September 22, 2025
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The hypocrisy of our university managers over the Palestine exception to free speech

Robert Boyce1849 mins mins

19 September 2024

The provost of Concordia University in Montreal has just circulated a “guidance” to departments and other sections of the University banning them from expressing their collective support for Palestine without quite ever mentioning Palestine or the pro-Israel members of the University community who might feel “uncomfortable” with such expressions of support. This, as Professor Nathan Brown (pictured) affirms in the article below, is typical of university managers in Canada and beyond.

The Palestine Exception’s Creeping Threat to Academic Freedom

Policies at Concordia University exemplify the new campus repression.

Chronical of Higher Education | Opinion

By Nathan BrownSeptember 17, 2024

One of the most significant contradictions of the “Palestine exception” — whereby pro-Palestinian advocacy does not enjoy the same protections as other kinds of political speech on campus — is that administrative actions specifically taken to prohibit, delegitimize, and isolate statements of opposition to Israel’s murderous war in Gaza, and its apartheid regime in the West Bank, inevitably bleed out into restrictions upon political speech more generally. Although especially acute in the United States, the Palestine exception and its contradictory consequences are not limited to it.

A recent memo circulated by Anne Whitelaw, the provost of Concordia University, in Montreal, where I teach, brings this into sharp focus. On September 5 — in response to an organized campaign by pro-Israel interest groups targeting statements by academic departments in support of Palestine and the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement — Whitelaw promulgated a new policy titled “Guidance on Political Statements by Departments.” Predictably, the content of this “guidance” is the prohibition of political statements by academic departments at Concordia.

“There is a crucial distinction,” Whitelaw argues, “to be drawn between academic units and academic members, as the latter are protected by academic freedom policies while the former are not.” Academic freedom, she claims, “applies to individual academic members and groups of academic members engaged in carrying out their principal teaching and research activities within the university.” But since “departments, schools, colleges, and institutes are administrative units of the university,” they have no claim to academic freedom. Whitelaw’s memo leans on Concordia’s policy regarding uses of the university’s name to argue that while faculty members may make political statements as individuals, or as “groups of academic members,” departments are not at liberty to collectively decide upon and post political statements on their websites.

Those stipulations are to some extent similar to the ones issued by Barnard College in November of last year. Barnard’s policy goes further than Concordia’s; as Len Gutkin has noted in these pages, it “doesn’t just apply to departmental websites. It also prohibits faculty members from making political statements as individuals, at least on college websites or on college grounds without prior approval.” But both Barnard’s and Concordia’s policies raise the thorny question of just what constitutes a “political statement.” And both involve inevitable inconsistencies of judgment and enforcement — inconsistencies closely related to the pretense that these policies do not specifically stem from pressure campaigns directed at support for Palestine and opposition to Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing.

At Concordia, the rhetorical contortions of Whitelaw’s memo only serve to point up the bad faith of that pretense. We are told that “recent geopolitical conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, have led to an escalation of tensions that have made dialogue and debate increasingly difficult.” Those geopolitical conflicts, “particularly in the Middle East,” create tensions on campus that make people feel uncomfortable, and “the university must ensure that all its members feel welcome, especially when so many feel buffeted by the pain and suffering we are seeing around the world.”

Both Barnard’s and Concordia’s policies raise the thorny question of just what constitutes a “political statement.” And both involve inevitable inconsistencies of judgment and enforcement.

The memo by the provost never mentions Israel or Palestine, let alone the dread name of Gaza. Its rhetorical strategy is to pretend “the Middle East conflict” just happens to be one case of “geopolitical conflicts” leading to an “escalation of tensions” which must be defused so that “all members feel welcome.” Because Whitelaw will not acknowledge that her “Guidance on Political Statements by Departments” responds to specific statements supporting the Palestinian cause and the BDS campaign, she must promulgate a general policy on academic freedom and political speech, which will then have sweeping and inconsistent implications for statements about any political situation. Thus, while statements of support for Palestine and BDS have been removed from the departmental websites at issue, some statements of support for the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) have also been removed. Meanwhile, at the time of writing, another such statement remains on the front page of a department website, and a departmental statement of opposition to Quebec’s Bill 21 (prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols by provincial employees) is likewise still posted.

