Students sit in for Palestine at University of Toronto

University of Toronto students occupy Simcoe Hall at the main campus in Downtown Toronto, as campus police walks the halls. Photo courtest of the occupying students

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See below for correspondence letters between the students and U of T president Meric Gertler

Transcript:

Desmond Cole: Yesterday afternoon, April 1, at around 12 noon, a group of concerned students at the University of Toronto occupied the first floor of Simcoe Hall, a building on the main U of T campus downtown in Toronto. The group is concerned about university investments that are tied to the Israeli military as it engages in its ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip. The group is also concerned with the school's academic partnerships with institutions in occupied Palestine and understanding the school's investments more broadly, to have the students occupying Simcoe Hall have joined me on the line there, Avi, and Parsa. Good afternoon to both of you.

0:44

Avi: Hello, thank you for taking the time.

0:46

Parsa: Thank you for having us.

0:47

DC: My pleasure. First of all, why did you choose this building to occupy why Simcoe Hall on the St. George campus downtown of U of T?

0:59

Avi: So Simcoe Hall has an extremely rich history as almost a symbolic epicenter of student protests and you will see. So in 1970s 1972, for example, a group of students occupied this very building where we are right now in opposition to a new policy against the library stacks that would have prevented undergraduates from unconditional access to the new library system at UC. They they made made it two days, we are on two days.

1:30

But at the same time, Simcoe Hall also has the Office of the President, Meric Gertler, who multiple student groups on this campus ranging from external student groups to our actual student unions have been trying to contact and get a public statement on the university's positions with regard to what is currently happening in Gaza, and have completely failed. So it's a dual symbolism there at once or dual purpose at once symbolic but also extremely material. We want President Gertler to look us in the eye and say 'no comment,' if that's where he believes.

2:04

DC: Now, I know you have had some interaction with the president Meric Gertler there and with some other administrators. I want to get to that in a moment. But first, I want to talk about the demands that have brought you to this situation, one at a time. So the first demand from the group is and I'm going to read them for everyone: Number one, divest the university's endowment pension fund and other financial holdings from all companies that provide Israel with military goods or services, which sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlement of the Palestinian territories, as well as the ongoing attacks on Gaza. Let's just begin there. What is it that you understand about the university's endowment, pension funds and other investments that is currently supporting the siege on Gaza?

2:58

Avi: Yeah, it's actually very interesting. So unlike many public institutions in Canada, usually has no obligations to its stakeholders, by which I mean students, faculty staff, can disclose the investments within its endowment or a pension fund. They do this with a very nifty maneuver of setting up the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation, which is a private entity that more in most cases cannot be fully requested because of its separation from the university. However, through private research, and just generally acquainting ourselves with the decades long campaign for BDS at this campus, and reading older organizers in our school, we've learned a lot from we were able to get access to

3:41

the emails mentioned in the 2014. brief bio put out by the website, you will see divest.ca which lists for examples, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Hewlett Packard as three companies that are confirmed that the university has sizable investments in through its endowment fund.

4:07

Again, you cannot really read our first demand for divestment without keeping in mind our third demand for financial accountability. With more than $7 billion in holdings and more than $3 billion in just the endowments, it is almost impossible for the University of Toronto to not be invested in companies listed in, for example, s&p 500. These are companies that are currently sustainably providing military goods and services to the Israeli army, which is clearly violating the recommendations laid out in the provisional measures by the ICJ. Yet we still cannot make specific claims in our first demand because we haven't had our current demand met. And that's just protecting particularly various.

4:49

DC: The third demand being publicly disclosed all investments including names of holdings and portfolio shares from endowments, the pension fund, short term working

4:59

capital assets and other financial holdings of the university. So I think that's clear.

5:06

And let's deal with the other demand, which is to terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that operate in the occupied Palestinian territories, or sustain the apartheid policies, occupation and illegal sediment of those territories. What Yes, you understand the university's relationships to be with academic institutions in occupied Palestine?

5:33

Avi: Yeah, so in this case, again,

5:36

I can make two cases that completely like paint a picture of what we're trying to get at with this. The first is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem currently operates at headquarters and Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, and has expanded its campus far across the internationally recognized Israeli partition of Jerusalem into the Palestinian side. Now, that on its face value is itself problematic and must be re evaluated. But the second is that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem currently hosts, for example, the Havatzalot program, which is the most elite training program for the IDF in Israel today. They also work with weapons manufacturers, of course, all public institutions do that in Israel. So there's that that's what we're talking about in terms of their directorate role in the events in Gaza currently.

