Professor Carol Aylward feels the chill of her ostracism every time she ventures into the hallways of Halifax's Dalhousie University law school.
"I would say the environment started out as chilly, and it has gone from chilly to poisoned," said the embattled head of the Indigenous Blacks and Mi'kmaq Program. "People don't talk to you. It is a very tense atmosphere."
Ms. Aylward, a professor who lectures on the historical disfigurement of law by racism, has come to see herself as a leading case study in discrimination.
The university disputes her claims, saying she is not subject to discrimination.
However, Prof. Aylward said ill will toward minorities is nothing new at the law school, and it escalated last fall when she lodged a human-rights complaint alleging that Dean Dawn Russell and several law professors manipulated appointments and tenure on racist grounds.
"You are looking at a 150-year-old institution that has never had a full-time black faculty member," she said in an interview. "There has been prolonged resistance that hasn't faded away over time. I'd say it has gotten worse. I feel like I'm in a David and Goliath situation -- except I am David with a slingshot."
Dalhousie, on the other hand, sees the complaint as a falsehood capable of damaging students and faculty, and threatening its stature in the outside world.
"It is potentially damaging to our credibility," said university spokesman Ann Janega. "It is a risk, and we take it very seriously. The university feels quite strongly that this is an unjustified and unwarranted complaint."
Is it a case of campus political correctness run amok, of overwrought racial sensitivity? Or is the law school smugly unaware that its efforts to encourage racial equity have been grudging and paternalistic?
The dispute stretches back a decade, to a royal commission report on the wrongful murder conviction of Donald Marshall, a Mi'kmaq Indian. Among the affirmative actions the commission urged were the creation of a black and indigenous studies program at the province's only law school.
Hired in 1991 to run the program, Prof. Aylward felt her mandate included the right to criticize her own faculty and department for racially backward acts or attitudes.
She became increasingly vocal about perceived slights against her within her department and against a broad swath of racial issues throughout the province.
Prof. Aylward was finally granted tenure in 1999, but she was denied the raise she felt a white professor would have been given. She viewed her entire career track as having been "sabotaged" by rivals -- several of them experts in the field of equity -- who made false allegations to impede her.
Her human-rights complaint also claims that her program was altered in ways as part of an attempt by Prof. Wayne MacKay -- a well-known constitutional specialist -- to "usurp" her role.
"After I became director and took over from Wayne MacKay, he still behaved as if he were director," says the complaint. "It was difficult to wrestle power from him. I soon realized that he was having difficulty accepting a black woman as the person who had replaced him and who was now exercising the authority he once had."
Returning several days ago from a lengthy stress leave, Prof. Aylward found the trenches dug deep.
"I feel the allegations are simply unfounded," said Prof. Richard Devlin, one of those named in her complaint. "One of the ways I can continue to do my job is not to let this take over my life.
"We continue to maintain our commitment to what we have been doing for the last 10 years," Prof. Devlin said in an interview. "To do otherwise would be a tragedy. One of the dangers in these situations is to engage in a backlash mentality. That would be a mistake."
Late last fall, the legal fight took an odd turn. Prof. Aylward concluded the provincial human-rights commission was unsuited to hear the case because of various conflicts of interest. Prof. MacKay was its former chairman, she said, and several Dalhousie law professors had adjudicated cases on contract.
The provincial Ombudsman's office agreed, and proposed farming out the case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The law university has now appealed this decision to the courts.
Selwyn Pieters, a Toronto lawyer who operates a Web site focusing on the Alyward dispute, said there is considerable support -- overt or silent -- from the modest number of black lawyers and law professors across the country.
"There are very few tenured black professors in Canada," Mr. Pieters said. "It presents a serious matter when one of these is being harassed in a law school. Racism is overt in Nova Scotia. It may be that the university and law school's motivations were not racist, but the impact is."
Mr. Pieters said Dalhousie recently proposed that Prof. Aylward go on long-term disability status.
"It was an attempt to remove her from the environment permanently," he said. "I think it has reached a point where they are just trying to protect the reputation of the law school." -** -**
CORRECTIONS
Selwyn Pieters is a refugee-claims officer at the Immigration and Refugee Board, not a lawyer. He was misidentified in an article on Monday. (Wednesday, April 4, 2001, Page A2)