David Butt is a Toronto-based criminal lawyer.
For St. Michael’s College School in Toronto, the ordeal will not end anytime soon. Assault, gang-sexual-assault and sexual-assault charges are now pending for alleged incidents captured on video. So the venerable private school will be rightly subjected to white-hot publicity bursts as the charges wind through court. And none of that publicity will be uplifting.
But things are far worse for St. Mike’s than dealing with the fallout from a cohort of criminally charged ex-students. Graduates are speaking out about a long-standing culture of bullying that is flourishing under a code of silence, institutional neglect and passive acquiescence by authority figures. The beast of St. Mike’s nightmare has many heads, all of them ugly.
Fortunately, there is a road to redemption for an institution that depends so heavily for its survival on public trust. The road is difficult to travel, but there is no alternative.
Since the 19th century, judicial inquiries have convened after publicly notable tragedies in high-profile institutions, both public and private. When done right, these inquiries tease out of momentous adversity the greatest possible understanding of root causes and solutions. In particular, such scrutiny illuminates systemic or cultural failings that contributed to the disaster at hand, probing much deeper than simply identifying malevolent individual actors. In so doing, these inquiries serve a higher need than even courts can fulfill: Their comprehensive systemic findings and recommendations can place the affected institution on a much more stable foundation going forward than would ever result from merely punishing individual wrongdoers.
From decades of judicial inquiries in Canada come best practices for approaching a complex institutional problem that St. Mike’s now faces. Those best practices are guideposts on the road to redemption.
First, there must be a scrupulously independent inquiry into what happened and why. The St. Mike’s scandal is fundamentally a betrayal of all those who trusted the institution and others like it. To win back that trust, no one with the slightest appearance of a stake in the outcome can conduct that review.
The school announced it will launch a third-party investigation to examine past and present incidents with a goal of delivering a final report by the summer of 2019, which is a promising start.
This inquiry must be resolutely transparent. Transparency in these circumstances is exceedingly painful and difficult. Nobody can possibly enjoy having their scandals butterflied like a chicken carcass, the entrails arrayed on cold slabs offered up by media outlets for public consumption. But long ago, a judge rightly observed that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And when perceived rot reaches critical levels – as it seems to have with St. Mike’s – it is the only curative with any hope of working.
Third, the inquiry must be empowered to move beyond the simplistic exercise of picking bad apples out of a barrel. It must examine the entire orchard operation. Systemic failure is very different from individual misconduct, but no less destructive. Both must be rooted out.
Any comprehensive examination of systemic or institutional problems must adhere to one key guiding principle: How great and problematic is the disconnect between the institution’s formal culture and its informal culture? Every institution has a formal culture defined by things like its mission statement, core values and misconduct policies. These catalogues of virtue are like ethical art on the institution’s walls – great to look at, but saying nothing about the informal culture or what actually goes on every day on the shop floor. It is crucial to examine the formal/informal culture disconnect closely and honestly, because it is the soil in which every scandal grows. And the great redemptive power in exposing this informal culture lies in how quickly the specious rationalizations over debased acts wither upon exposure to critical scrutiny. It becomes easy to transcend in public what it was impossible to escape in private.
To thoroughly dissect its prevailing informal culture, St. Mike’s must ask hard questions about tradition and the role it played in this mess. Tradition enriches because it fosters community – not just across geography but across time. However, when tradition invokes a cruel, ignorant past, it is a blight to be eradicated.
Ultimately, St. Mike’s will outgrow this scandal only by confronting the informal culture it fosters. Tinkering with the ethical art on the walls will do nothing. And after the recommendations for transformational cultural change come in, the work is just beginning. Like keeping a beautiful garden, tending to a healthy informal culture requires daily attention, pulling the tiniest ethical weeds before they take root.
Religious institutions, particularly hierarchical ones that venerate tradition, repeatedly show resistance to transformational change, even in the face of egregious failings. If St. Mike’s chooses a similar path, it will have powerful company. But it will have failed. And not because there was no road to success.