I present this list of demands, coming from students in one Canadian university, without comment, but readers are welcome to weigh in below. Click on the screenshot (taken from The Coast Halifax) to go to the article, and I’ll just re-post what the students are demanding at one school.
The list of demands below comes from students at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (usually called NSCAD University), but the text gives shorter lists from two other universities.
Excerpt indented:
On Friday, May 10, student groups from four Halifax universities–NSCAD, Dal, King’s and SMU–formed a shared group online, called Students for the Liberation of Palestine – Kjipuktuk/Halifax. In a post, they call on their universities “to immediately disclose and divest from any investments that sustain settler-colonial projects, including the Zionist state known as Israel.”
As of May 12, three of these schools have issued specific demands of their own university through specific student groups. At NSCAD, the student union–SUNSCAD–and the Student Action Group released a series of 12 demands to their university, as follows:
We demand:
- Public disclosure of the entirety of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University investment portfolio.
- Immediate divestment from all weapons manufacturing, military supplying, and companies operating in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories.
- In response to emails sent from Dr. Shannon regarding the rights and responsibilities for students and faculty to speak truth to power, and exercise their academic freedom: an apology from, and the resignation of, the President of NSCAD University, Dr. Peggy Shannon.
- Anti-oppression training for ALL faculty and administration at NSCAD, focusing particularly on Queerness, indigeneity, and anticolonialism.
- Free tuition for all students.
- Free housing for all students.
- The implementation of a Palestinian Art History course.
- A scholarship offering free tuition and housing for one student currently living in Palestine.
- That the NSCAD Board of Governors be made up entirely of students, faculty, and staff, with at least 50% +1 seat on the Board being held by students.
- That NSCAD university moves all its banking to a credit union.
- The immediate breaking of the lease of NSCAD with the Port Authority, regarding NSCAD’s Port campus, and a commitment of no financial dealings with the Port Authority going forward.
- That all funds divested through the process of realizing the above demands be reinvested in the rebuilding of universities from the Gaza Strip that have been destroyed.
h/t: Luana
12. Free pony for all students.
Thank you for the laugh. You won the best comment of the day award.
And make them pay full livery for its keep
LOL!
I want a pony!
It better a magic f*ckin’ pony too…..
“7. The implementation of a Palestinian Art History course.”
To include illustrations and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad!
+1 for that Inclusive idea
My favorites are the free tuition and the formation of a campus soviet, controlled by students and replacing the Board of Governors.
In general, I think all “demands” should be categorically rejected until submitted in a respectful way.
Mine is “free housing “ tell that to the tent dwellers of Halifax Nova Scotia.
It is truly astounding that these young, ignorant, entitled, professional complainers think that they are in any position to “demand” anything of any university. If they don’t like ‘em, don’t attend!
Precisely!!
“Students have a right to make requests. They have no right to make demands. Until the University receives a list of requests, no attention will be paid to student protesters.”
Ah, the power of a well-chosen word. How would students react? Would any college dean or president make such a statement?
I can take an angle on “Queerness” :
“Queerness” is fundamentally a Gnostic Theosophy extended from where Simone DeBeauvoir ended her feminism through Foucault who injected it with ideological steroids. Queer is a verb – it is by definition political activism. Etc. etc..
I could note the concern for the indigenous is simply a Gnostic emotional manipulation according to race Marxism formula.
In this context, there are some Marxists want power and control and use people that are – perhaps a different way to put it : out of the ordinary. The Marxists don’t give a S about anything else, least of all, humanity. Everyone gets used for the Revolution.
God it takes so long to write out.
I have to laugh at the breathtaking cluelessness of these Demands.
Which is the most ridiculous? Honestly, its hard to say but my pick would be the Demand that more than half of the friggin’ Board of Governors be Art College students. I think B of G members tend to established leaders in the community. You know, people who have actually done something and have a proven track record of managing huge financial and social responsibilities. Meanwhile these students probably could not work an Excel spreadsheet.
It is significant that these are “arts” students, practising the “black arts” perhaps but this is probably beyond their capability? What a bunch of self opinionated oxygen stealers. Just what Nova Scotia desperately needs, sarcasm in case you missed it.
