More than 1,000 scholars from across Canada, the U.S., and around the globe have signed an open letter supporting the University of Windsor's agreement to end the encampment on campus.
"We, the undersigned scholars, commend the historic agreement reached between the University of Windsor and the Uwindsor encampment students," read an open letter. "We applaud the university for engaging in good faith discussions with Palestinian solidarity activists and for refusing to follow the same paths of other institutions, including calling in police to violently remove encampments."
The university reached an agreement with students earlier this month, two months after they set up a Liberation Zone on campus to protest the war in Gaza. The pact requires university officials to disclose direct and indirect public fund investments and review its current ones.
"The University will continue to evolve in its investment review practices and strategies, aligned with its responsible investment policy and responsibilities as a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment while ensuring financial sustainability to support mission-related goals," read a statement, issued on July 10.
It also agreed to enhance its anti-racism initiatives, offer more counselling, and expand the Scholars at Risk program.
More support for students on campus was one of the demands made by the University of Windsor Student Alliance and Palestinian Solidary Group. They also demanded the disclosure of financial statements, divestment from any entity that benefits Israel, and an academic boycott from Israeli institutions.
The university is currently in discussions with Windsor's Jewish community, which expressed disappointment with the agreement, saying it will further marginalize Jewish students and encourage lawlessness on campus. In response, university officials pledged to formal conversations with Jewish students as it hires a Jewish Student Support Advisor.
The letter calls the university's goals "laudable" and applauded encampment students for changing the course of "global discourse about Palestine and Palestinian life and liberation."
"They have insisted on speaking up for Palestine notwithstanding a decades-long history of the 'Palestinian exception' to free speech and academic freedom," the letter continued.
The letter's authors also took exception to calls to reverse the agreement.
"The agreement has been spuriously labelled as antisemitic. These reactions are politically motivated and without merit. They are intended to operate as distractions from the reality on the ground in Palestine, from Israeli state violence that has operated with impunity for decades, and from the current relentlessly ongoing genocide in Gaza," it said. "Labeling the agreement as antisemitic is also an egregious erasure of the diversity of Jewish opinion with respect to Israel and Palestine, and it undermines the struggle to address actual incidents of antisemitism."
"MP (Anthony) Housefeather even called on the Ontario Minister of Education Jill Dunlop to intervene," continued the authors. "Such intervention would be an affront to the independence of universities and has been widely criticized as a new 'McCarthyism."
Finally, the letter called on all universities to engage in good faith negotiations with student protest movements, recognize and address Palestinian racism, bring investment and academic relationships in line with international law, and condemn political interference.
Signatories included scholars from Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia universities, along with others from South Africa, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
*With files from Maureen Revait.