history, and lectures frequently to Toronto police officers on the need for racial harmony. He has released educational material and a CD, which are distributed largely to new police recruits and schools, promoting his Mutual Respect Campaign of racial tolerance.

Two years ago, Walls began working on a form of storytelling befitting a present-day griot: a libretto. Each morning, he would lift a tiny table into the family cemetery, and – the tools of a dentist now replaced with the instruments of a writer – carefully shape the story. He originally sat by the gravestones of John and Jane Walls, but eventually, he says, the sound of their spirits became too loud and intrusive. So he moved his table near the area of those he had known firsthand: his father and Uncle Earl. In the comfort and safety of their spirits, he wrote for as long as there was light. He often continued to write in the silence of night in his own home, after his family was safely in bed, but preferred to be near his ancestors’ quiet wisdom.

Near the end of each tour of the historical site, Bryan Walls points out a world map on a wall of the museum. Every time a visitor comes from a new region, a family member pushes a pin into the location. The colourful pinheads form a pointillist picture: step close, and primary colours of red, blue and yellow dart into Australia, Japan, the Caribbean, the United States, Canada. Step away, and the pins merge into a luminous mosaic of countries whose residents have come to hear stories from a modern-day griot who talks about peace, harmony and racial equality. “We have so much to be thankful for as descendants of fugitive slaves; we know they laid a foundation that we could build on, and that’s what progress is all about. It is not just an African-American story. It is a story of liberation,” says Walls. “It’s a history that belongs to all of us.”

Stacey Gibson is managing editor of University of Toronto Magazine.

Much of Joe MacInnis’s adult life has been spent in the water, though not in the temperature-controlled, lifeguard-enhanced confines of a university swimming pool. Since 1964, he has logged more than 5,000 hours exploring and researching beneath the waves of the world’s oceans, including the Arctic. He was the first man to swim under the North Pole, and he has walked upside down on the undersea surface of the arctic ice. He has settled his submersible on to the deck of the RMS Titanic, 12,500 feet below the turbulent North Atlantic. He has been almost close enough to touch a rare, surfacing bowhead whale, feeling it exhale, as he put it, “a whole roomful of air.” He has dived with then-CBS television news anchorman Walter Cronkite, with then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau and with Hollywood director James Cameron. Although his work has helped make undersea research safer, the perils of early exploration were such that catastrophe was never far away. Injuries were common. Good men died – including the son of one of his best friends.

MacInnis (MD 1962) seems never to have lost a boy’s sense of adventure. He retains something, too, of a boy’s naiveté. He has learned – mostly, it seems, through the men he’s worked with – a man’s diligence and application. A man’s intelligent respect for fear. And a crusading man’s awareness that perhaps the only way to save our threatened oceans is to instil in others the same awe and sense of wonder that has animated his life.

Joe MacInnis grew up in Toronto, raised by his mother. His father, an instructor in the Royal Canadian Air Force, died when another plane crashed into his as he was attempting to land after a training flight with a student. He was just 32; Joe just a few months old. His mother remarried when her son was 12, but those earlier years, he says, were rough – although, in retrospect, “not having a father meant having no one to compare myself to. The advantage was that I could be what I wanted to be, and it meant that both my brother and I were independent at a very early age.”

He seems not to have needed anything to edge him into the water. After discovering Jules Verne in high school, he read and reread Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. As a boy, he swam with the Etobicoke Memorial Aquatic Club, where he discovered “both a wonderful camaraderie and the need to struggle. I was subconsciously learning the connection between hard work and results – something any thinking young person needs.” He loved to canoe, and recalls one perilous outing as a 12-year-old on a storm-tossed lake. As the wind picked up, and waves threatened to crash over all four canoes, the group realized that only the most intense, almost intuitive, teamwork would get them safely to shore. He names those boys in a book that was published this fall, Breathing Underwater: The Quest to Live in the Sea (Viking Canada). The incident happened more than 50 years ago, to a bunch of kids – but even kids can be a team, and MacInnis says “nothing I’ve done has been done alone. I’ve always been shoulder to shoulder with good people.”