There’s no free lunch.
Oh. They forgot to list that item. They’ll have to fund lunch.
Anyway ……”Free everything elae!”
I think public disclosure of public universities’ investment portfolios is an acceptable demand. It should be standard practice.
The students will likely be disappointed to find out that it’s all in index funds and blue-chip stocks.
LOL (Yes, I’m old fashioned)
You know, if they don’t want a good education (and those demands would leave a laughable college), perhaps they should get out of the way and let those who might appreciate it have a go?
Ha ha, very satirical! It’s such fun, concocting an absurd and exaggerated parody of self-important student posturing!
It was a parody, wasn’t it? (/s)
Poor benighted little Nova Scotia. Encampments are likely to come next.
Maybe here is a reasonable time* to point out that encampments, often barricaded and manned by thugs restricting passage to people of the correct ideological purity, have been established by pro-Hamas anti-Zionist activists at several of the quality Canadian universities, including McGill (the first, 2 May), University of Toronto, McMaster University, University of Ottawa, University of British Columbia, and others. (Universities in Canada, despite nearly all being substantially publicly funded and created by Acts of the provincial legislatures, are private property, owned in trust by their Boards of Governors or similarly named governance structures.) The non-negotiable demands of the organizers are less baroque than those of the Nova Scotia students but do include divestment from Israel and the severing of academic ties with Israeli universities. All enjoy substantial publicly voiced support from faculty with nostalgic, if second-hand, invocations of the Vietnam War (which Canadian universities largely missed out on.) The university admins. seem effeminately indulgent — free speech and all that and it’s not their personal property of course — but I think they are starting to get worried that the encampers might never leave. The universities know that if they don’t give in — none have — they are powerless to deal with escalations such as the barricading of entrances to the University grounds or buildings unless the police have a change of heart. There is also nothing to stop groups unrelated to the University from establishing sympathy blockades of infrastructure elsewhere off campus, which has become a feature of dissent in Canada which we are powerless to deal with except by paying the demanded cash for the “right” to use “stolen” land. This is one reason why the police won’t act. They are afraid of being blamed for retaliatory blockades of highways and railway lines which would totally screw up the summer.
So far only one, at University of Calgary, has been dismantled by municipal police. At all others, the municipal police have not seen fit to get involved and the campus cops — Special Constables we call them — do not seem to have the numbers or training to do the job themselves, especially as the numbers of tents and sophistication of barricades have grown through the month, and as a rougher outside element has infiltrated the encampments now that classes and exams have finished. (Foreign visa students have nowhere else to go home to and can’t work legally, so they are sticking around. Our land is being held to ransom by foreigners.)
———————–
* McGill was just today denied an injunction in a Québec Court which would have obligated (in theory but not in practice) the Montréal Police to enforce McGill’s property rights and clear the encampment. (The Court recognized the encampment as illegal but seemed to feel that McGill has not suffered enough yet. It noted with approval that McGill has curtailed its graduation exercises to accommodate the trespassers.)
Leslie your essay helped me understand why some want colleges and universities to help students repay their student loans. I thought it a silly idea. But when you are as guilty of educational malpractice as some American and Canadian universities seem to be, acting as factories turning out social justice lemmings instead of adults who can think and act independently, perhaps they should pitch in.
Leslie, I live in Montreal and I get my news about the encampment at McGill University from a local newspaper.
The situation at McGill seems to be this: the university leadership wants the encampment gone, but has not, so far, asked the Montreal police to remove it. Instead it has petitioned a court to decide that the encampment should be removed. As you note, the court rejected this petition today.
So the key point here is that the McGill leadership has NOT asked the Montreal police to come to its campus to remove the camp, even though, presumably, the camp violates university regulations (namely the regulations on time, place, and manner of free speech and free assembly).
The protestors are camping on a space where the university usually holds its graduation ceremony (McGill’s campus is small since the university is smack in downtown Montreal). My local newspaper yesterday reported that McGill has changed the place of this year’s graduation ceremony – at a cost of 700,000 Canadian dollar – to accommodate the protestors.
The occupation is now in week 3 and the McGill leadership has so far been unwilling to ask the Montreal police to come and remove this illegal occupation.
