Keeping BDS Out of Academia: A Canadian Case Study

A Canadian professor once complained to me that academia is nowhere near as radically leftist as conservative culture critics tend to imagine. Yes, there’s plenty of “wokeness” on display. But almost all of these woke controversies, he argued, originate with a tiny minority of dedicated extremists. Most of his colleagues—well over 90%, by his estimation—would prefer to stay out of the public eye, avoid political fights, and focus on their areas of specialized research.

He may well be right. But as numerous examples reported by Quillette have shown, even small groups of highly motivated ideologues can exert an outsized influence on the intellectual climate at their schools—especially if they succeed in co-opting ostensibly neutral bodies such as hiring committees, DEI oversight teams, and academic unions.

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A recent case study concerns the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA), the labour union that represents about 600 full-time faculty members and professional librarians at Brock, a large public research university located about two hours west of Toronto. At BUFA’s general meetings, quorum requirements may be satisfied by just 5% of the membership—or about 30 people.

According to one Brock professor who monitors BUFA’s activities closely, most meetings attract just a few dozen people. Few workaday profs can even spare the time required to scrutinize the agendas, which are sent out five days before each meeting.

And so it apparently wasn’t difficult for an assistant professor of sociology named Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz to get his “Motion on Scholasticide in Palestine” onto the agenda of BUFA’s December 16, 2024 meet-up—where it was duly seconded by his old master’s-degree supervisor, Nancy Cook (an expert on, among other things, “critical mobilities studies, and feminist, postcolonial and poststructural theory”).

Consistent with other campaigns inspired by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Tanyildiz accuses the Jewish state of not only “scholasticide,” but also apartheid, genocide, and war crimes. He calls for Brock’s administration (and its pension planners) to execute a “complete divestment” from any organization that’s even indirectly “complicit” in this regard—including multinational corporations and Israeli universities—and demands that Brock enact a long laundry list of pro-Palestinian policies.

None of this has anything to do with BUFA’s actual mission—which, according to the union’s constitution, consists of advancing scholarship at Brock; improving “the standards and welfare” of union members; and, most importantly, collective bargaining. But that doesn’t seem to have been any kind of dealbreaker for BUFA’s executive.

The union’s December 16 meeting, a recording of which has been reviewed by Quillette, lasted almost two and a half hours. Much of it consisted of two professors—Tanyildiz and another anti-Israeli campaigner named Liam Midzain-Gobin—instructing fellow academics that they would have Palestinian blood on their hands if they voted against BDS; and that the motion’s defeat might even be seen as a breach of the union’s human-rights obligations under international law.

Most of Tanyildiz’s motion consists of the usual BDS boilerplate—either copied or adapted from other BDS-inspired documents—and so isn’t really worth close scrutiny. But the sweeping, hectoring tone he adopted during the discussion helps illustrate why many (otherwise) reasonable and fair-minded academics sometimes get swept up by this movement, or at least are intimidated into silence when others demand support for it. (By Tanyildiz’s boast, at least 18 other Canadian academic bodies have passed similar anti-Israel resolutions.)

Tanyildiz styled his motion as a necessary response to “a solidarity call” from “Palestinian academic and cultural workers—from [their] civil society.” This is a point he repeated in various forms as a means to explain why he’d singled out the Jewish state while ignoring horrors and injustices in other parts of the world.

“It is not just [that] I decided that I should be doing this,” he explained. Far from it. Rather, he was proceeding from a “personal, professional, and ethical responsibility to listen to this call and stay in solidarity.”

From there, it was a short rhetorical jump to the proposition that anyone at BUFA who opposed his motion was effectively a maidservant to genocide—not unlike, say, a citizen of Nazi Germany ignoring the daily clatter of trains bringing Jews to concentration camps:

I do not want to be in my workplace, in my pension funds, in my scholarship, in any way, to be tied with an ongoing genocide. The excuse when the Holocaust happened was that people didn’t know. Well, now we know it, and we cannot take part, we cannot be complicit, like the complicit institutions in Israel, to a genocide. Genocide and genocide denialism undermine our academic freedom, our work conditions, our scholarship. 

Somewhat detracting from the moral grandeur of this pronouncement, Tanyildiz then paused to assure fellow BUFA members that heroically standing up to genocide wouldn’t negatively affect their future pension payments. It would all be cost-free: “There is extensive research—because people have already done this; I’m not the first one that is proposing it—people have divested [without suffering] any economic disadvantage.”

He then turned back to his main theme—which served to liken his ideological opponents to génocidaires: “When you’re voting on the motion, you will be asking yourselves, like I do, do I want my workplace and my pension monies to be tied with other people’s blood or not?”

Specimens such as Tanyildiz are often held up by conservatives as representative examples of the intellectual and moral rot on Canadian campuses. But even by the leftist standards of this milieu, he’s an obvious outlier. His Brock faculty profile page—which reads much like a conservative parody of progressive intellectual fads—identifies him as an “interdisciplinary scholar of Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and queer thought,” as well as an expert on “alternative ways of using Marx’s method to understand contemporary human praxis.”

In the accompanying photo, he appears in front of a 1970s-era Chinese propaganda poster celebrating the Paris Commune, whose brief takeover of Paris in early 1871 ended with a mass hostage slaughter. For their part, China’s communists caused the extermination of somewhere between 20-million and 40-million innocents during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution—three decimal orders of magnitude above even the most inflated Palestinian casualty statistics circulated by Hamas since Israel invaded Gaza following the 7 October, 2023 terrorist attacks.

