"Freedom of speech is not an unlimited right. It carries corresponding responsibilities toward others in the university community, and conduct that interferes with the ability of others to speak or participate in lawful university activities falls outside its protection."

"First, the misconception that protest rights exist without corresponding responsibilities. The frequent narrative is that protestors are sanctioned because they are protesting not because of their conduct. Nothing could be further from the truth. The protected right is peaceful protest, not violence or the threat of violence, both of which must be met with zero tolerance."

"Second is the misconception that discriminatory, intimidating and harassing words and conduct are protected. The University has both a legal and institutional responsibility to protect students, faculty and staff from intimidation, discrimination and harassment."

External Metropolitan University review 

 

"Promoting dialogue is not neutral."

"As Zionism continues to collapse, 'dialogue' initiatives have already become an intentional strategy of pro-Israel activists who are seeking to normalize Israel during an unprecedented period of its belatedly recognized abnormality as a modern settler colonial -- and thus, genocidal state".

Professor Joshua Sealy-Harrington, Windsor law school 

Students make their way around the renamed Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), formerly known as Ryerson University in Toronto. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette 

 

Critical Race Theory/DEI informs Professor Sealy-Harrington of the jaundiced view he must take, as a 'progressive', enlightened liberal of the very existence of the State of Israel. That Jews are indigenous to the Middle East, a history that predates the emergence of Islam by thousands of years, and that Israel is Judea reborn on its ancestral land, is an easily-dismissed reality that historical records attest to. Reality and history are both inconveniences in the analytical conclusions of Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, sturdily embraced throughout the academic world and certainly in Canadian universities.

 

And it is faculty of the ilk of Professor Sealy-Harrington whose unreconstructed views of Jews and their proper place in the world who teach their politicized view of history and reality, corrupted into a twisted version that fits their visceral, instinctual antisemitic pathology to university students in the ongoing process of producing other academics among the greater university-educated population who will carry on their hateful fiction denigrating the Jewish state and by extension diaspora Jews with the contempt thought fitting to their appearance within polite society.

 

The outward manifestation of this concerted verbal-political pogrom, building a consensus of agreement among the willing and those previously inducted into the Jew-hate pathology is open condemnation and isolation of Jewish students at Canadian universities, alongside their stricken Jewish professors whose ability to defend themselves against the larger numbers of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students and faculty whom the past several decades has seen swelling their presence through open invitation of Canada's Liberal-led governments from immigrants, refugees and migrants emanating from traditional Jew-hating cultures in North Africa and the Middle East.

reported classroom statements that minimize the Holocaust, describe academic power as rooted in “Jewish supremacism”, and imply that violence against Jewish children is acceptable if their parents are perceived to support Israel

the use of red inverted triangles, a symbol used to mark targets, posted over photos of Jewish student leaders

spoiled milk thrown at Jewish students and spitting directed at others

a lecturer who no longer wears a Star of David necklace for fear of physical assault

Shabbat dinners that now require security risk assessments

redefining Zionism “exclusively through pejorative or demonizing frameworks that leave little room for the perspectives of Jews for whom Zionism forms part of their identity”

Michael Geist 

TMU RCC 2024Feb by Aknell4, via Wikimedia Commons

  

Toronto Metropolitan University, faced with criticism that it is one of the worst Canadian universities that tolerates and oversees a disruptive, antisemitic atmosphere that focuses on slandering Israel and permits an ongoing harassment and persecution campaign led by Students for Justice in Palestine that targets Jewish students, with university staff on board with the campaign that makes teaching life for Jewish faculty one of heads-down and in both cases imposing an atmosphere of enforced withdrawal from many aspects of university life, commissioned an external review.

 

That review, purportedly to inform the university administration just where, when and how they failed to rise to the occasion of ensuring that all of its faculty, staff and student body felt equally respected, their dignity upheld, the atmosphere in which they worked and studied would be conducive to their learning experience that would lead to a future within the greater company of the Canadian identity. Former Justice Mary Lou Benotto and Margot Finley were commissioned to examine the manner of the university's management of an infamously increasing campus conflict.

 

That conflict encompasses the conflicting presence of politically-directed antagonists that drew Jewish students and faculty in conflict with Palestinians over the legitimacy of Israel and the respected place of Canadian Jews in the world of academia where leftist-progressivism has changed the character of universities from institutions of higher learning with its focus on exposure to the nuances of history, culture, traditions and experience in science, the humanities, Canada's legal system, and the arts. These verities of exposure to a sound education were subverted to political leftism superimposed over all else.

 

To the extent that Jewish faculty and staff withdrawing from campus life, leery of presenting themselves publicly as Jewish, to speak in public about Israel or growing antisemitism impacting their profession and their lives. Of students feeling the discomfort of being singled out because of their inheritance as examples of colonial Zionist oppressors. The effect of which was to make these students want to make themselves invisible to the larger critical mass of the student body and the professoriate that often singled them out for inappropriate comments during classes. 

 

On receipt of the review, the university has decided to strike a committee to study the report. None of what is contained in the report can conceivably be regarded as new information never before seen or heard about by an aware administration. Sufficiently aware that it recognized a need to do something, and that something at first hand was to commission the very review that validated all the wrongs already known of. The university that found it quite appropriate to slough off criticism by claiming the atmosphere that strictured Jewish staff and students was not of its making, must now face the reality that its lack of action made it possible. 

 

TMU students join pro-Palestine demonstrations in Toronto for International Day of Action

(SAMMY KOGAN/THE EYEOPENER)

 

"The Benotto report does not declare that TMU has constructively dismissed anyone. That was not its mandate. But that is precisely why TMU's lawyers should be reading it very carefully. The report supplies evidence. Testimony. Institutional admissions. And it supplies something employers rarely receive before litigation begins: a warning."

"A constructive dismissal lawsuit would ultimately require a court to decide whether the circumstances amounted to a fundamental breach of the employment relationship."

"There is a profound difference between an employee saying 'I disagree with what is happening here' and an employee saying, 'I can no longer safely identify who I am or be safe in this environment'."

"The first is workplace disagreement. The second is a workplace crisis."

Howard Levitt, Ontario labour lawyer, Levitt LLP