Much has been written about the importance of communicating and implementing the public service functions of higher education if these institutions are to earn public support. To date, the chief executives of universities have failed to make this their central task. As a result, universities have been isolated by ruling parties that are hostile to higher education.

While concern for mental health and self-care are increasingly prevalent across US society, our extensive conversations with current and former players to support our new book, The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, reveal that the world of big-time college football is a clear exception.

Efforts by Western governments to suppress evidence-based history, whether through banning “critical race theory” or a focus on ideologically sifted “facts and dates” must be fought. We need to insist on national histories being told from the point of view of the common people with that history placed in the context of the whole history of our species.

Writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, an annual award established by English PEN in memory of playwright Harold Pinter. Shortly after having been named for the prize, Roy named British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah a Writer of Courage, with whom she would share her award.

How does activism and policy that opposes systemic racism get redefined as its exact opposite—namely antisemitism or anti-Jewish racism? How does the language of anti-racism get deployed in defense of the actions of an apartheid ethnostate? Vincent Wong on how the redefinition of racism is a cardinal threat to all racially subordinated and dehumanized groups the world over.

Time and again, the McGill University administration, along with provincial government officials, has refused dialogue with student protesters, preferring to make a violent show of power over activists who remain steadfast in their aim: to make this summer a freedom summer aimed at contributing to ending genocide, occupation and colonialism.

The fight for Palestinian freedom—as well as for Canadian democracy—will be long and arduous. And it will require our collective resistance to evolving tactics of censorship. The TMU law students, and all the students setting up encampments around the world (including in Israel), have had an immense impact.

Students protesting worldwide aren’t a threat to anyone’s safety, writes University of Waterloo student Nadia Khan, they are simply standing up for the Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been denied it. We deserve a say in where our tuition dollars go, and until our institutions take our demands seriously, we’re not going anywhere.

The politics of power and resistance are raging on Canadian university campuses. As Judi Rever reports, through occupations at post-secondary institutions across the country, students protesting against Israel’s mass crimes in Gaza are demanding their schools disclose and review all holdings in companies profiting from Israel’s onslaught.

Instead of negotiating with pro-Palestinian protesters whose demands have broad support among the university community, the administration wants to force the police to intervene. As Yves Engler writes, perhaps the McGill administration should listen to the cops: talk to the students. Negotiate. Compromise. Settle peacefully.