It took more than six months for York University’s administration to articulate its concerns with a report detailing anti-Palestinian racism at the Keele campus.
The Grind first contacted York in October 2024 with questions about the report, titled “Surveilled & Silenced: A Report on Palestine Solidarity at York University.”
At the time, spokesperson Yanni Dagonas said the administration had “concerns with the report’s methodology and disagrees with the report’s assertions.” But what those concerns were wasn’t specified.
On May 16 of this year, The Grind asked for an update. On May 22, Dagonas replied: “The University remains concerned that the report, based on the responses of 90 respondents on a campus of over 60,000, includes some overstatements and inaccuracies.”
He did not elaborate further.
The following day, on May 23, the administration made more details available to the report’s authors after two of them published an op-ed earlier that day on The Grind’s website, describing fruitless meetings on Jan. 6 and Apr. 10 of this year.
The report’s authors — faculty members who are also part of York’s Race Equity Caucus (REC) — say the admin’s vague concerns “have no merit.”
“The critique on sample size is not valid on methodological grounds,” argues professor Tamanisha J. John, because the report was never meant to be a “‘representative’ survey based on a random sample” of all students. It was meant “to capture experiences of repression among advocates of Palestinian rights” at the Keele campus.
John says the report has been accessed over 7,000 times, and that students continue reaching out to them to talk about anti-Palestinian racism.
“It is not just morally deeply problematic to say that we cannot draw any firm conclusions if only 90 (or 60 or 45) have been repressed, it is profoundly absurd,” John told The Grind in an email.
“If we followed this reasoning, the question to ask would be: what is the threshold for this institution to move on [anti-Palestinian racism]? The only thing that should have mattered is the fact that some (far too many) have been repressed.”
The report’s findings are also backed by a 2022 report from Independent Jewish Voices that looked at the suppression of speech on Palestine across Canadian university campuses.
That report — based on 77 testimonies — found “that an atmosphere of repression and recrimination related to discourse and activism around Israel/Palestine is ubiquitous and insidious” across campuses.
In regards to the “overstatements” mentioned by Dagonas, John says it refers to the report’s description of Toronto Police Services crashing Dr. Muhammad Ayyash’s lecture in February 2024.
The administration claims they apologized, but that runs “contrary to what is in [the] report and in Dr. Ayyash’s published piece [with The Breach] about the incident,” John says. The report also says police claimed the university had called them, but the administration “maintain that they have no idea as to why police were called.”
“A response the day that the op-ed went live on The Grind website only confirms for us that the administration only chooses to respond when the media is involved,” John says.
“This shows that the administration lacks any genuine interest in addressing APR on campus, and that the administration doesn’t have any real intention of working with REC concretely on this issue. Instead, they view REC and the report as a problem they want gone.”
“If the administration actually wants to meet in good faith and to actually combat this issue with anti-Palestinian racism that has been well documented on our campus over the past 19 months of genocide, they would add anti-Palestinian racism into our glossary of terms as part of our DEI strategy, they would retract the false claims of methodological concerns regarding our report, and publicly apologize for undermining our report in public,” John says.
The university did not say whether they were prepared to take these actions. They have also not indicated if and when they’ll respond to the substance of the report.
This article appeared in the 2025 Summer issue.