Chicken death capped difficult year for man suing Dal

Student claims Dalhousie was unreasonable in refusing to defer exam

Trevor Smedley has taken Dalhousie to court over a failing grade. Photo: Shannon Fay

Trevor Smedley is familiar with university regulations. He graduated with his bachelor degree in 1984, got his master’s in 1987, and doctorate in 1990. He has taught computer science at Dalhousie and the Technical University of Nova Scotia. But he says he “can’t imagine how or why anyone would ever treat a student” the way Dalhousie University has treated him.

Smedley, a third-year law student at Dal, says his issue with the university began over a year ago when he missed the oral portion of a compulsory moot court – a staged trial dealing with appeals and arbitration. Though he had asked to have the date moved, the university refused and failed him on the exam.

He has now taken the university to court to dispute they way they treated him at a difficult time in his life.

Series of unfortunate events

Leading up to the exam, Smedley was going through some tough times with his family. His mother had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in December 2007. A few weeks later, his father-in-law suddenly died. The body was found by a neighbour a day later. Also in the home was Smedley’s mother-in-law, who suffered from advanced Alzheimer ’s disease. His wife was set to leave for her father’s funeral that Thursday, the evening of Smedley’s exam.

Smedley had discussed his situation with his professor at the Law faculty, who asked if he would like to postpone his moot court. He agreed he would be OK to do the exams, unless another tragic event was to occur.

The exam was schedule for 8:30 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2008. The night before, Smedley was preparing for his exam at his home in Stillwater Lake, about 20 km west of Halifax and had put his three children to bed. His wife had been out for the evening and when she came home she found all but one of the family’s 15 pet chickens not in their coop. The couple searched around their yard and discovered four dead birds, with the rest nowhere to be found. He did not know how he was going to tell his children the next morning that their pets had been killed. It was at this point Smedley decided he was not going to attend his exam.

“I was very stressed already. This sort of pushed things over the edge. I decided not to go to my oral presentation the next morning... and no reasonable person would expect me to do that, to go to a presentation where I had been told two days before that it would be no problem to reschedule.“

But it was.

Smedley began e-mailing his professor the night before the moot court, explaining the news. She told him he would have to make an application for accommodation to reschedule with the Dalhousie Studies Committee – the body which oversees the rescheduling of exams at the Faculty of Law.  But in the e-mail, Smedley only mentioned the death of the chickens. That e-mail was the one his professor forwarded to the Studies Committee.

“If it had just been the chickens, I would have gone to my presentation,” Smedley said.

Dal denies deferral

Smedley says he exchanged e-mails with the committee until 9:50 a.m. on the day of his presentation. However, the committee ruled that Smedley didn’t apply to reschedule the exam until Jan. 27. As a result, it granted Smedley a deferral on a take-home exam that took place the next month, and ruled he could take a supplemental oral presentation. But he still had a failure on his transcript.

Smedley disagreed with the ruling and took it to Dalhousie’s senate for appeal. It declined to rule on the matter, on Jan. 29, as it was “out of their jurisdiction”.

Senate Chair Lloyd Fraser says while the senate is there to hear the concerns of students, the senate’s terms of reference clearly state certain circumstances where the senate has no authority to rule in a matter.

But Fraser says the senate wants students to feel as if they are being treated fairly.  In the past academic year five cases were brought forward for review of the Senate Academic Appeals Committee, but it’s rare to have one before the courts.
“Universities make the best judgements they can. But if you feel strongly enough about a matter you can petition (in a court).”

Smedley says while he now has passed the course and has a job lined up in Massachusetts, he is not able to let the case go.  “I’m just so incredibly offended by the way that I’ve been treated here. And I'm also very concerned others have been treated the same."

On Monday, Jan. 25, both Smedley and Dalhousie appeared in court to set a date for a trial. The case is set for judicial review on April 15, 2009.

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