(The Quebec prime minister has said in public that the encampment should be removed. Quebec has a center-right government.)
Leslie, I don’t no what you are talking about in this passage:
I believe that such “sympathy blockades of infrastructure elsewhere off campus” would be illegal and the police would be promptly called to quickly remove them.
I think that Leslie is discretely referring to “indigenous “ sympathisers who take advantage of any situation that can be used to continue their policy of claiming that all of Canada was “stolen” from them and this gives them rights, or so they mistakenly think, to blockade anywhere that fits the bill. The existing Trudeau government seems powerless in all matters of difficulty where indigenous groups are concerned unless it is them falsely claiming colonialism has ruined their existence particularly where white people stand accused then they fall over backwards to support the troublemakers even supporting false claims of indigenous children murdered in schools.
It is my understanding that McGill had informal discussions with the Montreal police shortly after the encampment went up and the police had indicated they did not see a reason for them to interfere with a protest at that time. It is also my understanding that nothing would change if the university made a formal public request as the university cannot direct the police in their enforcement of the law, nor can the Premier of Quebec. The university doesn’t want to make a request of the police that it knows will be denied. The police can and will respond to enforce any laws at their discretion. Their response might be to arrest any individual lawbreakers and leave the encampment intact and unmolested, unless the other denizens attempted to resist the police in their attempt to make arrests and a riot ensued.
That’s why the request for the injunction was important: the police are required to enforce whatever the Court orders (but often don’t if they are afraid of the particular group protesting.)
You are unfortunately quite mistaken that police would promptly remove any illegal sympathy blockades that popped up elsewhere. The recent history in Canada is that they generally do not.
Retired litigation lawyer Andrew Roman has a nice exposition on the lacunae in Canadian law governing protests that obstruct the enjoyment of private or public property.
https://andrewromanviews.blog/2024/04/01/canada-needs-laws-governing-protests/
“Universities in Canada, despite nearly all being substantially publicly funded and created by Acts of the provincial legislatures, are private property, owned in trust by their Boards of Governors or similarly named governance structures.”
Taxpayer funded, government charter, yet conceptualized as “private property?”
Howzatagin’?
TL;DR: If the land and buildings of a university were truly public property, the University would not be able to lock its doors at night or prevent “the people” from driving away with its vehicles.
All land in Canada, as in the other countries who have the King as head of state, is the private property of King Charles III who inherited it from his mother, Elizabeth II, who inherited it down the line from George III who acquired it by right of conquest from the King of France in 1763. This ultimate right of ownership, called sovereignty, is today vested in the Canadian Crown, i.e., the Canadian State. What private landowners get with their deeds is an interest in an estate. Even with the mortgage to the bank paid off, we don’t own our land outright. The King does. Anyone who doubts this just needs to stop paying his property taxes to the municipality (a creature of the State) and see what happens. The municipality and other levels of government also tell us what we can and can’t do with “our” property, including forcing us to sell it to them if it wants to use it for some higher purpose.
There is no truly “public” property in Canada, land like a Commons owned by all the people collectively where anyone can graze his cows as he pleases. The street outside my house beyond the property line may be called “the public highway” but it is owned by the Corporation of the City of Hamilton who sets rules about parking on it. Ditto municipal parks and the like. What Americans think of as “public land” is, in Canada, just the King’s Crown Land outside an incorporated municipality that has not been granted by deed to some private interest-holder. The vast reaches of our unsettled wilderness in our nearly empty country are Crown land.
At some points in Canada’s past, —the University of Toronto and some others predate Confederation—voluntary bodies, often churches, acquired land grants from the Crown to found centres of higher learning. As the Canadian State extended its reach into previously private domains of life, using its voter-driven power to tax and spend, the Government came to influence the guiding principles of the universities. It passed enabling legislation under which it, for example, appoints the Boards of these non-profit corporations and, of course, controls the purse strings. But the assets themselves remain private property, albeit owned by the Corporations in trust to the people of the province. (Our hospitals are owned the same way.)
I had no idea!
Is there general ‘okayness’ with this setup? Do most Canadians disdain the USA modality of ownership by …… owners……, and government exists to protect the property rights of citizens?
