The McGill administration’s recent effort to obstruct the Law Students’ Association’s (LSA) referendum epitomizes its blatant disrespect for student expression and democracy. From March 19–21, students in the Faculty of Law voted in favour of a referendum endorsing the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The referendum, introduced by the LSA, passed with 57.3 per cent support and a 67.3 per cent voter turnout. The referendum called for a formal boycott of all exchange and collaborative partnerships with Israeli academic institutions, collaboration with the PACBI Committee, and academic initiatives promoting solidarity with Palestinian scholars.
However, ten minutes before the ballots opened, then-interim (since declared full) Dean of Law Tina Piper and McGill Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic) Angela Campbell sent a joint letter to all law students and professors dissuading the referendum’s passage, dangerously labelling it as discriminatory toward Jewish students and in breach of the LSA-McGill Memorandum of Agreement (MoA). Piper and Campbell’s intervention is a reprehensible violation of McGill students’ right to free and fair democracy, with administrators using disinformation and fearmongering as tools to obstruct student expression.
The referendum’s focus on institutions is not incidental, as Israeli universities are not merely neutral sites of learning, but active participants in the production of legal, military, and ideological frameworks that shield state violence from accountability. By conflating a boycott of Israeli institutions with antisemitism, McGill has diluted the impact of a word representative of horrifying hatred and violence. Administrators must confront antisemitism on campus as a pressing issue, not weaponize anti-Jewish violence to shield their suppression of student democracy and obscure the political and legal role of academic institutions in Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The LSA referendum is explicitly framed around institutional relationships, not individuals. It calls for the severance of academic partnerships and in no way targets individuals on the basis of Israeli ethnicity, nationality, or background. The institutions are not being singled out arbitrarily by the LSA; Israeli universities have played a legal and political role in helping justify, sanitize, and legitimize the occupation and genocide in Gaza. Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Institute for National Security Studies, for instance, brings together academic experts and senior security personnel to produce legal and policy guidance for the Israeli state and military. A referendum that targets institutional partnerships is not antisemitic; insisting otherwise irresponsibly collapses political critique into bigotry and shields complicit institutions from accountability.
In response to the referendum, Jonathan Amiel, Faculty of Law Advisory Board Chair, has resigned and withdrawn financial support for the university. In his resignation letter, he warned that if McGill failed to respond, the university would suffer reputational damage, weakened recruitment, lower employer confidence, declining alumni engagement, and donor erosion. His stance has framed a democratically-adopted student referendum as a threat to the faculty’s financial stability and institutional standing, presenting the issue as a crisis requiring administrative intervention and containment.
McGill’s response reveals an emerging pattern of administrators obstructing and delegitimizing resolutions reached through democratic channels. In April 2025, Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) members voted to ratify the Policy Against Genocide in Palestine with a 71.1 per cent majority. In response, McGill threatened to terminate its MoA with SSMU, which would have been detrimental to the Society’s ability to support student groups on campus. Similarly, students passed divestment policies through the SSMU in 2022, and 2023, both of which were blocked by the administration. McGill has repeatedly characterized student mobilization as violating its policies—but when students attempt to use existing democratic structures to advance their goals, the university is quick to bulldoze their efforts. It seems that there is no palatable form of activism to McGill, so long as it objects to their complicity in genocide.
By sending alarmist memos that claim to speak for all Jewish students, the university both misrepresents the politically diverse communities it claims to protect and weaponizes grounded fears of rising antisemitism to delegitimize student democracy. McGill must cease its attempts to frame the referendum as discriminatory, stop using administrative power and MoA threats to obstruct its implementation, and acknowledge that a boycott of Israeli institutions is not, by default, a danger, but a crucial form of political expression.