The 'Deteriorating' Campus is a Wake-Up Call

When administration officials and legal experts use words like "deteriorating" to describe a campus climate, they aren't describing a collapse. They are describing the end of a comfortable silence.

According to reporting from CBC Toronto and CityNews Toronto, an external review conducted by lawyer Margot Finley and former Ontario Court of Appeal judge Mary Lou Benotto has labeled recent protests at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) as "symptoms of a deteriorating campus climate." The review focuses on two specific dates—Sept. 19 and Nov. 5—where protests led to student arrests. One incident involved the disruption of a TMU-hosted Democracy Forum event; the other involved an off-campus event featuring speakers linked to the Israel Defense Forces.

For the institutionalists, this is a crisis of management. The Benotto-Finley report argues that TMU has policies to handle such conduct but has "too often failed to apply them consistently and decisively," which the authors claim contributed to the tensions. Their solution is the classic corporate playbook: more rules, more "content-neutral expectations," and a revised freedom of speech statement that "expressly prohibit[s]" intimidation and harassment.

But let's be clear: this is my opinion, and I believe the "deterioration" the authors lament is actually a long-overdue correction.

For too long, the modern university has attempted to sanitize academic discourse, treating the campus as a corporate entity where "civility" is prioritized over the raw, uncomfortable friction of competing historical narratives. The Benotto-Finley report admits that the university cannot eliminate "disagreement, grief, anger, or competing historical narratives" regarding the Israel-Hamas war—a conflict that began with the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks that killed approximately 1,200 people and saw over 250 taken hostage, and continued with a retaliatory offensive that Gaza's Health Ministry says has killed more than 72,700 people.

When the report suggests that TMU needs "decisive institutional action" to prevent these incidents from recurring, it is essentially asking for a return to a sterile environment where dissent is neatly packaged and doesn't disrupt the schedule. The call for "predictably" enforced policies is a call for the domestication of student passion.

If the campus climate is "deteriorating," it is because the facade of the university as a neutral, corporate space is cracking under the weight of actual global tragedy. The arrests of students are not the problem; they are the result of a system that prefers the appearance of order over the reality of engagement.

Rather than revising speech statements to further restrict behavior, TMU should recognize that the disruption of a "Democracy Forum" is, in itself, a democratic act. The desire to regulate doxxing and online harassment is understandable, but the overarching goal of the Benotto-Finley review is to return the university to a state of managed quietude.

We don't need more "content-neutral expectations." We need to stop pretending that the university is a business and start remembering that it is a place where the most volatile ideas in the world are supposed to collide. If that looks like "deterioration" to a former judge, then perhaps the decay is exactly what is required for something honest to grow.