By his own admission, he was not one of the stellar minds at U of T’s medical school; he jokes that he was one of those students that made the higher percentiles possible. He was, however, a superb swimmer, held the Canadian record for the breaststroke and was captain of the U of T swim team in the mid-1950s. He tried to make the Canadian Olympic team in 1956, but didn’t – and doesn’t regret it. “If I’d made the team,” he says, “it would have taken a year out of my life and I wouldn’t have graduated at just the right time.” The time was 1962, when medical research into the challenge of living and working underwater was taking fire. In the spring of 1963, the USS Thresher, America’s most powerful nuclear submarine, imploded and sank, killing all 129 men on board. It also left a nuclear reactor on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, more than 8,000 feet below the surface. Deep-water research and rescue suddenly became a navy priority, and an eccentric American businessman and inventor, Ed Link, had been tapped to head the civilian team. MacInnis, a scuba diver since he was 17, drove all night from Toronto to Washington when he finally snagged an interview with Link, with whom he was desperate to work. His enthusiasm and his eagerness to learn won him a job – part of the medical support team for Link’s next project. He would eventually become medical director of Link’s Ocean Systems Inc., the world’s largest commercial diving and undersea engineering company.

It’s clear that Link, who was in his late 50s when the two met, is something of a hero to MacInnis, who describes him as a “Yankee genius, an inventor, a successful businessman who had decided to make it possible for humans to live and work in the sea.” He has the same high regard for other pioneers in the field: Jacques-Yves Cousteau, co-inventor of the aqualung and popularizer of all things oceanic, and George Bond, a physician with the United States navy, who pioneered research into the effects of high-pressure atmospheres on humans. Though modern submersibles keep passengers at sea-level pressure, much early research was performed by men working at pressures equal to that of the sea around them, a practice dictating long periods in decompression chambers to prevent a fatal attack of the bends. Link, Cousteau, Bond – they were men who changed MacInnis’s life, men who stoked and encouraged his passions, men who helped make him what he calls “a curiosity junkie.”

By the late 1960s MacInnis had realized that there would be no future for him working solely as a diving physician. Technological advances were making the field much safer. So he formed his own science and education consulting company, Undersea Research. Since then he has done work for more than 60 major corporations, and for governments in both the United States and Canada. He has written eight books and assisted in the production of some 40 television documentaries and an Imax film on the Titanic. As well, since 1980 he’s been a motivational speaker, often on the topic of leadership, for such companies as IBM, Ford, Kodak, Merrill Lynch and Microsoft. He speaks to them about his work beneath the waves and the importance of teamwork, and shows them videos taken on his undersea adventures. Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at U of T, author of The Ingenuity Gap and a friend of MacInnis’s, says the man is trying hard “to influence corporate culture by communicating some of his own sense of wonder. They have colossal influence, and if Joe can convey something of the almost spiritual meaning the oceans have for him, he’ll make a world of difference. He’s appalled by the damage we’ve done already, and it says a lot that he’s able to maintain a spirit of optimism. Maybe he’s an idealist…but there have been many times in history when things looked very grim, but then something, or someone, you couldn’t anticipate comes along and makes a difference.”

MacInnis is also a keen advocate of environmental education for youth. He speaks at high schools and raises money for Pearson College, a British Columbia institution that brings students together from all over the world on full scholarships. The college aims to demonstrate that “international education works and that it can build bridges of understanding between peoples,” says MacInnis. He was chair until last year of the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation and is involved with the World Wildlife Fund and the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute. As he puts it, “we can only solve our environmental problems if major corporations step up and say, ‘Business is healthy only if the planet is healthy.’” And when he speaks to young people, he talks of the importance of giving back to the communities that have nourished them, but also conjures them to “just enjoy life, the beauty and the miracle of it.”

He remembers, when he was a kid, listening to a teacher talking about the stars, and how it took millions of years for their light to reach us, and how that dazzled him. He goes on to describe his recent work with James Cameron, and how their investigations into the curious animals living at extreme conditions near deep-sea volcanic vents make it seem not so improbable that there is life in the oceans beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Of course, life on other planets could be just a crazy fantasy. But we’ll never know unless we dream it. And dreaming, says MacInnis, is one of the essential leadership skills he learned from men such as Link and Cousteau. “There was this quality they shared, an ability to think forward, to imagine things as they might be,” he says. “I call it ‘visioneering,’ a 3-D mental map of where you are and where you want to go.” He thinks a lot about leadership these days, and talks to many groups about the qualities he thinks are essential – characteristics with names such as “guerilla vitality,” “silent courage,” “emotional intelligence,” and compassion. Good qualities in anyone. Good qualities that can make a leader if they are tethered to a dream.