6:25

And when we bring up the University of Toronto, what we're actually seeing is that even though there's been intense, intense public pressure placed on administration, since I would say late October, and most definitely since November, when massive coalitions of students and faculty have been trying to get the university that clearly committed to a stance on what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian people. Yet, in public facing comments, the University says nothing. It does not endorse Israel, it does not commend condemn anything.

6:56

But in private, we know that, in the last three months alone, more than $350,000 worth of postdoctoral fellowships and graduate student funding to travel to the university, to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Technion, university, and Tel Aviv University, has been signed on and agreed, these are new research partnerships, or these are willingly like renewed research partnerships. Some of these five relate the events of October 7, because, again, our second demand is also not a demand that we ourselves have come up with. We find this demand from years decades with activism at U of T, right? We're not new here.

7:39

So that's that's kind of what we're getting at. Because we've Technion, for example, our quantum physics department at UCSD works extremely closely with Technion University. Now we know how engineering and physics departments collaborate with the military. And you don't even really need to know it's kind of intuitive. But Technio n University was also the university that produce the bulldozer that murdered the American activists, Rachel Corrie in 2005, and many, many, many other Palestinian land defenders as Israel continues to expand settlements into the West back. So these are direct connections. And that's what we're trying to get out with the second demand.

8:16

DC: Now, Meric Gertler, the president of the University of Toronto, has responded, you started your occupation yesterday. And yesterday, you received a letter from him, which I have here, where he acknowledges each of these three demands that we've just outlined, and then describes a meeting between members of your group and some other senior members of the administration. Can you help me understand what was said at that meeting?

8:44

Avi: President Gertler, of course, was not there. I mean, as the president of the Canadian institution, most of his job is meeting donors, so he's almost never in his office. So yesterday, we we started our occupation around noon. And by 230, we received a request to ever meeting not with the President, as we explicitly requested, but with the Vice President and Provost, Professor Trevor young, the Vice Provost, students, Professor Sandy Welsh, and the assistant vice president in the office of the president, who is Gwyn McPherson.

9:18

We want to say that we do appreciate the timeliness of the meeting with these people. In particular, Professor Trevor Young, and Professor Sandy Welsh are doing three of the highest ranking members of this university. Yet at the same time, that is not what we requested within the meeting. They didn't want to get into any of the specifics. They offered us extreme sympathy and these and found sadness and we hear you get to express that sympathy and grief with the procedure. They said that all we can offer you at this time is an acknowledgement of the receipt of your demands, please leave now. And that just did not sit right with us.

10:10

Do you wanna go for it Parsa?

10:37

Parsa: Yeah. In President Gertler's

10:00

letter to us, which we received last night. He states that since we have had the opportunity to speak with senior administration, our demands have been met. Now, while we appreciate that the opportunity to to to to discuss our concerns with with with senior administration, this is, it's not true. The demands that we clearly outlined in our letter have not been met not only because we did not get a chance to discuss this with President Gertlter himself, who is the addressee of our demands, but also what was said at that meeting. And what President Gertler reiterated in his letter is that they can is that procedurally speaking, all they can offer us at the moment is an acknowledgement that they have received our demands, and within a week, they can get back to us with an actual substantial response.

10:47

We find this really troubling for two reasons. One, the urgency of the situation at hand, there's students at this institution who have had dozens of their family murdered members murdered. Over the past few months, up, over 40,000 people have died, have been killed. And we don't think putting a one week timeline on such an urgent matter and asking us to leave in the meantime, is an appropriate way to address. Moreover, the demands were putting forward it this is not the first time these demands are being put forward. They have been pursued for years. And in the past few months when the organizing around campus has taped back up.

11:22

The president's office has received similar demands from other student groups, and other student groups called Toronto Students in Solidarity with Palestine, issued a letter to the President with demands, some of which are kind of along the same lines as ours. They also received an acknowledgement but no action. Three months on, this letter came out in November. So we do not think an acknowledgement of receipt addresses our demand for that reason. UTAM, the University of Toronto Assets Management Corporation, is a separate institution from from U of T, which is itself a barrier to financial accountability. However, President Gertler is a sitting board member of UTAM. And he is the person who appoints the investment committee that advises UTAM. So we believe that he he can respond to our demands, both our financial accountability demand and also the demands of divest from from from military, military companies providing arms to Israel.

