On Sept. 29, I had barely joined the cheers celebrating the passing of the Motion to Strike for Divestment from Genocide through the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) General Assembly when SSMU Chair’s harsh voice cut through the crowd: “Decorum, decorum!”
The call for order echoed a contradiction at the heart of McGill and SSMU’s Sept. 4 joint statement, announcing the reinstatement of the two groups’ Memorandum of Agreement (MoA), which McGill attempted to terminate following a three-day strike for Palestine the previous spring. They proclaimed a “commitment to uphold students’ rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” before issuing an “unequivocal condemnation” of any protest involving disruption of “teaching, learning, research, and other core academic activities.”
The insistence upon ‘decorum’ wasn’t just about noise; it was a command that each expression of collective power—or even shared exultation—remain palatable to those who hold authority over us. Therein lies McGill and SSMU’s shared message: Activism is tolerable, but only if it’s placid, convenient, and ignoreable. It is duplicitous to champion free expression and decry disruption in the same breath. One does not exist without the other, at McGill or anywhere else.
The university’s rhetoric—whether in statements, legal filings, or codes of conduct that further criminalize student activism—imposes an infantile vision of what protest is meant to accomplish. Effective protest has never been about making people comfortable or ensuring that business continues as usual. And no permitted protest or political plea will satisfy McGill when the quintessence of our demands lay bare the complicity behind the ‘core academic activities’ our university aims to shield from scrutiny.
Our calls to action strike at the very core of McGill’s moral authority. Severing research partnerships with Tel Aviv University—an institution that developed the Dahiya doctrine justifying disproportionate military force against civilians. This includes ending the Sports Adams Science Institute’s partnership, financed largely by self-declared ‘Israel ambassador’ Sylvan Adams, who has openly encouraged more murders of Palestinians and called for McGill to expel students opposing genocide. Terminating study abroad programs at Hebrew University—a centre for weapons research and military technology development that normalizes illegal occupation. Divesting from weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Thales—investments McGill capitalizes upon with our student tuitions through fund managers. These demands expose the university’s willing entanglement with violence. The truth is that no form of protest will make the administration comfortable with that reckoning, no matter how prettily it is packaged, orderly it is arranged, or quietly it is laid out.
This is the confine of moderation that McGill wishes us to incarcerate ourselves within, implying that some imaginary middle ground exists where we can politely and quietly ask McGill to extract itself from complicity in genocide, and they’ll simply agree. Moderation serves to prolong inaction. What compels change is a visionary, unyielding alternative.
While administrators would like to convince our community that disruptive protests only serve unproductively to polarize, McGill’s own history contradicts this. In 1985, student activists forged a pathway for McGill to become the first Canadian university to fully divest from apartheid South Africa, after years of sustained and contentious protest. Today, McGill proudly references this pioneering moment, while effacing the charges and criminalization students endured in forcing this change—celebrating the result while erasing the resistance.
Lost in McGill’s condemnation of protests is the democratic deficit that necessitates disruptive action in the first place. Students passed divestment policies through the SSMU in 2022, 2023, and 2025 with over 70 per cent majorities—each blocked by the administration. They organized hunger strikes and alternative campus tours. They established a 75-day encampment; McGill responded with aggressive dismantlement. Following a three-day student strike last spring, McGill sought out court injunctions banning protests within five metres of buildings that criminalized “excessive noise.” When activism is suppressed, disruption becomes an increasingly necessary tool for democratic participation, stripping away what institutional routine normally obscures.
The sanitized version of campus life McGill seeks to maintain—where learning occurs in pristine isolation from the moral urgencies of our time—represents a bleak imagination of education’s transformative potential. Disruption is not an unfortunate side effect of protest that can be remedied by joint statements that celebrate expression while condemning its exercise; it is itself the mechanism through which change is wrested from power. And perhaps that’s the education McGill fears most: Its students discovering that power yields not to polite reason but to unflagging pressure, that institutions change not when persuaded but when the status quo becomes untenable. Disruptive action is necessary to shift reality when order is causing inordinate harm; maybe the most vital lesson we can learn on campus is that we have the capacity to rupture it.
