Canada, which is, like Israel, usually so much more civilized than the U.S. when it comes to the ability to have frank public discussion of competing perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is on the verge of international humiliation. Having failed in the earlier effort to get York University to shut down an academic conference on a one-state solution to the conflict, the would-be censors have now prevailed on some politicians to put pressure on the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, which is providing funding for the event, to submit the conference proposal to an unprecedented second round of peer review, with the obvious purpose of trying to de-fund it at the SSHRC level, having failed to squelch it at the university level. My colleague Leslie Green has sent the following letter to Profesor Chad Gaffield, a distinguished historian at the University of Ottawa, who is President of the SSHRC:
Dr Chad Gaffield, President
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
350 Albert Street
P.O. Box 1610
Ottawa, ON K1P 6G4
Canada
Dear President Gaffield,
If the report in the Globe and Mail of 10 June is accurate, Canada's
Science Minister, the Hon. Gary Goodyear, "has asked SSHRC president
Chad Gaffield to convene a second peer-review committee to assess if the
[York University] conference is still worthy of public funds...." :
I hope that this report is inaccurate. It if is accurate, I very much
hope that you will decline the request to re-review a properly
peer-reviewed proposal for a conference on a timely and important
issue. In Canada and abroad, senior academics are watching this
controversy with great concern. I believe it would seriously injure
the independence and mission of the SSHRC, not to mention the value of
academic freedom on which all our work depends, were you to acceed the
this overtly partisan request.
Yours sincerely,
Les Green
--
Leslie Green
Professor of the Philosophy of Law
University of Oxford
Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ
& Professor of Law
Osgoode Hall Law School,
This really is an extraordinary embarrassment for Canadian higher education. The one-state solution is discussed all the time in Israel, and even those who reject it don't waste their time trying to shut down university conferences on the subject. Hopefully Professor Gaffield can resist the unethical political pressure being brought.
UPDATE: A Canadian reader informs me that Science Minister Goodyear is perhaps not entirely qualified for his position.
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