Incomplete

LettersMarian Pinsky — Published April 5, 2011

I found The Link’s coverage of the recommended dismissal of Queen’s University rector Nick Day, as a result of his anti-Israel statements, to be curiously incomplete. [Editor’s Note: this article was taken from the Canadian University Press newswire.]

This is a not an issue of “academic freedom” or attempts to censor or muzzle “free speech,” as construed by the graduate students and as essentially depicted in the article. Rather, it was reflective of the fact that Day used his official capacity as rector to condemn Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff as being “complicit in supporting the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” and in doing so, purported to speak on behalf of the student body.

While Andrew Stevens, member of Queen’s Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights and former organizer of Israeli Apartheid Week, painted this as an issue of “academic debate,” Day crossed the boundaries, exerting “his personal and individual rights [and views] as a citizen” to abuse his position as student representative.
Day, like everyone else, is entitled to his political opinion and is entitled to make it public. However, as National Post journalist Ron Prosner emphasizes, “Academics […] are supposedly society’s guardians of knowledge, objectivity and informed debate.”

—Marian Pinsky,
MA Sociology

This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 29, published April 5, 2011.