Zack Zaidener sat in his Wednesday afternoon psychology seminar, listening to his professor speak about Gaza—and an unexpected way to receive a 2 percent grade bump.
At the beginning of that 4 p.m. seminar on Oct. 25, 2023, Zaidener—then an undergraduate student at Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University—says he was “in shock.”
Natalie Kivell, an assistant professor at the department of psychology, informed her students that class would be cut early that day, Zaidener told The CJN. A pro-Palestine rally called “End the Genocide in Gaza,” was happening in nearby Kitchener. It was less than three weeks after Hamas terrorists carried out a massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, and before a ground offensive was carried out by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
“During her (opening remarks, Kivell) mentioned that she would be offering an extra 2 percent credit for attending the rally and for writing a reflection piece on the experience,” Zaidener said.
Two other students who attended this class also told The CJN about the extra credit offered for attending the protest.
At the time, Zaidener, who is Jewish and has family in Israel, remembered seeing videos of pro-Israel college students in the U.S. being beaten and spit on at pro-Palestine rallies. Although he recognized that not all pro-Palestine protests are violent, he had no interest in attending one.
After students were dismissed, Zaidener says he approached Kivell, hoping to ask her why she didn’t mention Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7 or the Israelis held hostage in Gaza. He asked Kivell if they could set up a time to speak in a more private setting, and she offered her office hours.
Then Zaidener started to express why he felt uncomfortable about her opening remarks. “She cut me off and told me (she) promised students, who were waiting in the hallway, that she would drive them to the rally,” he said.
“After I left class that day, I felt completely alone,” Zaidener recalls.
The CJN reached out to Kivell via email, but she did not reply.
There’s a term for when instructors and professors at post-secondary institutions utilize lecture time to deploy political statements that are not relevant to course material—it’s called “abuse of podium”. While official policies vary depending on the institution, many university administrations recognize the potential damage of professors abusing their position of authority.
Yet, as students settle into a new school year, few Canadian university administrations have taken a clear stance on abuse of podium infractions in the context of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas.
According to a statement by Hillel Ontario, over 500 incidents of antisemitism have been documented at nine Ontario universities over the past 11 months, “many of them related to teaching faculty and staff inappropriately using the classroom to spread harmful anti-Israel rhetoric.”
Since Oct. 7, professors, instructors and teaching assistants at numerous Canadian universities have facilitated anti-Israel dialogue in classes that have no correlation to geopolitical tensions.
The CJN interviewed multiple students at different universities in Canada who reported similar incidents, all of them echoing a pattern: When it comes to unqualified anti-Israel statements by faculty members, students’ complaints are not being dealt with.
Many of these students (who are still enrolled in school) did not want to have their names reported, because they were concerned about repercussions from the university or professors.
Administrative responses
The week after Kivell offered extra credit to attend a pro-Palestine rally, Zaidener had a private meeting with her. “She failed to admit any wrongdoing,” he said. Then, on Nov. 5, Zaidener and two other students submitted an official complaint to Laurier’s president’s office.
The letter was acknowledged by Laurier’s president Deborah MacLatchy’s director of communications, and Laurier’s faculty of science dean, according to an email thread obtained by The CJN.
“Thank you for your letter and sharing your concerns—we are taking them very seriously,” wrote Anthony Clarke, the faculty of science dean, on Nov. 8. In the email, Clarke mentioned that the psychology department chair met with Kivell on Nov. 7. “She recognizes that harm has been done,” Clarke wrote.
He then encouraged the three students to separately reach out to Laurier’s Office of Human Rights and Conflict Management, which, he said, “provides many options for students seeking conflict resolution and restorative justice.”
Zaidener says the administrative response came down to repeatedly referring the students to another university office. (The president’s office forwarded the complaint to the provost and vice-president office, who forwarded it to the dean of the faculty of science, who forwarded it to the psychology department chair.)
