In a landslide vote, McGill University professors and librarians endorse the academic and cultural boycott of Israel

 

In a 114-8 vote, the McGill Association of University Teachers endorsed the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The win came after years of organizing, demonstrating the collective power of professors, librarians, and students against genocide.

On October 10, 2025, the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT) succeeded in passing a resolution at a special general meeting endorsing the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The resolution calls for the association to “take all necessary steps to implement the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, while ensuring that the boycott applies to institutional partnerships and agreements, not individual Israeli academics.”

This principled stance taken by full-time professors and librarians is a major victory at a university where such an action was thought to be impossible until recently. An article in the student-run McGill Tribune the day after the vote characterized this vote as “historic,” another calls it unprecedented. With this huge victory, the faculty association joins at least 20 other such associations in Canada, as well as others across North America and the world. As a recent article in the Guardian points out, “boycotting Israel has gone mainstream.”

This endorsement by a large group of professors and librarians across the university demonstrates that solidarity with Palestine cannot be silenced. It may be difficult to hear our unwavering voices – especially in an atmosphere of repression well-documented by the report “Palestine on Campus,” but we keep pushing ahead and it only gets louder.

Conventional wisdom held that it would be impossible for professors to endorse the academic boycott at McGill, an institution that has proudly accepted donations from prominent Zionist donors who actively support the state of Israel. One example is the well-known Quebecois donor, Sylvan Adams, a self-proclaimed “ambassador of Israel” in Canada. With the world increasingly cutting ties with the state of Israel and implementing boycotts, McGill doubled down and continued to build a sports centre in Sylvan Adams’ name, while devoting a section of the centre’s website to his biography, giving him unusual attention in a university context, especially at McGill. The so-called, “McGill University -Tel Aviv University Collaborative Sport Science Grants” are advertised on the centre’s website, exemplifying the type of activities tied to the state of Israel that the boycott aims to stop. 

It is in this context of complicity, marked by retaining as well as establishing new exchange programs during this period, that professors accelerated their efforts to endorse the boycott.  (more...)

In a landslide vote, McGill University professors and librarians endorse the academic and cultural boycott of Israel