Relentless Torture
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In late April, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which unites a majority of college faculty in the country, took the extraordinary step of censuring the University of Toronto, Canada’s top-ranked institution of higher learning. The move amounts to a boycott: the association is asking members not to accept job offers or attend conferences at the school. The censure vote came at the end of a nearly eight-month controversy, which centers on a single rescinded job offer from a tiny program at a small school within a very large university. The entire affair, however, resides at the precise intersection of scholarly freedom, the place of the university in broader political conversations, and the influence that financial donors wield over academic institutions.
Do donors have too much influence over universities?
“I scarcely know anybody who works in the academy these days who isn’t concerned about donors’ influence,” Professor Denise Réaume told me resignedly. “It’s almost unheard of for someone to make a big money gift that is not targeted in some way. Nobody calls up a university and says, “Here’s $20 million, now go do good stuff with it”.
For this University of Toronto (UT) law professor as well as for Vincent Wong, a Toronto lawyer and former lecturer at the university’s law school, Exhibit A for undue donor influence is not the expected perk of naming of a building – as it is in so many American colleges and universities which have accepted gifts with strings attached from foundations such as Charles Koch Foundation.