“I do think the school felt, to some extent, that they needed to get ahead of this before it became a big story,” Zaidener said. “They kept pushing off doing something concrete until either the semester was over or we just got burnt out and stopped fighting.”
According to Section 4.06 of Laurier’s safe disclosure policy, faculty members abusing public trust, making false claims or statements, or “gross management or abuse of authority” are all grounds for the university to “carefully and fairly investigate and respond to disclosures of wrongdoing, including legal action as appropriate.”
The CJN reached out to Laurier’s president Deborah MacLatchy’s office to learn whether the complaint prompted an internal investigation.
“Wilfrid Laurier University can confirm that in this case, as per our standard practice, all university policies and procedures were followed,” wrote Vanessa Barrasa, Laurier’s director of communications and issues management, in a statement sent to The CJN.
She declined to disclose further details.
Kivell is still employed at Laurier.
Ambiguous policies
In a virtual town hall meeting in September 2024, McGill University’s president Deep Saini spoke to Montreal MP Anthony Housefather, the special advisor to the prime minister and cabinet on Canada’s Jewish community and antisemitism, about his stance on abuse of podium infractions.
Saini told Housefather it’s been made “abundantly clear to (faculty) what the rules of engagement are,” adding that “nobody would be allowed to abuse their position on the podium to make a statement or project their own beliefs on people.”
He specifically mentioned that professors at McGill are prohibited from excluding or intimidating students who identify as Zionists and support Israel.
Conversely, University of Toronto’s tolerance for abuse of podium incidents remains ambiguous. In a statement emailed to The CJN on Sept. 9, a media relations representative said that faculty members at UofT “have academic freedom, which is the freedom to investigate, speculate and comment without reference to prescribed doctrine, and to criticize the university and society at large.”
The statement added that faculty members enjoy this freedom within the context of their professional obligations, “including the responsibility to deal fairly and ethically with students and colleagues.”
According to a recent report by Canary Mission, an American organization that investigates antisemitism on campuses, at least 153 professors openly supported the pro-Palestine encampment that occupied King’s College Circle, at University of Toronto, between May and July. Pro-Israel students were targeted, harassed and denied access to sections of the Toronto campus.
The report also mentioned that 122 of those professors were part of the UofT faculty, while 31 were instructors from other post-secondary institutions. Forty-five of these professors “actively participated,” the report claimed, adding that at least six professors delivered pro-Palestine speeches at the encampment, which was dismantled in July after an Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling.
(The CJN emailed the UofT Faculty Association for comment on this report, but did not receive a response.)
York University is equally ambiguous about what constitutes an abuse of podium infraction, claims an instructor at York’s liberal arts and professional studies department, who chose to remain anonymous.
“My sense with the faculty (at York) is that they’re hiding behind a shield related to academic freedom, and kind of using it in a way that’s inappropriate and a misinterpretation of what academic freedom means,” she told The CJN.
She referenced a document titled “Teaching Palestine toolkit,” an 18-page manual that aims to promote Palestine dialogue among teaching assistants at York University, released in January.
The document was developed by the Palestinian Solidarity Working Group, a group affiliated with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3903, which represents contract faculty and teaching assistants at York. The manual states that the Toronto university is complicit in genocide by allowing Jewish groups, such as Hillel, to operate on campus.
“The toolkit basically told everybody, regardless of what discipline they teach, that they should be teaching Palestine in their courses, which is obviously problematic,” the instructor said.
“As an educator, I don’t think my own personal opinion, regardless of what I’m teaching, is relevant.”
Faculty engagement with anti-Israel rhetoric extends beyond encampments and lecture halls, however. In many cases, abuse of podium cases can appear online.
Faculty influence
Sarah Gould, a former anthropology instructor at University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus and Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., says there’s a problematic overlap between social media and the authority of teaching.
“These professors are in these positions of power and they have these open social media profiles. There have been a few instances of really intense anti-Israel, and really antisemitic posts that students see,” she told The CJN.