The removal and non-removal of departmental BLM statements is particularly revealing. After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, expressions of solidarity by academic departments proliferated in the United States, Canada, and beyond. At Concordia, it was also a galvanizing moment for a campaign to establish a Black-studies program, which had begun years earlier. The university issued an apology for the harm that was caused to Black students by its handling of the 1969 Sir George Williams University student protest, which stemmed from complaints of racial discrimination. Concordia’s president established a Task Force on Anti-Black Racism, and Provost Whitelaw responded to the task force’s report by acknowledging that “at Concordia we need a concerted response to systematic and targeted racism,” since “Concordia lives with a colonial legacy that entails systems and histories of racism.”

Yet now — in response to departmental statements opposing colonial practices by the state of Israel — Whitelaw’s guidelines have resulted in the removal of statements of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, while the remaining presence of other such statements indicates the inconsistency of administrative decisions. That inconsistency is opportune, since Concordia would indeed like to have it both ways. But by taking action against collective opposition to the atrocities in Gaza, Whitelaw has also effectively acted against the concerted response she called for in opposition to systematic and targeted racism.

What is a political position, and what constitutes a political statement? Can we find these disseminated elsewhere by the administration of the university, using its name on Concordia webpages? The answer is yes. On the front page of Concordia’s website, one finds a Territorial Acknowledgment stating that the university is “located on unceded Indigenous lands.” This statement is eminently political, and it appears as well at the bottom of every departmental website. Should one doubt its political content, one need only consider whether such a statement would be permitted to remain on the webpages of any university in Israel — to cite an example directly relevant to the present case.

But one need not look so far afield. In the conservative Canadian press, there is no shortage of political opposition to such statements and the principles they seem to represent. In the pages of the National Post one can find Lawrence Krauss polemicizing against Concordia’s five-year plan to decolonize and Indigenize its curriculum: “Concordia graduates will then be stigmatized for the simple reason that the university has promoted ideology over reality.” In a news outlet called The Hub, Zachary Patterson argues that “University ‘decolonization’ is a threat to academic freedom.” Yet Concordia does not respond to such political contestation by removing its Territorial Acknowledgment from its website — nor should it. Rather, administrators apparently judge that such statements are important and warranted whether or not they cause discomfort to those of certain political persuasions.

By taking action against collective opposition to the atrocities in Gaza, Whitelaw has also effectively acted against the concerted response she called for in opposition to systematic racism.

The hypocrisy is blatant. Introducing Concordia’s “Indigenous Directions Action Plan,” which lays out its “Path Toward Decolonizing and Indigenizing the University,” Whitelaw states that “decolonizing the curriculum asks us to question why we look at the world in the way we do; requires us to reevaluate our frames of reference; and pushes us to think differently.” Yet when academic members, and groups of academic members, look at the world through the lens of decolonization, and when they state their collective support for the decolonization of Palestine on departmental websites — so as to ensure such support is legible to students and to the university community — their political speech is judged not to be protected by academic freedom.

One may well conclude that Concordia’s commitment to “Decolonization,” to “Indigenization,” and to “Black Perspectives” amounts to a marketing campaign. When that commitment leads to the wrong kind of publicity, it is summarily dispensed with. In dispensing with that commitment by prohibiting academic units to collectively affirm it, Provost Whitelaw forces individual academic members to speak only as individuals, or as groups of individuals identifiable by signatures, and thus to put themselves at risk of retaliation, harassment, and abuse. Since I am putting myself at risk in precisely that way by writing this piece, let me be forthright about the content of the “guidelines” to which Anne Whitelaw and the many other administrators in both Canada and the United States have signed their names. Though she may be inclined to disavow its political content, Provost Whitelaw in her memo contributes to securing and reproducing ideological conditions of possibility for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, for settler violence in the West Bank, and for Israel’s ongoing persecution of the Palestinian people.

About the Author

Nathan Brown

Nathan Brown is a professor of English at Concordia University.

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