At some point in our conversation I ask him casually where the deepest point in the ocean lies. “The Mariana Trench,” he answers instantly. “It’s south of Guam, and it’s 36,200 feet deep.”

“Any plans to visit it yourself?” I ask half-jokingly.

“Ask me that question,” he says with a dreamer’s smile, “two years from now.”

Gerald Hannon (BA 1966 St. Mike’s) is a freelance writer in Toronto.

Hollywood loves U of T. Studio executives say they come to Canada because of a favourable exchange rate and generous government subsidies, but choose U of T because of the university’s wide variety of buildings – both modern and historic – and its resemblance to Ivy League schools.

Still, much preparation goes into creating on campus the look and atmosphere a movie script requires. Production executives scouting potential filming sites usually put their first call in to the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC), a government agency that has a digital photo library with 90,000 images of Ontario locations. After the OMDC puts a photo package together, producers may fly to Toronto to see U of T for themselves, or hire a local locations manager to do a scout on their behalf. At that point, the location manager will contact either Andy Allen, who works in the Office of Space Management and co-ordinates film shoots on campus, or the space-rental representatives for individual colleges.

In August, director Ron Howard recreated a 1930s Central Park shantytown for his next movie, Cinderella Man, amid the rolling meadows of U of T’s Scarborough campus. Jack Martin, director of hospitality and retail services at UTSC, recalls that the single four-hour shoot called for three days of preparation and required dirt to be trucked in to create a muddy, Depression-era encampment. Another four days were needed to restore the location to its former splendour. The one-day shoot was just fine for Martin, who, like all university administrators, is wary of interruptions to the lives of students and faculty. “I like [the crews] to get in and to get out,” he says.

Hosting a movie cast and crew – however deep their pockets – can be highly intrusive. “It’s like having a benevolent auntie come to visit. You hope they don’t stay long,” says another college administrator. Not surprisingly, U of T imposes ample constraints on film producers. Almost all of the shoots take place on weekends or during the summer to minimize academic disruption, and film crews are not permitted in residences. The university does not allow its name or insignia to be shown, as it has no control over how these will be depicted on screen. For interior shots, all wall plaques and paintings must be removed before the crews arrive.

While the university wants to do its part to sustain Toronto as a major film production centre, it also wants to protect its primary role as an educational institution. Contrary to popular belief, location shooting is not a big money-spinner for the university. In a good year, approximately 200 major film and TV productions take place in and around Toronto, but only a small percentage of those shoot one or more scenes on campus. The university charges a per-day rate of $3,000 – less for partial or preparation days. Every production, from a low-budget TV series to a large studio feature, pays the same fixed rate. With most campus film or TV shoots rarely going beyond two days, the modest revenue is shared by the Office of Space Management and the college where the filming is done.

As is the case with any production, unexpected problems sometimes arise. William Chisholm, the manager of building services at Trinity College, recalls an August shoot for Paramount’s Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993). One of the stars contracted chicken pox, delaying production for two weeks until filming clashed with the new school year – and a wedding reception that had been booked for the college patio. The mother of the bride wanted all visible scaffolding and lighting taken down for the reception. Paramount, eager to placate her, offered to underwrite part of the honeymoon and even have the film’s cast, including Ben Kingsley and Joan Allen, mingle with reception guests. But to no avail. “They came to a financial arrangement,” says Chisholm.

Another time, an overnight shoot at UTSC for Expect No Mercy, a 1995 thriller about an elite assassination group, was to include a middle-of-the-night pyrotechnic explosion, complete with fire spewing out of the upper windows of a university building. Delays in preparation led instead to a dawn explosion, whose thud disturbed the morning prayer session of a Muslim community group, which was using a nearby area of the campus.

