McGill faculty association votes to boycott Israeli cultural and academic institutions

McGill University political science professor William Roberts defends his position on Hamas and Hezbollah and the school's boycott of Israeli institutions.

Teachers and librarians at a McGill University association voted to boycott Israel’s cultural and academic institutions this week as debates continue to swirl about academic freedom.

The McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) decided on Friday “to take all necessary steps to implement the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, while ensuring that the boycott applies to institutional partnerships and agreements, not individual Israeli academics.”

Of the 114 staff present, 104 voted for the boycott, eight voted against, and two abstained.

According to the McGill University “quick facts” page, there are 1,715 tenured and tenure-stream faculty at the university.

Political science professor William Roberts is part of the MAUT and said that the consensus opinion was due to the Israeli institutions’ censoring of voices and opinions.

“Israeli academics don’t enjoy the sort of academic freedom that we enjoy,” he told CTV News. “They have a lot of freedom to research and teach, but there are very clear boundaries beyond which they get thrown overboard and they get pressed out of service, and they have to go into exile.”

The MAUT alleges that Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the state’s war in Gaza.

“The adoption of the resolution to boycott Israeli institutions complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people shows that McGill professors and librarians will not stand by idly as Israel murders and abducts our colleagues in healthcare, libraries, and universities,” the MAUT said in a statement.

Roberts has been at the centre of the discussion of academic freedom since he posted, “Nothing short of ‘full economic and military support for Hamas and Hezbollah’ is appropriate” on X.

He accused the university of being dishonest when he was later removed from McGill’s student discipline committee.

His comments, he said, were meant as a critique of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and not support for either group. He said that both groups have been demonized.

“It’s not that I am ideologically aligned with either of those groups,” the Marxist professor told CTV News. “I don’t believe in theological government. I want a secular, free state, both in Lebanon and in Israel-Palestine... I think just saying that those are groups that have a certain legitimacy and that have a certain role to play in checking Israeli aggression and checking Israeli power, that was clearly beyond the pale for a lot of people so and I think it’s because of that background, the history of the war on terror.”

Academic freedom

University of Montreal (UdeM) political philosophy professor Charles Blattberg said Roberts’s comments on Hamas and Hezbollah do not fall under academic freedom and that they created an unsafe space for a Jewish professor like himself.

He resigned from an inter-university Montreal political philosophy research group as a result.

“I believe that it violates my academic liberty, not in the sense that he has said something that perhaps I find deeply offensive, or rather, it’s because he’s declared support for organizations that are terrorists that are dedicated to killing people like me, Jews, not just in the Middle East, but the world over,” Blattberg told CTV News.

“They’ve proven that in word and in deed, and that’s where I believe my academic liberty is jeopardized because when you’re having a meeting to discuss political philosophy or any academic topic, we have to be able to exist in a kind of safe space, not in the sense that people can’t say very controversial things.”

Roberts said there are no grounds to suggest that supplying either group with military aid to fight Israel would threaten anyone’s academic freedom in Montreal.

He added that in addition to online backlash and hate mail over his comments, the people, fellow faculty members and students he works with have either agreed with him or been able to respectfully disagree.

“I have had people who disagreed with me, who wanted to talk about it, who wanted to lay out why they thought it was a bad idea what I was proposing, but they wanted to listen to my case for why it was a good idea, and we had respectful conversation about that,” said Roberts.

McGill’s political science department’s statement on academic freedom says that it allows professors to voice opinions.

“The department as an organization does not take stands on political questions. It does not issue statements deploring, condemning, celebrating, or expressing concern about world events,” the statement reads. “The department includes members at all levels who take a wide range of positions on contested questions, both in their academic capacity as scholars studying politics, and in their private capacities as persons and politically engaged citizens of their many various societies.”

That position on academic freedom extends to social media.

“It supports the freedom of all its members both to engage in academic inquiry and to engage in political speech, and will reaffirm that commitment as needed,” the statement reads.

Blattberg argues that Roberts’ statements threaten his security. He said he hoped that he would be able to discuss the matter within the group, but that the other members decided not to.

“He has every right to take positions that I happen to maybe totally disagree with, but that’s not what this is about,” said Blattberg. “This is about his support for groups that clearly, again, in word and deed, threaten the security of Jews the world over, and you shouldn’t be supporting groups like that.”