Fortress McGill

Author’s photo, 30 July 2024.

By Edward Dunsworth

Order has been restored to the campus of McGill University. Gone is the tent village, its perimeter fence adorned with a multilingual cacophony of banners decrying genocide and crying out for peace and freedom. Gone is the “Free Store,” the “Profs 4 Palestine” tent, and the video monitor screening documentaries. Gone too is the mud, everywhere and thick, and the truckload of wooden pallets cleverly laid down as sidewalks and platforms.

And gone are the dozens of young people who dared to believe that an institution of higher learning should have nothing to do with a state carrying out genocide, apartheid, and the most heinous of war crimes.

After months of legal battles, fearmongering, and handwringing, McGill’s administration finally succeeded in ending the antiwar encampment, hiring a private security firm to evict campers and a demolition crew to take down the camp on July 10, some ten weeks after it was first established.

Having restored order, McGill is anxious to ensure it is maintained. The encampment is gone, but the campus is not “back to normal.” It is transformed.

Every entrance is walled off with the very same type of temporary perimeter fencing erected by campers. Instead of hand-painted revolutionary banners, those fences are now outfitted with neat, rectangular, printed signs that proclaim, in both official languages, “Private Property. No Trespassing. Proprieté privée. Entrée interdite.”

Security guards patrol the campus and are stationed at every entrance, checking the identification of anyone who wishes to pass. Only staff and students are allowed in. Visitors must be approved ahead of time and carry signed forms to secure entrance to the hallowed grounds of this public university. Booking rooms for meetings is strictly forbidden.

McGill is in lockdown, on high alert, the threat level raised to red.

To anyone who believes that universities should be sites of free speech, open debate, and rigorous learning, with doors open to students and the public, this state of affairs is, frankly, shameful.

Shameful, but not surprising. Over the last year, a siege mentality has set in with McGill’s upper administration, and not just in relation to pro-Palestinian protestors.

The 2023-24 academic year was a contentious one at McGill. Two strikes: one by teaching assistants, the other by law professors. The unionization of professors in Education and Arts. And a wellspring of protest against Israel’s war on Palestine and McGill’s institutional and financial connections with Israel.

(You might have to go all the way back to 1968-69 to find so momentous an academic year at McGill. That one featured a 10,000-strong march, Opération McGill français, that demanded McGill become a francophone, socialist university, as well as a weeks-long student occupation of the political science department, and one of the sixties era’s most important international gatherings of radical Black intellectuals.)

Throughout the present year of campus protest, McGill’s response has been heavy-handed in the extreme – particularly when it comes to students. It has imposed narrow limits on the freedoms of speech and assembly on campus and acted aggressively to police those boundaries.

When, in November, students voted overwhelmingly for a resolution calling on McGill to sever ties with institutions and corporations involved in the genocide of Palestinians, the administration threatened to defund the entire student government. In the lead-up to the vote, it also pressured professors to forbid students from making statements about the resolution in class – an egregious violation of academic freedom and disturbing intrusion into the learning process.

When, in March, teaching assistants, nearly all graduate students, went on strike and engaged in the sorts of disruptive activities normal in work stoppages, administrators called police on strikers and broadcast a steady stream of campus-wide emails that grossly exaggerated strikers’ actions and painted a picture of a campus descended into anarchy. McGill also threatened to withhold the pay of professors who refused to cross picket lines or to perform the work of their striking teaching assistants, blithely disregarding the Quebec Labour Code’s prohibition of the latter.

When the encampment was established on April 27, the siege mentality reached new heights. While early comments from McGill administrators acknowledged the peaceful nature of the encampment, by April 29 the messaging had switched. From that point on, the administration told a story of a campus under occupation by violent, anti-Semitic lawbreakers who were obstructing students’ rightful use of the campus. They beseeched the police and the courts to take down the encampment, to no avail. Threats of discplinary proceedings against participants of the encampment were sprinkled liberally into the barrage of campus-wide emails sent during the ten weeks of protest.

This was a portrayal of events entirely divorced from reality, sharply contradicted by the reporting of journalists and by the observations of dozens of professors, including myself, who occasionally visited the encampment. Violent? The scene at the encampment, for all its youthful revolutionary fervor, was for the most part utterly banal, consisting of young people hanging out, talking, and figuring out what to do with generous but not always practical donations. Anti-Semitic? Campers and their supporters counted many Jews among their ranks, and the encampment was the site of Shabbat meals and Jewish celebrations.

Not even the Montreal police believed McGill’s story, repeatedly refusing to intervene in a peaceful protest. Ditto for the courts. For all their mouth-frothing, McGill could never produce any actual evidence of anti-Semitism or violence.

It quickly became clear that such idealistic concepts as evidence and reason carried little weight with the administrators of one of the world’s most renowned universities. Instead, McGill used its loud megaphone to disparage and discredit the encampment, crafting a narrative that would justify its eventual dismantlement. Classic “othering” tactics were deployed: campers were described as outsiders and foreigners, drug addicts, and homeless people. Facts were gleefully distorted to support the official line. When protestors hung Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in effigy, dressed in a prisoner’s uniform, a campus-wide email from McGill president Deep Saini described this an anti-Semitic act, claiming that the uniform resembled those worn by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. This was, to put it charitably, a creative interpretation. The most famous concentration camp uniforms featured vertical blue stripes. The Netanyahu effigy was clad in horizontal black stripes, the classic generic prisoner’s uniform, in the style of, say, the Hamburglar.

The state of the campus in the aftermath of the encampment merely bolsters the administration’s siege storytelling. Following the war, they have created an occupation zone.

McGill is a marvellous university, an oasis of reason and learning in a world increasingly discarding such values. I am not only a professor at the university; I am an alumnus. I am also a donor. When, some fifteen years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree I was hired as a tenure-track professor, I felt I had won the lottery. I still feel that way. McGill students are second to none. It is a joy and a privilege to teach them day in and day out. I have brilliant, supportive colleagues. I love McGill. I believe in McGill. But I am worried about it.

A university that aggressively seeks to stifle forms of speech and protest that it deems out-of-line, that threatens, criminalizes and shames its students in public, that repeatedly twists facts to support its positions, that bans the public from its campus is not a place where rigorous debate and fearless learning can freely occur. Surely these are values that a university should uphold.

This school year, McGill’s administration has failed to live up to that standard. Here’s hoping that, in 2024-25, they can make the grade.

Edward Dunsworth is a assistant professor of history at McGill and a member of the editorial collective of Activehistory.ca. Versions of this piece were pubished in French in La Presse and Le Devoir, coauthored with Catherine Leclerc.