After an academic year marked by Israel’s intensified genocide in Gaza and heightened campus dissent, McGill has not only failed in its responsibility to preserve student safety and educational democracy: It has intensified hostilities by vilifying the Palestinian liberation movement.
On March 27, a strike motion submitted by two McGill students passed through a Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Special Strike General Assembly. The student body then ratified the motion, which led to a three-day student strike between April 2 and 4. The strike—which called for divestment from weapons manufacturers and Israel, as well as ending disciplinary cases against pro-Palestine student demonstrators—asked union members to avoid class and instead attend daily alternative educational programming, including workshops, teach-ins, film screenings and a rally on April 3. This was the first SSMU-sanctioned student strike since 2004.
However, as seen since October 2023, the administration’s response to the strike has been repressive, targeted, and violent. This hostility is fueled and maintained by McGill’s increasing police presence on campus and employment of privately hired security forces. McGill does not train these private security officers on the Charter of Students’ Rights, nor does the institution offer students any official channel of complaint against them. The pervasive, unqualified nature of such a security force is enough to induce tension on a psychological level, where students feel that their university, which they pay to attend, considers them criminals or worthy of being treated as such. McGill has neglected its institutional responsibility to foster a safe and open environment; instead, the very security hired to protect students endangers them and results in increasing intimidation and censorship.
Such unchecked power accommodates violence. While existing to allegedly “ensure a safe environment”, most McGill students do not feel any safer with the oversaturation of security presence on campus. By justifying increased police presence and violence against its students while simultaneously ignoring protestors’ Boycott, Divest, and Sanction demands, McGill demonstrates its negligence of students’ calls to action, democratic free speech, and institutional acknowledgement of its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The strike is a testament to McGill students’ continued mobilization for Palestine in the face of antagonism, repression, and violence from McGill. However, on April 7, McGill announced a Notice of Termination of their Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with SSMU, due to some protestors who allegedly threatened and intimated students and instructors who still went to class, and injured a McGill staff member with a thrown fire hydrant. McGill can not use this distressing incident to discredit the entire Palestinian liberation movement.
And the irony is evident. In December, campus security forcibly detained and violently physically assaulted a member of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM) after the member took a picture of a security guard, and the member is yet to receive any response from the university administration regarding recourse. McGill can not condemn an entire movement, especially as it tries to engage in democratic assembly for its cause, due to one violent incident, while simultaneously refusing to condemn or rectify its security’s violence against students.
The strike itself was motioned in a democratic manner, allowing every SSMU member to express their stance. SSMU encouraged all students to show up and offered a space for alternative opinions. Still, the motion to strike passed. McGill, to tell students that they should not have passed the strike motion in SSMU’s channels as it “further divided a campus community already deeply cleaved and hurting” is to say that students can not make their voice heard if the university thinks it’s too “controversial.” It is to say that students can not mobilize against a genocide, as it may counter the opinions of those who agree with the Israeli regime’s entirely immoral and inhumane apartheid.
McGill is creating the hostile environment that it claims pro-Palestinian activism perpetuates. The university must uphold democratic avenues of protest. To say that the university’s “goal is not to silence dissent” is not enough—actions must speak louder. It is not lost on protestors that construction emerged on the Y-intersection on the first day of the strike. McGill must stop imposing strategic maneuvers and police violence against its own student body during times of protest.
McGill, open your eyes: Israel is committing genocide. At least have the courage to acknowledge it.