Film crews have their own logistical challenges in shooting on campus, as distinct from a studio where they fully control the environment. Directors scout possible locations anywhere from three to six months before actual production starts. In the interim, university construction or weather can play havoc with production schedules. Prudence Emery, the doyenne of Canadian movie publicists, has worked on two shoots at U of T that needed fake snow for key scenes. Back in 1974, she stood outside Hart House on the set of Black Christmas, a teen slasher movie about embattled Pi Kappa Sig girls in the college town of Bedford, Pennsylvania. Foam was used then to create snow, but with limited success. “The crocuses kept popping up through the foam,” Emery recalls. This past July, Wycliffe College stood in as Harvard for Disney’s Ice Princess, in which a young girl pursues her dream of becoming a champion figure skater. Emery recalls umpteen bags of ice being hauled into the college courtyard to create snow. Predictably, the snow kept melting.

And during wintertime shoots, filmmakers often want snow removed entirely from the scene. Trinity College’s Chisholm recalls producers in Los Angeles ringing months after an August shoot for a short-lived television series called Mr. Rhodes, asking permission to redo a couple of shots. Chisholm assured them the leaves were gone from the ground. But when the studio representative and a second unit crew arrived in early December, three inches of snow had fallen the previous night. The studio rep asked for the snow’s removal. “Do you have a lot of money?” Chisholm asked the rep. She did, and an army of groundskeepers were ushered in to shovel away the snow, and any semblance of winter.

Keeping students and the public away from location shoots can also pose challenges. An example, Jennifer Lopez made Angel Eyes in 2000, soon after she’d become a star. During the filming of key scenes at Varsity Stadium, the cast discovered a nearby pub. Lopez wanted to join the party one night, but balked for fear she might be spotted and accosted by fans. Co-star James Caviezel convinced Lopez to get back into her police uniform, a customized blue Chicago Police Department shirt and grey jeans, and to pull her cap over her forehead to cover her hair and partially obscure her face. But midway through the cast’s pub-crawl, a buzz went round that “J.Lo” was in the house, and the campus police were called to help everyone beat a fast retreat out the kitchen exit.

Etan Vlessing is Canadian bureau chief for The Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles.

Others may remember the Ys on the walls of a New Haven university in the 2000 drama The Skulls. The school was modelled after Yale, but members of the secret society were actually lurking at University College, Knox College and Hart House.

And axe murderers don’t generally come to mind when one talks about the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management – unless one happens to be watching the 1998 slasher flick Urban Legend, which includes a cameo by Citytv newscaster Gord Martineau.

U of T has a long history with horror movies. A generation ago, Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin spent a night in a creepy diner in Cannibal Girls. Their car bears a U of T sticker, one of the few films shot on campus where the school is actually identified by name.

And UTSC’s retro-futuristic cement columns and arches have attracted a number of sci-fi movie shoots. A command centre for a martial-arts academy was built on campus for the 1995 thriller Expect No Mercy, with fight scenes taking place in cordoned-off classrooms and corridors.

Why don’t good movies with big budgets and larger-than-life stars come to U of T? Blame the lack of high-quality sound stages in Toronto. To shoot blockbusters, Hollywood heads to Vancouver and Montreal, where state-of-the-art studios already exist.

It is the summer of 2002, and the University of Toronto professor and forensic anthropologist is assisting with the excavation of the pig farm in Port Coquitlam belonging to Robert William Pickton. Over the better part of two summers, Rogers will help uncover and analyze thousands of bone fragments, working closely with an elite squad of more than 100 forensic experts, pathologists, scientists, coroners and police investigators. Pickton is now charged with 15 counts of murder and is the focus of an investigation into the disappearance of nearly 70 women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Like all detective work, forensic science involves the painstaking process of gathering evidence and analyzing it. Crime scene investigators spend hours collecting and sorting through bits of clothing, strands of hair, even cigarette butts, in the hope of obtaining evidence that will link a perpetrator to a crime. Each item is tagged, carefully logged and sent on for further examination in the lab.



The Port Coquitlam work exacted a physical and emotional toll on Rogers and the other members of the team. In the summer heat, the sweat poured into the sleeves of Rogers’ synthetic jumpsuit. Her hands grew damp beneath two layers of gloves as she sifted through three separate crime scenes in search of minute pieces of evidence. In a nearby tent and makeshift refuge, family members gathered daily, waiting for news that would fill in the details of what may have happened to their daughters, sisters and lovers.