You raise a very good point, John. I don’t know enough about land ownership and property rights in the United States to comment on differences. I don’t want to over-comment here, either. Would be a great topic to discuss over drinks!
I’m grateful to see that your list of encamped universities doesn’t include my sleepy suburban engaged university (currently ranked in the top 300 in the Times Higher Ed 2024 rankings – woo hoo). Nice and quiet here. All our activist students seem to have, um, decamped to UBC where all the cool kids are. It’s a shame because our central academic quadrangle has lots to offer encampers: defendable high ground; water; a treed patch for latrines; and good sightlines for TV news cameras when the chanting and antisemitism really gets going.
On the other hand, my recollection is that your central campus resembles the architecture of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacan, rather than the old-fashioned
greensward academic style. Maybe that is why the protest encampers head west to UBC.
Ha yes maybe. IDK about that architectural resemblance to Teotihuacan. Might be intentional? One would have to ask Arthur Erickson.
Thanks for posting that, I needed a good laugh. Gotta admire their audacity.
13. That Yahya Sinwar be awarded Canadian citizenship and be named University President*
*posthumously, if necessary
Demands?
😂🤣😅😂🤣😅😂🤣😅😂🤣😅😂🤣😅😂🤣
I assume that that these are publicly funded universities, or even if not, that they have a fixed operating budget each year. My proposal: agree to all of their demands and walk away.
Speaking of indigeneity and anticolonialism, shouldn’t those universities also divest from any investments that sustain the settler-colonial project known as “Canada”?
This was funny. But I suspect the demand for free tuition came out of the realization that a degree in Art & Design qualifies one to be a barista and not much more. Peddling worthless degrees to entitled morons should be criminal. No sympathy here for NCSAD
I mean, as long as you’re making demands, why mess around?
Isn’t Canada itself a colonial-settler project?
Deftly addressed by these students by describing their chapter of Hamas as “Students for the Liberation of Palestine – Kjipuktuk.Halifax.” Kjipuktuk being the currently agreed name for Halifax in Mi’kmaw. It was Chebucto when I did my citizenship, but perhaps Kjipuktuk is pronounced Chebucto? Or maybe the evil priests have bothered to write a new syllabic for Mi’kmaw?
Frankly, more concerning is that the only two synagogues in mainland Nova Scotia (there is one in Cape Breton, too) are on Oxford Street, which borders the vast Dalhousie/St Mary’s/King’s campus. I hope they suffer nothing worse than some graffiti!
These protestors care a LOT about indigeneity—just not Jewish indigeneity. They perform land acknowledgement ceremonies as part of their morning routine before heading out for a long day of protesting in support of an organization whose mission is to extinguish Jews from Israel. What a world!
The thing that strikes me the most in reading this list of demands is just how foolish these kids really are. The Palestinian protests are one thing but when you see the long list of demands, it’s even more evident just how incredibly naive they really are.
We have strict statutes and most biting laws.
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,
Which for this nineteen years we have let slip;
Even like an o’ergrown lion in a cave,
That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,
Only to stick it in their children’s sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
Becomes more mock’d than fear’d; so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;
And liberty plucks justice by the nose;
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum.
another pro-Hamas article full of lies in the NYT about the just and measured actions of the settlers who defend their rights on the West Bank. Appalling.
Do they not see that eight is redundant to five and six?
Michael Lind explains what the “student protest demands” ritual really amounts to at: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/left-campus-protest-scam . Excerpt: ” The Rutgers administration has also agreed to consider divestment from Israel and—you saw it coming, didn’t you?—agreed to “develop anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism training for all administrators and staff.” All that training means more work and money for existing left-wing faculty and perhaps the hiring of additional left-wing bureaucrats or nice paychecks for external consultants who will develop expertise in anti-Arabophobia training overnight.”
13. The University shall publicly condemn JK Rowling.
14. Grilled cheese will be on the dining hall menu daily. Not just Tuesday and Thursday.
15. The university shall explain to Samantha that I’m a hero and should go on at least two dates with me.
16. The tiki torches that SJP got from the Proud Boys came with a gift receipt and we need the use of the campus shuttle to take the unused ones to Home Depot next month.