Facing mounting pressure from students and professors alike, Dalhousie University announced it has suspended the 13 dentistry students involved in a Facebook group that featured a number of disturbing, misogynistic posts from clinical work.
The university said they made the move to ensure the safety of both patients and classmates.
“The comments made in the Facebook group by some of our fourth-year male dentistry students were deeply offensive, degrading to women and entirely unacceptable. This behaviour will not be tolerated at Dalhousie University,” university president Richard Florizone told a news conference.
“As previously stated, Dal and the faculty of dentistry are committed to significant consequences to fully address the situation. However, those consequences must follow a just process, a process which is consistent with the law, with university policy and which holds the rights of all of those involved in this incident.”
The suspension will remain in place amid a review of the matter, the school said in a Monday morning news release.
The school notes the students cannot graduate without meeting academic requirements, which includes “professional standards.”
The decision to suspend the students was made on December 22. However, the school only went public with the news after four professors recently told the media they filed an official complaint with the school over the Facebook posts.
Dalhousie said it waited two weeks to make the announcement because some of the male students involved were reportedly at risk of harming themselves.
“We had credible reports from our frontline staff of potential self-harm,” Florizone said. “We took those seriously and so that concern for student safety overrode our concern about communicating this publicly.”
Fourth-year dentistry classes are set to resume Jan. 12.
Exams were re-scheduled in December after the CBC reported on the “Class of DDS Gentlemen” Facebook page, in which male dentistry students voted on women they wanted to have “hate” sex with and made jokes about drugging women.
The Facebook page has since been taken down.
Dalhousie has been under immense pressure to expel the students over the situation, but says it is moving forward with its restorative justice approach. The process is informal and confidential, although Dalhousie has repeatedly said it could end with the students being expelled.
“We recognize that what has happened is not isolated to Dalhousie University,” said Monday’s Dalhousie statement, signed by Florizone and Dentistry dean Thomas Boran. “It is a complex societal issue about which our community cares deeply and in which we must fully engage. We take seriously our responsibility to create the space for this conversation in order to ensure a healthy, safe environment for all and we are developing strategies to address these issues. While this will be a long, complex journey, it is a necessary one for us to lead.”
With files from The Canadian Press