Editorial – UBC’s Legal Tactics Help Cover Up Misconduct

By Caroline Grego, Ph.D., Glynnis Kirchmeier, M.A., and additional signatory Stephanie Hale Sparks

As universities across Canada continue to grapple with developing policies around sexual assault, and as students struggle to receive proper support, institutional accountability, and justice after cases of sexual misconduct, ongoing events connected to the University of British Columbia demonstrate how fraught this process can be. Since 2017, the University of British Columbia has worked on implementing SC17, many community members have come forward with their thoughts on the new sexual misconduct policy. As alumnae and participants in a case now before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, we feel compelled to raise our own concerns about actions UBC’s legal team is currently taking before the tribunal that are at cross-purposes with SC17. The legal team’s defense contradicts the representations of the administration in how seriously UBC takes reports of sexual misconduct. 

In 2016, Glynnis Kirchmeier filed a Human Rights Complaint against UBC for its mishandling of repeated reports of sexual misconduct from many sources about Dmitry Mordvinov, her colleague in the History Department. UBC expelled Mordvinov in November 2015, days before a CBC documentary aired about the case and years after the first student reports of his behavior. As the case drags on five years later, we as class members see a hypocritical disjuncture between UBC’s legal arguments on the one hand, and UBC’S new policy SC17 and the public face that the university puts forth on the other. 

UBC’S legal tactics undermine the dignity of the case’s class members and should also cause the UBC community to question whether UBC lives up to SC17. The university’s practices ought to accurately reflect policy and stated public commitments, and it should not abandon those commitments when it stands in front of a Tribunal justice.

We take issue with the following:

The university’s lawyers say first-person testimony of sexual assault is “hearsay.” Inrecent arguments the lawyers ask the Tribunal to throw out the accounts of the victims as “hearsay.” This line of defense is bizarre, offensive, and unlikely to succeed – but it follows an old pattern at UBC. Earlier, UBC administrators also winnowed away or ignored firsthand accounts of Mordvinov’s abuse on narrow technical grounds. The legal team’s description of these women’s accounts as “hearsay” emerge from rape culture in denying survivors’ accounts unless they match some unspecified criteria of perfection.

They argue that bystander reports have no place in the case. While SC17 suggests UBC will take bystander reports of misconduct, UBC’s legal team undermines them in front of the Tribunal. UBC maintains that the women who were not personally assaulted by Mordvinov have “no claim” to make in the case, no matter if they witnessed harmful actions or statements on his part or experienced fall-out from their willingness to speak out. 

They deny that a hostile environment for women existed at UBC, or that the “environment” is even a concept to be drawn upon at all. Yet this hostile environment was so prevalent that Dr. Grego and two other Green College resident members wrote about it for GUTS Magazine in January 2014. The concept of a “hostile work environment” is routine in definitions of sexual misconduct at workplaces throughout Canada. Mordvinov, a serial sexual predator who attacked numerous women connected to UBC over the course of years, turned the university into his hunting ground, creating an atmosphere of risk that threatened the safety of all women at UBC. When women raised the alarm, leaders across campus, and now the UBC defense team, contributed to the hostile environment by treating women and their allies who spoke up as the problem.

UBC argues that since there’s a sexual misconduct policy now, Mordvinov’s victims should just get over it. UBC’s legal team asserts that UBC neither owes anything to women whom Mordvinov attacked nor needs to take responsibility for their bungled disciplinary process from 2013 – 2015. Instead, they hold that SC17 is sufficient redress — ironic because the clear failures of UBC’s old sexual misconduct policy in the Mordvinov case played a major role in creating SC17 in the first place. What about the women who endured physical attacks, whose environment was tainted by fear, and whose professors retaliated against them? A new, flawed policy, implemented on the last day before the province made it illegal not to have one, isn’t enough.

Based on our familiarity with the Mordvinov case and UBC’s response to it, we recommend a few areas of improvement in SC17 that could be instructive for other universities as they modify their own sexual misconduct policies. 

First, all complainants should know the full case against a respondent and should have a written copy of the disciplinary findings and outcome. This includes written reasons why the Director of Investigations declined to investigate any report.

Second, the policy should explicitly state the geographic and event limits of UBC’s jurisdiction. SC17 recycles vague phrasing from the old policy that the “alleged conduct must have a real and substantial connection to UBC.” The administration has used that same language to throw out multiple allegations of sexual assault, including a report of a rape perpetrated by Mordvinov. UBC’s reliance on this language suggests that UBC could continue to claim the legal right to ignore violence by UBC community members if they keep it off-campus.

Third, UBC needs to conduct and release results from annual climate surveys of both campuses, as well as statistics about how many disciplinary processes substantiated sexual misconduct reports, and whether the perpetrator was expelled. As of right now, there is no public information that anyone has been removed from UBC since Mordvinov in 2015.

We understand that UBC’s lawyers have a case to win. But their defense of the university does not align with UBC’s stated commitment to “trauma-informed” policy. SC17 is a starting point, not a finish line — and the strategies of UBC’s legal team call into question UBC’s sincerity in practicing its policy.  If UBC is genuinely dedicated to SC17, then why are survivors’ accounts of their assault and their allies’ attempts to support and bear witness so callously dismissed by its lawyers? Why has UBC so consistently refused to show accountability for the Mordvinov case? We know why: because UBC prioritizes protecting itself from legal repercussions over the well-being of its students. 

As the flagship university of the province of British Columbia, UBC ought to serve as an example for universities across Canada. So far, they are failing to live up to that reputation. The university community deserves consistency from UBC from policy to practice, whether on campus or in the courtroom, and we call on the administration to hold themselves to the standards that they have recently adopted. 

Caroline Grego received her MA from UBC’s Geography Department in 2013 and was a resident member of Green College from 2011 – 2013. She then completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Colorado Boulder and is now a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Queens University of Charlotte. Dr. Grego is a class member because she witnessed, documented, and reported both a hostile environment against women at Green College, of which Mordvinov took advantage, and frightening behaviors and self-incriminating statements from Mordvinov himself.

Glynnis Kirchmeier earned her MA in History from UBC, where she was a student from 2011 – 2013. She witnessed and reported Mordvinov’s misconduct, participated in the effort to get UBC to send him through a disciplinary process, and is spearheading the human rights complaint against UBC. She works as a paralegal in securities law.

Stephanie Hale Sparks is a Class Member and the complainant for her own human rights case against UBC for its repeated mishandling of her own report of rape and discriminatory process. Her case is currently being heard by the Tribunal.