“It’s always hard when you have contact with the family,” the 38-year-old assistant professor says, noting that psychologists were on hand to counsel the team through the emotional trauma of the work. “But I feel that we do have something very positive to offer. I never forget that it’s not the remains of a person, but someone’s loved one. We can’t bring them back, but at least we can provide some resolution.”

Students enrolled in forensic science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga (UTM) learn through simulations about the intense nature of crime scene investigations. On an early September morning this past fall, Rogers sealed off a patch of meadow on the bucolic UTM campus with yellow police tape to create a fictional crime scene. The supposed victim? A 17-year-old girl last seen walking her dog along the edge of campus.

The exercise, devised for a third-year class, is certainly not as involved as the Pickton investigation, though there is one macabre aspect that evokes the alleged serial murder: these students are scouring the earth for pig corpses. Just coincidence, says Rogers. Pigs are the animals used to replicate humans in fieldwork, sort of the crash-test dummies of forensics.



For some of these fresh-faced students, it’s gruesome work. But it provides an important lesson in a fundamental aspect of all forensic science: the recovery, mapping and documentation of evidence. In their fourth year, the students will move to the lab where they will examine human bones to determine characteristics such as age, sex and ancestry, and to look for evidence of trauma to help determine the cause of death.



Nicki Engel is one of the students enjoying the fieldwork as she steps gingerly through the meadow, marked with spikes and flags where evidence has been unearthed. The 22-year-old Chilliwack, B.C., native says she’s been fascinated by crime stories ever since she was a kid reading Nancy Drew mysteries. She wanted to be a police officer for a while, but now hopes to work outside Canada on cases of international importance. “I’d like to take what I learn here and work with the [United Nations] in the mass gravesites in Kosovo or with the police at Scotland Yard,” she says.



Engel is one of a select group of aspiring sleuths to have earned a spot in UTM’s four-year forensics program, the first of its kind in Canada – and the most comprehensive. While Rogers specializes in forensic anthropology, which involves the search, recovery and identification of bones and the presentation of findings in court, other faculty members teach pathology, entomology, toxicology, odontology and molecular biology.



Now in its 10th year, U of T’s program owes its existence to Professor Emeritus Jerry Melbye, a well-known presence at UTM until he retired a few years ago. Over the years, Ontario police came to rely on the forensic anthropologist for his expertise in the identification of victims from skeletal remains. One of Melbye’s highest profile cases was the second trial of Guy Paul Morin who was charged with the 1984 murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop. DNA evidence eventually cleared Morin, who had spent the better part of a decade in and out of jail.



Melbye was one of the first people to recognize the importance of having an educational program dedicated exclusively to forensic science. In the early days of the profession – the first recorded case in Canada of a non-medical expert testifying in court was in 1850 – police departments typically trained scientists in the finer points of forensic investigation, and prepared them for courtroom testimony. “I realized as I started working on cases myself just how varied everyone’s background was,” says Melbye. “I wanted to train forensic scientists who could speak to each other about their problems and challenges in a common language.”

Melbye rallied the Office of the Chief Coroner for the Province of Ontario, along with the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto, to support the launch of a dual bachelor of science degree at U of T. The program confers a degree in forensic science combined with one other specialty, such as biology, anthropology, psychology or chemistry. 


This year – largely because of an increased demand for spots – the program has accepted 50 new students, double the intake of last year. Program director Raymond Cummins attributes the growing interest in part to the boom in crime shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, as well as the novels of real-life forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, whose Grave Secrets and Déjà Dead have won a cult-like following.



But Rogers sees a deeper meaning in our society’s current fascination with criminal investigation. “When someone dies, their body is taken away for burial preparations. We’re now dissociated from death and so it’s shrouded in mystery. Science offers us a window on the process of death.”

