Mosaic senior editor Andrew Koss highlights the saga of Canadian Professor Paul Finlayson in the publication’s daily newsletter this morning. Koss quotes from Professor Finlayson’s account of his ordeal at Finlayson’s own Freedom To Offend site. Koss writes (the links are in the Mosaic newsletter):
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Paul Finlayson was, for fifteen years, a beloved professor of marketing at the University of Guelph-Humber, a small institution in Toronto. Shortly after the October 7 attacks, he found himself in a heated online exchange where he told an Israel-hating interlocutor from Pakistan, “You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler.” Finlayson later conceded that the post was “hot-headed and unwise.” But it was reported to university administrators, in what appears to have been a campaign coordinated by a fellow professor named Wael Ramadan. Thereafter,
events at the heavily Muslim campus moved quickly. [Finlayson] was suspended almost immediately, without charges or explanation. At the time, he had no idea that a routine social-media post had set such dire machinery in motion.
Criticism of an organization designated as a terrorist group by the Canadian government was unacceptable at the University of Guelph-Humber. Even more striking, Finlayson’s own union local, OPSEU 562—an organization to which he had paid thousands of dollars in mandatory dues for representation—treated such criticism as a “hate crime.”
Finlayson goes on to recount in detail the Kafkaesque experience that followed. He was ordered to stay off campus and was forbidden from having any contact with students, colleagues, or staff members, leaving his students in the lurch and making it impossible for him to organize his own defense or even find out the reasons for his suspension. And then there is the role of Professor Ramadan:
He behaved like someone who knew exactly how the system worked—and knew that it would not turn against him. . . . Ramadan reached out to activist organizations and encouraged them to mobilize their networks. I possess the posts from those organizations.
What makes this extraordinary is that the university knew exactly how this campaign was being generated. A faculty member—who happened to have a relationship with senior administration—was openly encouraging students and outside organizations to pressure the university to terminate another professor. To my knowledge, the university took no meaningful steps to stop it.
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Please see the whole thing here at Freedom To Offend.