The other aforementioned speaker at the BUFA meeting—Midzain-Gobin, a self-identified “full-time settler scholar” focusing on “settler coloniality,” “settler colonialism,” and “settler sovereignty”—seems just as intellectually marginal. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any serious mainstream academic arguing, as Midzain-Gobin did, that Canadian academic unions which fail to denounce Israel will run afoul of “international legal responsibilities” set down in The Hague.

I want to speak to our international obligations and really our responsibilities under international law as motivating why this is being put forward. So, the International Court of Justice has noted that there’s actually a duty to prevent genocide…That is a duty on state parties. [But] there are individual-level responsibilities under international law, and the International Criminal Court has made that clear in issuing warrants…I’m not suggesting that BUFA is going to be dragged in front of the International Court…But what I am saying is that we can start to see individual responsibilities that are separate from legal duties on the parts of states. And what I see this motion is doing is us being able to live up to those international responsibilities to not be complicit in the genocide that we see. This is one step toward us fulfilling those international legal responsibilities that we hold. And I think that not only puts us on the right side of history in terms of stopping and helping to stop the extermination of a people, but also allows us to sit easily within international law.

In keeping with my friend’s complaint about academic stereotypes, some readers may imagine that these speeches were met with either unanimous approval or cowed silence from fellow BUFA members. But that’s not what happened: Despite the fact the meeting had been scheduled in the run-up to the Christmas holidays, and that the associated agenda was emailed out with less than a week’s notice, a handful of concerned BUFA members caught wind of the motion and mounted a hastily organized opposition campaign. Attendance was more than 180—standing-room only by ordinary BUFA standards.

Several of the attendees spoke passionately against Tanyildiz’s motion. And at least one advanced amendments that would expand its text so as to include criticism of Turkey’s suppression of its Kurdish minority—an apparent jab at the hypocrisy of Tanyildiz, who self-describes as a Turkish-Canadian dual citizen.

The last twenty minutes of the meeting consisted of confusing cross-talk and duelling procedural motions; with BUFA members variously seeking to force the meeting to end, continue, or be suspended in some form so that the issue might be taken up at a further date. And when the beleaguered chair (BUFA vice-president Liz Clarke, a scholar of female involvement in the early film industry) announced the meeting was indeed over, no one seemed to know what had been decided or what next steps would look like.

It wasn’t until three days later that BUFA’s executive put out a two-page letter, electronically encoded as Next BDS Motion Meeting, explaining what had actually happened at the meeting, while kicking the underlying issue to an as-yet-unscheduled “special meeting” to be held in early 2025.

It’s uncertain what will become of Tanyildiz’s motion. And in a way, it doesn’t really matter. Though the BDS movement has been around for two decades, it remains what it’s always been—a clearinghouse for symbolic academic and activist stunts that have little real-world effect. Certainly, the movement has done nothing to inhibit Israel’s largely successful military response to both Hamas’ 2023 terrorist attacks and Hezbollah’s follow-on missile strikes.

In recent months, Israel’s most implacable foes—in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran—have been decimated and humbled. To the extent the arrow of “history” may be said to point anywhere, it would appear to be in the direction opposite that of Midzain-Gobin’s settler gaze. And for all his strange talk about BUFA’s “responsibilities” to the International Court of Justice, no one in the Middle East, let alone The Hague, cares what professors at an Ontario university think about how Israel’s (non-existent) genocide figures into their academic “praxis.”

No matter how things conclude, this case study betrays the limited support that anti-Israel activists such as Midzain-Gobin and Tanyildiz actually possess, even within strongly leftist institutions such as Canadian universities. According to one source at Brock, these extremists have less influence than they imagine, and tend to be clustered within a small number of programs, such as Women’s and Gender Studies, and Social Justice and Equity.

“Their ‘cross-disciplinary’ programs—i.e., not actual departments—are little fiefdoms they’ve set up for themselves because they have no friends within their own [departments],” the source opined. “All they do is plan activism; and, as you’ve discovered, they aren’t popular [with students].”

In this regard, it’s notable that the academics who spoke most forcefully against Tanyildiz’s BDS motion on December 16 don’t seem to be vocal conservatives (to the extent Brock has any faculty who answer to this description), but rather present as ordinary campus liberals who’ve simply become tired of watching anti-Israeli monomania being asserted in their name by campus ideologues.

The author of the aforementioned amendment, for instance, is linguist Ron Thomson, a self-described pacifist who doesn’t even support Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. Georgii Nikonov, who stated that the pro-motion arguments he’d heard were taken “directly from Hamas’ playbook,” is a distinguished expert on metallic chemistry who, as far as I can tell, has never once commented publicly on the current conflict in the Middle East.

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Then there’s Carole Stewart, who stated that she opposes any kind of “exclusive” BUFA action against Israel, and noted (correctly) that “Hamas’ stated existence” is itself “genocidal.” Stewart is an expert on African-American literature and critical race theory who seeks to promote “a pedagogy firmly committed to antiracism and decolonization.” I’m guessing that Stewart and I would disagree on many things, and that she might well be scandalized to get approvingly name-checked in my writing. So it says something about the radicalism channelled by Midzain-Gobin and Tanyildiz that even this kind of card-carrying academic progressive would be put off by her colleagues’ attacks on the Jewish state.

This tale focuses on just one university. But in many respects, I believe, it serves as a stand-in for similar internal fights going on at many schools—and it comes with important lessons. For all the abuse they take in the public sphere, academics (Canadian or otherwise) tend to be busy, just like everyone else. And so it’s understandable that most lack the time to closely monitor the activities of the unions, administrators, and trade bodies that purport to protect their professional interests. But unless a critical mass of academics do take care to regularly scrutinize the politics of these organizations—and push back against those seeking to co-opt them in order to prosecute parochial geopolitical grievances—their profession will remain associated with extremism.