Gould says she was recently contacted by a former student at Trent, who told her about a professor named Paul Manning, in the anthropology department. “His social media is insane. It’s so terrible that Jewish students feel like they can’t go to his classes anymore.”
Gould says these posts include messages about how Zionists are Nazis, praise of the Palestinian “resistance” and calls to “punch people who support Israel in the face.” In screenshots seen by The CJN, Manning posted a photo of someone wearing a shirt that says “If you have not been called antisemitic, you are not working hard enough on justice for Palestine.”
The CJN emailed Manning for comment, but he did not reply.
Shortly after discovering Manning’s social media account, Gould wrote a confidential letter to the dean of humanities and social sciences at Trent, which she sent to The CJN.
“At a point when Canada’s Jewish community is under siege, antisemitism is on the rise and there have been protests on university campuses that call for violence against Jewish people, this kind of public behaviour from a university professor on campus and on public social media is unacceptable,” a section of the letter reads.
The dean, Mark Skinner, wrote back to her, saying that the situation will be evaluated, also citing counselling resources that are available to students. “Thank you for reaching out about your important concern,” Skinner wrote in an email reply. “We will look into this following our procedures.”
“Never heard from him again,” Gould said.
Behaviour such as this is no anomaly. Students at multiple universities told The CJN that faculty members are actively posting anti-Israel content online over the last year.
In a screengrab obtained by the CJN, one professor at Concordia, for instance, reposted a social media statement which denied Hamas raped Israeli women on Oct. 7.
A sociology professor at Brock University published a series of posts on a personal blog titled “The Professor’s Corner,” in which he equates Nazism with Zionism.
In both of those cases, these professors are all still employed at their universities, according to faculty pages on each school’s website.
Such leniency doesn’t always extend to professors who express anti-Hamas views.
Paul Finlayson, a business instructor at the University of Guelph-Humber in the Toronto area, was suspended from teaching at the university in November 2023, after he wrote a post on LinkedIn denouncing Hamas’s murder of Israelis on Oct. 7. A fellow faculty member at Guelph-Humber helped file a complaint to Guelph-Humber’s administration, saying Finlayson’s words “dehumanized Palestinians” and made students feel unsafe.
In an interview on The CJN Daily podcast, Finlayson, who isn’t Jewish, said there is often pressure to remain silent on the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I just utterly reject that (pressure) because what happens then is that people, the tyrants, the bullies, the squeaky wheels, they just get to dominate the whole narrative,” he said, in April 2024.
Dominating the narrative is something Gould says applies to her fellow instructors, particularly when it comes to faculty members bending scholarly discourse to align with anti-Israel sentiment.
“There’s a really repetitive adoption of terms like genocide and apartheid and ethnic cleansing that, even though we’re in anthropology—we study this stuff and it doesn’t correlate with our scholarly definitions of these terms—a lot of the professors have adopted these terms, seemingly uncritically or politically,” she explained.
“That in itself is an inappropriate use of their position that is swaying students.”
Course content manipulation
Aside from using class time to make political statements, or amplifying their personal positions on social media, numerous faculty members at Canadian universities are also changing course curricula to include anti-Israel content. This is according to students at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), University of Guelph, University of British Columbia (UBC) and Wilfrid Laurier University, whom The CJN has interviewed.
At Laurier, during the first week of classes in September, a student, who also chose to remain anonymous, reported that his instructor modified the course syllabus for a course called Exploring Cultural Studies.
In a note sent to students, this instructor blamed the death toll in Gaza on “Israel’s genocidal policies and Israeli Occupation Forces indiscriminate scorched earth military operations.”
The CJN reached out to Laurier’s Faculty Association for comment on this, but received no reply.
Shortly after Oct. 7, a webinar on gender-based violence was held at Guelph University. According to a student who attended, who chose to remain anonymous, two faculty members said that Israel is a “settler colonial country that is responsible for the violence that Palestinian men inflict on Palestinian women because they learned it from the imposed colonial values of Israel.”
This student reported the incident to the Hillel on her campus.
