Key takeaways:
- Union president says threat imperils democracy and union’s freedom to represent all students.
- McGill’s administration served the student union with a default statement, offering a month to rescind the motion or have its contract with the university closed.
McGill University is threatening to sanction its student union, including banning it from using the McGill name, because the association championed a pro-Palestinian policy that the school and Jewish groups state is biased.
The Palestine Solidarity Policy, embraced in a March student referendum with 71 percent support, says the Students’ Society of McGill University shall enter an international campaign to boycott all firms and institutions “complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.”
The approach also calls for the union to pressure the university to join the boycott.
In reply, McGill’s administration served the student union with a notice of default, offering it a month to repeal the motion or have its contract with the university closed.
The “Memorandum of Agreement” controls the relationship between McGill and the union by forming guidelines over financing and the use of school space and the university’s name.
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“McGill University firmly condemns all states of racism and discrimination, including antisemitism and Islamophobia,” university representative Cynthia Lee said in a report regarding the vote results.
She said the policy infringes the university’s values of inclusion, and it scorns students’ religious and political beliefs.
The union president supports policy and student democracy.
Several Jewish advocacy groups help the university’s position, saying the policy targets Jewish students on campus.
But union president Darshan Daryanani states the administration’s threat endangers democracy and the union’s request to represent all students.
“We talk regarding academic freedom, but where is it in this?” Daryanani said in a recent interview.
Source – cbc.ca
