Administration building, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. Photo by Sancho McCann/Wikimedia Commons.

When actions fail to honor the promises that gave rise to them, and their consequences ripple outward, the speaker is left exposed, holding only their own lack of seriousness. In the academy, such unseriousness erodes our intellectual mission—a mission that depends on integrity in the hard work of describing the world as it is, envisioning the world we want, and striving toward a better one.

By its word, the University of Manitoba has professed a commitment to human rights and opposition to social harms in its investments. By its actions, the university has refused to divest from arms manufacturers who supply the tools of an ongoing genocide. While Palestinians in Gaza suffer the consequences of this global complicity, the university’s actions also indict our own institutional integrity. Here, now, our word is not our bond. So why would anyone take our intellectual mission seriously? We need to reckon not only with how we have impugned human rights, but with our own unseriousness and the damage it does to the academic integrity of our university.

The state of Israel is currently carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.[1] Amid this genocide, the University of Manitoba’s endowment maintains equity investments in eight companies who continue to equip Israel with the tools of mass murder, despite repeated warnings about the human rights violations tied to these arms sales. These companies include Honeywell International, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation, Check Point Software Technologies, Oshkosh Corporation, and Rolls-Royce Holdings.[2] General Dynamics, for example, profits as the manufacturer of the MK-84 2,000-pound bomb, described by a Pentagon official as a weapon that “turns the earth to liquid,” “pancake[s] entire buildings,” and causes “instant death” to anyone within 30 metres of its blast area. This munition has been used repeatedly in Gaza, where at least 70,000 tons of explosives have been dropped. For comparison, the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 contained between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of explosives.

The MK-84 has been deployed in the Jabalia refugee camp and in the Al-Mawasi tent massacre, killing 40 people and leaving 10-metre craters where densely packed tents had sheltered forcibly displaced Palestinian families trying to sleep. Last fall, the University of Manitoba........

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