Reporting, however, has its limitations.
Limits and concerns
Students are concerned that launching complaints with the university will negatively impact either their grades or their future graduate program prospects, explained Jay Solomon, the chief advancement officer of Hillel Ontario.
Solomon says Hillel staff have helped students draft letters, set up meetings with professors, and have facilitated conversations with university leadership, but that “students really need to be the ones to submit the official complaint.”
He agrees that the challenge is daunting for students to tackle, particularly when each university has different classroom policies and procedures.
“You might need to (submit) a report to the dean of a faculty, for example, while at other universities you might need to make a report to the chair of a particular department. You might need to make a report to the human rights and equity office,” he explained.
A major problem often comes down to lack of anonymity. When there are few Jewish students in a classroom, it becomes difficult for their identities to be concealed while administrations carry out investigations.
Free speech and academic freedom
Another obstacle stopping university administrations from reprimanding professors who abuse their positions of authority is the umbrella of free speech and academic freedom.
The 2024 Canadian Universities Antisemitism Report, developed by the Abraham Global Peace Initiative (AGPI), an advocacy organization that aims to combat antisemitism, highlights how protections granted to professors can be easily exploited.
“While these principles (free speech and academic freedom) are vital to fostering a robust intellectual environment, there have been instances where the line between scholarly discourse and promoting antisemitic ideologies becomes blurred,” reads the report, which was released in December 2023.
The AGPI details how misinformation campaigns, many of which are facilitated by faculty members, are fuelling oversimplifications of the conflict.
These oversimplifications include false narratives, such as portraying Hamas as “freedom fighters,” or the mischaracterization of Jews as “white colonialists” and “apartheid oppressors.”
The report warns that faculty failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and ideologies of demonization is derailing productive dialogue about the Middle Eastern conflict and putting a target on Jewish students.
Occasionally internal investigations carried out by administrations do lead to consequences, despite faculty associations pushing back.
Natalie Knight, an English instructor at Langara College, in Vancouver, was placed on leave after she appeared in an online video, where she describes the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 as an “amazing” and “brilliant, offensive” during a pro-Palestine rally in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery on Oct. 28.
After the school completed an internal investigation, the college announced that Knight’s comments “were not clearly outside the bounds of protected expression.”
The Vancouver college also condemned Knight’s remarks that glorified violence against Israelis, saying it does not represent the views of the school.
Knight was reinstated by the college the following semester, but cautioned that future remarks “could not reasonably be interpreted as celebrating violence against civilians.” She was dismissed after she attended a rally on Jan. 23.
Although Langara did not mention Knight specifically in a Jan. 26 statement, the college said that a faculty member “proceeded to engage in activities contrary to the expectations laid out by the college and as a result this employee is no longer an employee.”
The Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia and the Langara Faculty Association issued a statement on Jan. 26, saying that Knight’s dismissal was a violation of academic freedom.
“While we understand that some members of the community may be offended and distressed by the remarks made at these demonstrations, the remarks, as evidenced by Langara’s own report, are clearly protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and do not constitute hate speech. It is shameful that a post-secondary institution would attempt to police protected speech under external pressure instead of supporting academic freedom and freedom of expression,” the faculty association said.
Speaking up
Reflecting on that psychology seminar, almost a year later, Zaidener says universities need stricter guidelines for what crosses the line of free speech in classrooms.
“Free speech is being weaponized on campuses and it’s going unchecked, leaving students exposed to harmful rhetoric,” he said.
He added that there should be clear repercussions for faculty members that abuse their positions of authority.
To Zaidener’s knowledge, Kivell never faced any official consequences for offering students a grade bump to attend a pro-Palestine rally.
As antisemitism spreads to universities across Canada and beyond, Zaidener says now is the time for students to make their voices heard.
“Although it may be hard to speak up, this cannot continue,” he added, referring to the many other incidents of abuse of podium infractions throughout the country.
“When a professor crosses a line, university administrations need to listen.”
