Terry Newman: Profs call out their association for left-wing mayhem
"Some Canadian academics are accusing the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) of straying from its core mission of advocating for academic rights and fair working conditions to pursue a politicized agenda that undermines its fundamental purpose. Specifically, they accuse CAUT of betraying its founding principles by issuing an unsubstantiated U.S. travel advisory, producing a likely skewed academic freedom report with soon-to-be added anti-Israel rhetoric, and encouraging administrative overreach into equity-based hiring that risks faculty autonomy...
CAUT’s scope has, indeed, gone far beyond its original purposes.
Founded in 1951, CAUT was envisioned as a national association that might help faculty members with issues related to “salaries and pensions, sabbatical leave and academic freedom” — basic, bread and butter concerns for its members who now total 75,000 teachers, librarians, researchers, and other academic staff in over 130 Canadian colleges and universities across the country.
Over time, CAUT’s role expanded to include other, non-controversial issues, such as the protection of intellectual property, necessary for the digital age, advice on legal support and collective bargaining, and fair employment, which includes organizing against the increasingly precarious conditions of contract workers.
Fast forward to 2025. CAUT’s scope is now far more ambitious, political and global.
In its own words, CAUT sees itself as advancing “equity and human rights for academic staff across Canada,” but not just in this country. Despite originally being an organization concerned with the basics of labour for academic employees here at home, CAUT now sees its role as global, telling members, “We partner with national and international allies to defend human rights.”
It appears CAUT wants to be part of an academic United Nations.
In addition to these, no doubt, well-meaning, yet, lofty goals, CAUT now sees organizing to push for equity hires as part of its purview. “With our member associations and allies, we press for the Indigenization of our colleges and universities and justice for all,” it notes...
While taking no issue with fairness in pay amongst genders, “two individuals who have different genders but comparable positions, experience, accomplishments,” the letter argues that advocating for targeted equity hires goes beyond the scope of CAUT’s mandate and actually promotes administrative control over hiring, conflicting with CAUT’s role in preventing administrative overreach, as hires are typically decided amongst faculty members, not university administrators, because doing so would threaten academic freedom.
Campaigns like these — targeting hires from particular identity groups — are arguably in opposition to fairness for all existing and prospective members, including those in minority groups who, even as the best candidate for the job, may end up feeling like a token diversity hire.
Other concerns outlined in the open letter include an April 15 CAUT statement advising academics against non-essential travel to the United States. As pointed out in the letter, the statement went far beyond the updates made to the Canadian government’s own travel advisory page, which advised Canadians at the time to take “normal security precautions” and simply reiterated already existing travel norms concerning border screening and the discretion individual border agents have in making decisions.
CAUT behaved as if it were an association responsible for something between Canada’s travel advisory and national terrorism threat websites...
“CAUT provided no data with which to substantiate this claim, has no special expertise in security or Canada-U.S. relations, to their knowledge, and, has not cautioned against travelling to any countries other than the U.S. — even though many other countries (including Canada) also allow comprehensive border searches.”
The letter notes that: “CAUT has not issued any sort of travel advisory for the 100+ countries that the Government of Canada lists as higher risk for travellers, including several with significant authoritarian policies that threaten faculty members’ academic freedom (arguably to a much greater extent than those of the current U.S. government). CAUT’s advisory therefore gives the appearance of being primarily an anti-Trump political statement rather than a reasoned recommendation to protect the rights of faculty members.”
For example, there doesn’t appear to have ever been a travel warning from CAUT for Iran, even though Iranian-Canadian anthropology professor Hooma Hoodfar was arrested by authorities there in 2016 while on a personal and research visit.
Hoodfar was detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for 112 days without medicine for the rare neurological disease she suffers from. Iran’s press reported that she was charged with “collaborating with a hostile government against national security and with propaganda against the state” with the prosecutor there accusing her of “dabbling in feminism.” Hoodfar researched sexuality and gender in Islam at the time.
While CAUT actively campaigned for Hoodfar’s release, they did not issue a travel advisory for Iran at that time, or afterward, to protect academics.
The letter further accuses CAUT of engaging in political advocacy rather than objectively studying post-October 7 academic freedom on campuses.
It claims that CAUT’s March 2025 “Report on Academic Freedom in Canada after October 7, 2023.” focused “almost exclusively on alleged incidents of suppression of pro-Palestinian viewpoints” in its compiling of cases that occurred from Oct. 7, 2023 to March 2025. While CAUT admits the report is not exhaustive, reading it would lead readers to believe that pro-Israeli voices are largely unsuppressed as the report contains only three examples of such suppression over that period.
The letter claims the report is methodologically unsound, as its non-random sampling relied on cases which were widely reported or brought to the attention of CAUT. One disadvantage of non-random sampling is that it often systematically excludes key subpopulations, in this case, pro-Israel voices.
CAUT stated that it did not attempt to investigate or determine the merits of the cases it lists in its report, yet contradicts itself by weighing in on the case of Université de Montréal (UdeM) lecturer Yanise Arab who was suspended after being caught in a video yelling, “Go back to Poland” at Concordia University students. CAUT claims the audio is “unclear,” and they conveniently omit the word he uttered following that: “sharmuta” which means “whore.”
As if this weren’t bad enough, CAUT members voted on May 2, 2025 to amend this report by adding what the letter refers to as “blatantly anti-Israel language” including the “war waged by Israel on Gaza, now widely considered genocidal in both intent and practice” as “context” to the earlier report.
This all doesn’t sit well with Rachel Altman, an associate professor of statistics and actuarial science at Simon Fraser University in B.C., who has no choice but to be associated with CAUT because her union is. She told me in an email, “Some of us (myself included) are legally mandated to be members of our bargaining associations — which then use our dues, in part, to pay for membership in CAUT. It’s outrageous that I and others are being forced to support an association whose activities are inconsistent with its purposes — especially when those activities are contrary to our interests.”...
[The letter] recommends that CAUT adopt an “institutional voice,” as per Harvard, where it’s already been recognized that “universities and their leaders should not issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” According to Altman, several Canadian universities, including Laurentian University, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, University of Waterloo, and University of New Brunswick, have already adopted similar policies."
The left wing agenda is shoved into everything
Left wingers love unions because they can hijack them to push their agenda