Although there is a team aspect to forensics, the profession calls for hours of solitary work. Most of a forensic grad’s career will be spent in a laboratory peering through a microscope. An investigator or lab technician might spend more time in the company of the dead than the living. The work demands surpassing patience. Directing a crime scene investigation is time-consuming. Cases aren’t neatly wrapped up in an hour. Sometimes they stretch on for years; in other cases, decades. And although it’s a small part of their job description, forensic scientists have to be experts in the courtroom. By definition, forensic science means the study of evidence discovered during criminal investigations and used in courts of law. Forensic witnesses, therefore, need to feel comfortable presenting their findings in a legal setting.

Students also need a strong background in their chosen field of specialty, such as chemistry or biology, and must be able to interpret increasingly sophisticated lab results. DNA analysis – accepted commonly as a legal tool only a decade ago – has helped the discipline evolve, giving investigators a powerful means of solving both current and cold cases. The information revolution is affecting the discipline, too, as new police databases help match up evidentiary material – fingerprints, bullets and DNA – more quickly with known offenders and weapons used in other cases. This will allow investigators to link crimes more efficiently and to identify repeat offenders much faster.



Many graduates of UTM’s forensics program will look for work outside the country. Some will go to the United States where the violent crime rate and the demand for forensic scientists are much higher. Still, police forces across Canada are hiring an increasing number of students – as are the nation’s seven centres for forensic science. But applications for such coveted jobs typically run upwards of 300. And the top rate for scientists is only about $70,000 a year.

Back in the UTM meadow, these students seem to have more on their minds this morning than money. They are carefully photographing their crime scenes for a guest instructor, Crown attorney James Cornish. He’s evaluating their work and advising them on how to organize their findings for a mock trial.



Rogers looks on critically at the interaction between her students and the lawyer. She knows the drill. How important it is to get this all right.

“This is what it all comes down to,” she explains. “It’s about righting wrongs; bringing culprits to justice.

”

That’s one thing I don’t really mind about television’s portrayal of our work,” she continues. “Sometimes they make us out to be heroes. And that’s okay, because we really are the good guys.”

Susan Bourette is a writer in Toronto.

Cases are rarely solved in an hour. “Sherlock Holmes” moments are few and far between.

The scientific method prevails. Crusading detectives operating on hunches and intuition are good entertainment, but nothing more.

Investigations aren’t star vehicles. Forensic scientists are inevitably team players. Their findings are strictly work-by-committee.

There’s little glamour, and certainly no high heels. CSIs get hot, dirty and sweaty. Nobody is ever ready for a close-up.

My most significant and immediate challenge is to ensure a successful outcome for the Postsecondary Review of higher education in Ontario being led by U of T alumnus and former premier Bob Rae. Higher education in Ontario is, as Rae states, “on the edge of the choice between steady decline and great improvement.” The decisions made in the next several months will affect universities and colleges in the province of Ontario for years to come. Rae’s report, expected in January 2005, will address issues of accessibility, quality, system design, funding and accountability, and will assist the government in developing a sustainable long-term plan for financing postsecondary education in Ontario.

The title of the University of Toronto submission to the Rae review is The Choice for a Generation. This title reflects our strong view that the present course of provincial policy regarding postsecondary education shortchanges an entire new generation, and jeopardizes the future that depends on its leadership. With increasing university participation rates have come some dramatic changes in the makeup of the student population. Compared to those of a generation ago, today’s university students include proportionately many more women, and students from new Canadian families. Indeed, this is the most dramatic change I have seen in my return to the university. And while aboriginal people and students from lower-income families remain under-represented in the university student population, participation rates in these groups are increasing faster than the average. These new students deserve the fullest opportunity to participate in society and to succeed. 


To meet the needs of this new generation, and of society as a whole, Ontario requires public universities that are among the best in the world. We should be able to offer students a range of programs at undergraduate, professional and graduate levels that rank with the best of their type internationally – including opportunities that only a major teaching and research university can offer. To create that range of options, universities need a strong base of public funding, as well as the flexibility and latitude to work with and build upon that base. To access that range of options, students need to see clear pathways through the system and to be assured of the resources they need to pursue their chosen course.



Where are we now with respect to this goal? Readers of this magazine may be surprised to be reading of a crisis in postsecondary education in Ontario. After all, as a university we have celebrated many successes in recent years – in the accomplishments of our faculty, the success of our graduates and our expansion to accommodate the surge resulting from the recent “double cohort” of high school graduates in Ontario. New construction for research facilities and for teaching facilities related to enrolment expansion has produced a buzz of activity on each of our campuses. And the generosity of our donors has made it possible for us to complete a record-breaking billion-dollar campaign a year ahead of schedule.



