Editorial: Less resolutions, more sound solutions.
As we ring in the new year, Concordia University is heading into 2025 with its fair share of questionable, yet predictable decisions poorly sheathed in a veil of “neutrality.”
Throughout 2024, student movements have made it abundantly clear what many are looking for from the university’s administration: To address and commit to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement; to permanently remove police officers from campus; and to prioritize the safety of students on campus.
And yet, instead of addressing these urgent calls to action, the administration has chosen to allocate hefty sums towards hiring a deeply problematic security consulting firm and increase President Graham Carr’s salary. All the while, the university sweeps signs of student discontent under the rug by spending an egregious amount on repairing the Henry F. Hall Building windows. However, the university addressing the smashing of the windows cosmetically, in the form of repair, is not enough to mend the bridges between student demands and admin. Direct communication, active listening, and negotiating with student activists is the institution's first step to reconciling with the political tension felt on campus.
To repress student activism and expression, the university spent over $33,000 on hiring Perceptage International, an external security consulting firm founded by an ex-Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier. Concordia hired Perceptage on four separate occasions from September to November 2024 to monitor Palestine-related demonstrations, during which its agents were accused of physically assaulting students.
Students who had democratically mobilized to demand Concordia to divest via demonstration were later head-locked by security agents, dragged down Concordia stairwells, and pushed and shoved while attempting to strike in the Henry F. Hall building. To make matters worse, not even two weeks later, Concordia was unable to restrict ex-IDF soldier and staunch anti-Palestinian activist Yoseph Haddad’s presence on campus, with CSPS silently watching and refusing to remove the guest off the university grounds.
We have to question, does the university really not take a side in this “conflict”?
To make matters worse, President Carr received a salary increase of over $30,000 in 2024, making his total salary over $520,000 a year, a salary higher than that of Canada’s Prime Minister.
And of course, to punctuate the trifecta of egregious spending, the university spent nearly $300,000 to replace the Hall building’s front windows, which were damaged during an autonomous demonstration on Sept. 29. Over $9,000 was spent on temporary wooden boards to hide the vandalism and over $2,000 was spent on branded replacement black panels to conceal the damage. Over $270,000 was spent on the sourcing and installation of replacement windows.
All of these significant expenses come at a time when the university has been implementing cuts to valued resources—notably, reducing the campus shuttle bus hours, placing a freeze on hiring new staff and faculty and cutting courses with low enrolment—to reach its approved deficit of $34.5 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year. On the university’s Budget Updates webpage, it is written that Concordia “continues to face significant financial difficulties.”
And, in an interview with The Link on Jan. 9, Carr said that Concordia now needs to look outward for new revenue sources as a result of the increasing deficit and losing money from tuition hikes, a statement that comes in stark contrast to the university’s spending over the past months, which includes Carr’s own salary raise. Granted, according to Concordia’s media team Carr and other senior administrators donated their increases back to the university. However, this begs the question, “Why did they receive it in the first place?”
To make matters worse, Concordia still fails to truly address any Palestine-related matters and take action.
In that same interview, Carr deflected a pointed question about Concordia’s ties with companies such as BMO, which is guilty of funding Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Instead of directly addressing this, Carr opted to speak about the university’s 2019-25 initiative to divest from fossil fuel companies—essentially stating that staff and students should be proud of the climate change efforts that the university has been making, all while ignoring the root of the initial BDS-related question.
When asked about Concordia’s involvement with notorious weapons manufacturing companies such as Lockheed Martin and Bombardier, Carr iterated that it is “the student’s choice” to select where they conduct their Co-op placement, as opposed to acknowledging Concordia’s partnership with the two companies. In doing this, he actively shifts the blame away from the university for having ties with such companies, instead highlighting that it is the students who choose to work for such companies through Co-op.
Carr equally failed to provide solutions to the violence and harassment from Campus Safety and Prevention Services (CSPS) officers that many students have reported during on-campus protests, particularly in the latter half of 2024. According to him, CSPS is made up of “a small number of individuals,” who have been “asked to do an awful lot over the last 16 months.”
He went as far as to explain that CSPS are not “bouncers” in a “nightclub.” What he failed to mention, however, is that students have been racially profiled, assaulted, shoved, pushed, yelled and screamed at. Only because they stood up for Palestine. Once again, Concordia proved, through Carr’s expert media training, that the university refuses to denounce the status quo at the price of students’ safety.
The Link continues to condemn Concordia’s inability to listen to the resounding concerns of its student body and its inaction regarding its ties to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. We particularly denounce the allocation of funds and working relationships with repressive entities such as Perceptage, Lockheed Martin, Bombardier and BMO, companies so blatantly involved with a genocidal state.
Lastly, The Link denounces the overall hypocrisy of the university when it comes to its recent financial decisions, despite being in “extraordinarily challenging times.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly but nonetheless disappointingly, Concordia is heading into the new year with no BDS compliance, an overt ignorance towards its student population, and a considerable amount of money having been spent on things that have little to no value to the student body.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 7, published January 14, 2025.
