Pro-Palestine encampment at U of T’s King’s College Circle in 2024. Photo by Can Pac Swire/Flickr.

The partial ceasefire in Gaza offers an opportunity to reflect on how universities have responded to a level of student activism not seen since the protests against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. One of the most notable developments has been the adoption by dozens of universities of policies promoting so-called “institutional neutrality.”

At first glance “neutrality” is a laudable aim of universities whose mission is to promote research that raises “deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.” According to a University of Toronto memo from 2024, introducing what it called a new approach of not making statements on local or global events, the university’s role is not to act as an arbiter among competing positions.

But whether framed as “impartiality,” “neutrality,” promoting “diversity” or even as “statements about not making statements,” the language of neutrality after the events of October 7, 2023 has come to set the terms of a deeper question reverberating through universities: how should institutions ‘balance’ pro-Palestine research and activism against claims from some pro-Israel groups that such work is offensive or even antisemitic?

If we turn the clock back to anti-apartheid activism at the University of Toronto in the 1980s, we can see more clearly what is—and is not—new about today’s invocations of neutrality.

The University of Toronto divested from apartheid South Africa much later than most of its peer institutions and it employed the language of neutrality to justify its stance. In 1985, U of T President George Connell affirmed that individuals, himself included, were free to boycott South African products and speak out. “The University is a community in which that kind of engagement can take place,”

© Canadian Dimension