Yet beneath all these successes, the operating base that sustains us has been steadily eroding, and has not kept pace with growing enrolments. Public funding per student for postsecondary education in Ontario is the lowest of any province in Canada. U of T’s operating grant per student in 2003-04, adjusted for inflation, was about two-thirds of what it was in 1992-93. Our endowment has been very important in ensuring accessibility (about one-half of the endowment is dedicated to financial support for students) and in enhancing our programs. But on a per-student basis it amounts to about one-quarter of that of the University of Michigan, for example, and it contributes less than five per cent to our operating budget. And while our new facilities have created important new landmarks on each of our campuses, we have struggled to maintain our historic buildings (73 of the 176 buildings on our St. George campus are historically designated). We need more than $300 million just to clear the backlog of deferred maintenance.



Ontario’s lag behind peer jurisdictions in graduate education is particularly startling. Per capita, compared to peer American states, Ontario has less than half the master’s degree holders and only about three-quarters the number of PhD holders. If we are to participate fully in the global environment, not only should this gap be closed, but Ontario’s research-intensive universities should also be international destinations for graduate work at the highest level. The need for graduate research and education is so vital that U of T has stretched its resources to admit graduate students well beyond the capped levels currently supported by the province.

As our submission states, “A sense of upward momentum simply cannot be sustained as long as the underlying trajectory is downward. We are now at the tipping point.”



Our message is clear: We need a new compact among the government, universities and citizens of Ontario for postsecondary education – a compact that is student-centred and institution-based. Students need access to postsecondary education in Ontario at international standards of high quality. Our society needs the broader contributions to the public good – to economic prosperity, cultural wealth and community vitality – that only thriving universities can make. Universities can meet these needs, with the necessary support and scope for realizing their distinctive missions.

Our submission highlights eight elements of a new compact. Briefly stated, they are:

• Public funding at least at the level of the average for the other Canadian provinces as a necessary first step toward the level of resources necessary to provide access to education at an international standard of high quality.


• A greatly reformed and enhanced framework of student financial assistance.


• Stable multi-year funding and accountability agreements between universities and the provincial government, based on mutually agreed-upon measures of accessibility, student success, research performance, unique resources, etc.


• Institutional self-regulation of tuition fees within a framework that holds institutions accountable for ensuring accessibility.


• Leverage and flexibility for universities beyond the base of the public operating grant – for example, through provincial matching programs for federal support, and incentives to encourage donor support for financial aid and other important priorities.


• Research support that builds upon the momentum established by federal and provincial programs in recent years.


• The public funding necessary to expand graduate education, concentrated in well-recognized centres of research excellence.


• A revised college-university credit transfer mechanism, to be developed by a working group of university and college representatives, to provide clearer opportunities for students.

A compact implies mutual responsibilities, and the University of Toronto is prepared – indeed eager – to do its part. We believe that this university has a leadership role to play in this regard. With our mission rooted in our historical designation as “the provincial university,” our current stature and potential among the leading research and teaching universities of the world, and our position as a key portal of access to education at a major university in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan population centres, we are both the flagship and the bellwether of Ontario and indeed the country.



We have led in the development of a guarantee of student aid such that no student offered admission to U of T is unable to enter or to complete his or her program for lack of financial means, and in the development of a framework of annual reporting to our governing council and to the public on key measures of our performance. We look forward to working with the Honourable Bob Rae and his advisors, our colleagues in the Ontario postsecondary system, the government of Ontario and our other partners throughout the public and private sectors to seize this moment for the benefit of our current and future students and for the people of Ontario and Canada.



I urge you to lend your own voice to advocacy in this important cause, in the period leading up to Bob Rae’s final report in January and afterward as the Ontario government prepares its response through the 2005 provincial budget. Also, please consider contacting your MPP or writing a letter to your local newspaper expressing your support for postsecondary education and for the University of Toronto.



It is a privilege for me to be leading the university at this most important time. I have great hopes for, and great confidence in its future. Please join me in working toward that future, for the good of generations to come.