McGill Faculty Wins Unprecedented Vote to Boycott Israeli Institutions
Sid Shniad
The Rover October 17, 2025
McGill Faculty Wins Unprecedented Vote to Boycott Israeli Institutions
Professors and librarians at McGill join students and other universities in Canada to call the university administration to cut ties with Israeli academic and cultural institutions.
By Neha Chollangi
McGill University’s biggest teachers’ association is endorsing a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions.
Last Friday, over 100 members of the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) showed up at a special meeting, met quorum, and overwhelmingly voted in favour of the boycott.
A number of professors and librarians at the meeting emphasized that the boycott is not an individual one but rather a cultural and academic one that asks McGill to cut ties with Israeli Universities. Twelve members from MAUT submitted this as a resolution to the association a few weeks ago. Michelle Hartman, a member of the MAUT and a professor at the university, said she has not seen anything like this happen in her 20 years at McGill.
“The academic and cultural boycott is about pressuring Israeli institutions to pressure their own state. We won’t cooperate with those institutions until those institutions stand up and stop themselves collaborating and being complicit with the genocide and with the occupation,” said Hartman, adding that she sees “a rising interest in the professorial core in engaging more as a collective body and the issues that are most important in the world.”
During the special meeting, a few faculty members who didn’t support the resolution stormed out of the room, shouting, “We are leaving so that you don’t have a quorum,” according to Hartman.
Eight people voted no, and 104 voted yes.
Daniel Schwartz, a professor who presented to the association before the vote, said that the faculty is mirroring the students’ activism and similar resolutions over the last two years.
“The faculty is listening to those concerns and is attempting to address them through their own institutions…working together and working in parallel is the best way to finally get McGill to divest from Israeli universities that are complicit and engaged in apartheid,” he said.
Students protesting after the McGill encampment in solidarity with Palestine was torn down by a private security force hired by McGill University in July 2024. PHOTO: William WilsonFounded in 1951, MAUT has a long history of activism. In 1985, the association joined the campus mobilization against South African apartheid, ultimately forcing the university to divest $45 million from companies doing business with the apartheid regime.
McGill is linked to Israeli universities such as Tel Aviv University and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology through student exchange programs, as well as the more recent Sylvan Adams Sports Sciences Institute, which was funded by the Israeli-Canadian businessman Sylvan Adams in partnership with Tel Aviv University.
In an interview with i24 News last year, Adams admitted to providing weaponry, ammunition, and bulletproof vests to reservist units in the Israeli Defense Forces. He also said on the Canadian Jewish News podcast that he used his status as one of the university’s biggest donors to pressure McGill President Deep Saini to crack down on pro-Gaza encampments last year.
Hartman said that she believes McGill should suspend these exchange programs and distance itself from Israeli Universities until Israel fully complies with international law.
Schwartz, who grew up in a Zionist community, explains that he often witnessed in those spaces how liberal values were invoked to legitimize apartheid. In response to the MAUT winning the vote, some early reactions online already label the move as anti-semitic and discriminatory towards Israel. Schwartz argues that it’s important to see the larger role that universities play in international politics.
“Universities actually participate in an apartheid system; we’re not something apart (from it) where we just philosophize and talk about things; we are actually engaged in the politics and economics of our various societies.”
For instance, Tel Aviv University houses the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which is meant to be an independent think tank, but has on several occasions published reports that parrot the Israeli state propaganda, specifically on Hamas, and deflected Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
In an interview with the Jewish Current, Maya Wind, who has written extensively about how universities play a role in bolstering state propaganda, said that “the INSS and other such centers at Israeli universities work on behalf of the Israeli state to counter international grassroots organizing for Palestinian rights and enable Israel to violate international law with impunity.”
In a press release, the Union of Professors and Employees at Birzeit University in Palestine responded to the MAUT’s vote, celebrating the win and thanking the association for its support. The union release reads, “While we have long since learned to study on the rubble of our universities and give underground classes, we take inspiration and hope from the global solidarity action of faculty and students that challenge the complicity of their institutions.”
In the days leading up to the vote, as Hartman was preparing her notes and mobilizing faculty members, her mind kept going to her colleagues in Palestine. Every university in Gaza has been bombed, while students and professors have been killed. She thought about professors who no longer had an office, their books, notes, or cards from students. She thought about how many of them now live in tents, and how there are no universities left in Gaza.
“People often say, ‘There are so many other horrible things happening in the world. And yes, we would want to stop those, too,” said Hartman. “But we don’t see, for example, McGill deeply involved with educational institutions in Sudan or in Congo. We are deeply embedded within Israeli academic and cultural institutions. In fact, since the genocide started, McGill has strengthened those ties, rather than weakening them.”
The next step for the MAUT is to build momentum around this victory and seek ways to hold the university administration accountable, pushing them to implement the resolutions that a majority of students and now faculty agree on.
As more of the university’s unions and associations take similar stances to boycott Israeli institutions, Schwartz said that, “this will hopefully show that it is only the McGill administration that is opposing this resolution.”