12:27

And in our meeting yesterday with with the Provost and Vice Provost, we were advised several times, that it was not possible for them to give us a clear, substantial response to our demands without consulting with senior administration. Having heard that from them, we simply cannot accept the statement by President Gertler that our demand has been met through that conversation, when those officials themselves have told us that they were not able to respond in a substantial matter right now without further consultation.

13:02

Avi: And to be clear, when they say that they have met with us to speak about these demands, we will be publicizing and I believe we've also shared with you a copy of the President's letter outlining the meeting yesterday. I would like anyone who has a copy of that letter to find the word Palestine anywhere. How can you claim to have met with us to speak about these demands, when you still even refuse to say that the sympathies and the deal you're offering and the grief that you're recognizing is faced profoundly by Palestinian students who have been trying to get your attention. When I say 'your' I mean President Gertler's attention.

13:38

DC: Now they've given you a timeline saying that they need about a week to continue to consider this they've asked you to leave in the meantime, you've decided to stay 24 hours a little more than 24 hours in now. What are the conditions like occupying an empty I presume it's an empty university building.

13:57

Parsa: The conditions here are extremely difficult. The administration has been cruel in the in the way it's treated us we do not have access to any windows in the space for occupying. There is one window on the stairwell which is our only access to fresh air. That window has been shut down. The hallway leading to that stairwell has been blocked with desks and campus police officers who are guarding it 24/7. We are not allowed to pass the ventilation here is awful. And administration will not respond to our very reasonable, I have to say,

14:32

offer to just simply oped crack a window open for us. We have also asked to bring in an air purifier they have not allowed that. They have barred us from bringing food. And they have deliberately tried to prevent us from getting rest at night employing truly like onslaught of awful tactics to intimidate us the time to us and to really make the conditions here

14:59

As awful as possible. That being said, we've come prepared, we've come prepared for this. It's very, very difficult. No one's having fun in here. It's extremely warm, the air quality is horrible. We've had to ration our food very, very carefully. However, none of this deters us into leaving without our demands have been met. We are reasonable in communicating to the to the administration, what our demands are and how they can be met. And we will continue to speak with them. But no matter how difficult the conditions get, we're not leaving at all until we until we get them.

15:36

Avi: When we're trying to sleep on one side of the corridor, we see campus police enter the eye to the floor, turn on all the lights, and then leave or at 4am tonight as they did on all the lights. And as people are sleeping, take out their phones and start photographing individuals who are sleeping under personal effects. I honestly cannot understand how a university under its student code of conduct which permits symbolic protest—this is Code of Conduct article B2—it permits symbolic protest, which has been confirmed to us by green McPherson, when we started this occupation that it is permitted for symbolic protests to occur in this building, this is not permitting This is restricting.

16:20

This is not a movement to reopen the library stacks as honorable as it is to reopen the libraries that this is a movement to address our obligations to prevent genocide as an institution with access and control to more than $8 billion in revenue.

16:36

DC: Finally, your fellow students at this university are definitely a big part of this conversation, because I know that there's only a select few of you who are inside this building occupying it at this time. But there are obviously tens of thousands of people across the different campuses of the University of Toronto, many of whom care about this issue for a number of different reasons. So what would you like to say to the students at the University of Toronto who are becoming aware of this demonstration?

17:06

Parsa: First of all, already, within, as you said, just over 24 hours of us being here, the support that we received from the rest of the student body is immense and so heartening. Yesterday, as we occupied the building, other students organize the solidarity protest outside, while our windows were shut so that we could not see them and hear them. They stayed out for hours chanting supporting us. It's very clear that the demands we represent the demands we have put forward represent the demands of a very, very large portion of the student body, and that they will support us through this, which we really appreciate.

17:48

It's not just as you said, the tens of thousands of students, our fellow students here in the University of Toronto, but also students across Canada from seven other universities, who have organized solidarity actions or endorse our occupation here this week. What we would say is the support that we already feel from the student body that you see and across Canada students is immense. We know that we have the student voice, we know what the students want from their administration. And they want this they want financial accountability, and they do not want their universities to invest in weapons that funds genocide, or that are used to commit genocide. However, as our conditions get worse and worse, we urgently need the voices of not only students but community members, anyone with a platform to amplify our message, why we're here and the way we're being mistreated by this university, by this administration, and to and to and to raise their voice louder and louder than they already have and support.

18:49

DC: Avi and Parsa Thank you very much for giving me your time today.

Parsa: Thank you so much for having us.

18:54

Avi: Thank you so much.

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Correspondence between students and U of T president Meric Gertler