NP View: Our universities’ ideology problem

As a new report on the University of Toronto encampment makes clear, woke ideology has allowed hatred to fester on campus

Published Sep 07, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

Protestors pose for a portrait inside the anti-Israel encampment set up at the University of Toronto, on May 24. Photo by Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press

A report released this week on the individuals behind last spring’s anti-Israel encampment at the University of Toronto highlights the fact that Canadian universities don’t just have an antisemitism problem — they have an ideology problem. If schools hope to stem the tide of hatred, they will have to get serious about rooting out professors who can’t separate their duties as educators from their politics.

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It’s no coincidence that a new report from Canary Mission, a group that maintains a database of people involved in antisemitic activity on campuses throughout Canada and the United States, notes that the encampment became a “home base” for “climate justice groups, labour activists, trade unionists, gay rights activists (and) socialists/Marxists.”

While there is no particular reason why such groups should be inherently against Israel — a state that has a strong labour movement, strict environmental regulations and affords more rights to LGBTQ individuals than any other country in the Middle East — the woke ideology of the modern left sees the world through a Marxist lens that views all conflicts as being between oppressors and the oppressed, colonizers and the colonized. And Israel has unfairly been branded as a colonialist oppressor state.

Yet these “outside agitators,” as Canary Mission refers to them, were not created in a vacuum. They were churned out by a higher education system that has for years allowed facts and critical thinking to take a back seat to ideology and activism. Indeed, the report found that the encampment received “substantial support from faculty and staff, which contributed to its prolonged existence and the lack of significant consequences for participants.”

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Of the 248 participants in the encampment that Canary Mission was able to identify, only 19 of them were students, while 153 were professors, including 122 who are associated with U of T. Some of the academics who were specifically cited in the report, all members of U of T’s Hearing Palestine initiative, teach in areas such as “social justice education” and “critical studies in equity and solidarity” — fields intended to train militant revolutionaries, not productive members of society.

Others offer instruction in more mainstream fields like political science and anthropology, which makes us wonder whether they can really be trusted to give students an unbiased view of geopolitics and world history — and, for that matter, if they can be relied upon to provide a safe and respectful environment for Jewish students given all the Jew-hate found in and around the encampment.

For years, Canadian universities have been hotbeds of antisemitic and anti-Israel activities. As Canary Mission has documented on its website, many of the academics who supported or participated in the encampment have a long history of anti-Israel activism and antisemitic statements, so it’s not like any of this should have caught U of T administrators off guard.

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While our institutes of higher learning have made a show of their commitment to “anti-racism” in recent years, they have been hiring and nurturing faculty members who have been creating an unsafe environment for Jewish staff and students and helping spread hatred on campus.

As Judge Markus Koehnen of the Ontario Superior Court noted in his ruling granting an injunction against the encampment, “There can be no doubt that some of the speech on the exterior of the encampment rises to the level of hate speech.” Those messages included “Jews in the sea Palestine will be free,” “Jews should go back to Europe” and calls of “I hate every fu–ing one of you people” directed at a group carrying Israeli flags.

This was not merely pro-Palestinian activism, but blatant hatred targeted toward people with a specific religion, ethnicity and worldview. It is the type of speech that would surely not be tolerated by university administrators if any other minority group were being victimized.

In May, a number of Jewish student groups issued a joint press release complaining that, “Jewish students and faculty have not felt safe being on their campus. Some have been attacked, some have been refused entry and many have experienced antisemitism.” One student told the Post that she had to “hide my Jewishness.”

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Imagine, for a second, if similar levels of hatred were being experienced by Black or LGBTQ+ students. Would the administration still have refused to enforce its code of conduct, which prohibits “vexatious conduct” based on “race,” “ancestry” or “ethnic origin,” along with causing “another person or persons to fear for their safety”? We highly doubt it.

Yet in this case, as Canary Mission noted, U of T backed down from its threat to suspend students and subject faculty who refused to comply with its May 27 trespass notice to “disciplinary measures up to and including termination of employment,” after receiving pushback from its own staff. It legitimized the illegal occupation of its property by negotiating with the protesters and providing them with washroom facilities.

Although U of T led the way by seeking a court injunction that ultimately resulted to the dismantling of university encampments from coast to coast, its refusal to sanction any of those involved will only encourage others to engage in similar behaviour in the future and legitimize antisemitism on campus.

Yet if schools really want to stem the tide of hate, they must address the root of the problem: instructors who blur the line between education and political activism.

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