Academic institutions are meant to be spaces of intellectual diversity, open inquiry, and rigorous debate. The Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa has abandoned these principles.
Rather than fostering an environment where students engage critically with multiple perspectives especially on highly controversial issues the Institute demands allegiance to a singular worldview, using its platform to promote misinformation about Israel and exclude scholarship that differs from its established views. When an academic unit prioritizes partisan advocacy over education, it fails in its most fundamental duty—to equip students with the analytical skills they need to think for themselves.
During the week of February 24, 2025, a guest lecture was delivered at the University of Ottawa by Nada Elia entitled, “Weaponizing Feminism in Service of Genocide” organized by the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies and the Joint uOttawa and Carleton Chair in Feminist and Gender Studies. Nada Elia, a visiting associate professor of Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University, alleges that Israel invented claims of Hamas’s sexual assault on Israeli women on October 7, 2023, to justify genocide.
She asserts this even though many of Hamas’s crimes were filmed by the perpetrators themselves and the videos were later sent to many of the parents and families of victims in the aftermath of the terror attack and posted on the Hamas website.
Indeed, for several weeks after October 7, Hamas and its supporters used social media to gleefully celebrate their mind-boggling brutality as the first installment in a renewed effort to “liberate Palestine.” Then, in a baffling reversal, many of these same people, Elia included, denied that these events occurred in the first place, though the evidence was abundant and incontrovertible. This starts to make sense when we look at her past statements.
Ms. Elia has explicitly called for “intifada” during periods of violence against civilians, defended convicted terrorists, and openly advocated for the removal of Jews from Israel, declaring she “doesn’t care” where they go. Her claims about October 7 would receive a failing grade if made in an undergraduate essay because they deny evidence and are based on distortions and false premises. The decision of feminist professors to platform a speaker who denies the rapes of women and blames the victims of such rapes as the “real” perpetrators is a shocking betrayal of feminism.
If this event were an isolated occurrence, it would be troubling enough. However, incidents and statements like this have become all too common in some academic circles, even within the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies. This makes it painfully clear that much of feminist scholarship has been distorted by embracing a dangerous authoritarianism that celebrates violence against women.
Over the past 18 months, several students haves confided in me that classes taught by professors affiliated with the Institute insist on ideological conformity that reflects an obsessive anti-Israel stance. For example, last year a student reported to me that in a class offered by the Institute, they were forced by their instructor to engage in anti-Israel action by completing an assignment in which they were expected to explain how they would support a “Strike for Gaza.”
The ideological monoculture is further reflected in a statement issued by the Palestinian Feminist Collective in 2021, of which Elia claims to be a co-founder, that the unit signed as an academic unit. That statement demonizes Israel as solely responsible for regional conflict despite the fact that Israel has repeatedly offered land for peace even as recently as 2006.
The statement calls for anti-normalization, which is just a way of silencing any other viewpoint from being expressed than one that demonizes the world’s only Jewish state.
In an academic environment, this statement is deeply troubling because it was signed by the unit rather than individual members, making it nearly impossible for students or junior members of the faculty to hold and express a different or more nuanced viewpoint. It creates a chilling effect on academic freedom and freedom of expression. Signing the statement on behalf of an academic unit also violates institutional neutrality, which is a principle that prevents the University and by extension its departments from taking a position on political or social issues unless they are directly relevant to the operation of the institution.
By signing as a department, it pretends there is only one acceptable point of view, and it makes very clear that debate and rigorous scholarship are unwelcome.
The Institute’s anti-Israel authoritarianism is also reflected in their October 2024 Letter to the Editor published in the Fulcrum. Again, in a clear violation of the academic freedom of faculty, the letter was signed by the entire unit rather than individual members, thus preventing anyone from disagreeing or dissenting, a clear violation of academic freedom.
The letter is ostensibly predicated on “engaging with Palestinian justice” but is just an ill-informed repudiation of Israel and Zionism. Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to a nation in their ancestral, indigenous homeland where they have lived for millennia, nothing more.
The vast majority (over 90 per cent) of Jewish Canadians are Zionists and many non-Jews share that view. Yet, the Institute’s letter frames engagement with Zionists or Israeli perspectives as inherently illegitimate, treating Palestinian liberation as the only acceptable feminist position.
One of the most common antisemitic fantasies says Jews control everything and they are at the centre of all that is wrong in the world. That distorted view is clear in this statement. They falsely position Zionism exclusively as a tool of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide — while erasing any Jewish historical or indigenous connection to the land and ignoring the vibrant, diverse Israeli campaigns for peace and coexistence. It excludes and delegitimizes any academic or intellectual engagement that does not conform to this rigid and distorted ideological stance.
Furthermore, the professors’ call to boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) Israeli institutions reinforces this by rejecting dialogue or collaboration with Israeli scholars including those who are Muslim, Christian, Druze, Arab Israeli and Palestinian. In fact, 25 per cent of professors at the University of Haifa are Arabs and over 17 per cent of the students at Hebrew University are Arab Israelis. In contrast, Jewish Israelis are not allowed to work at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
The letter also calls for the exclusion of Zionists from feminist spaces, defining Palestinian justice as a moral litmus test that determines one’s legitimacy as a feminist. It leaves no room for disagreement or alternative perspectives or scholarly complexity. This ideological gatekeeping means that Zionists — or even those that hold nuanced, balanced views — are unwelcome, which is fundamentally exclusionary and contradictory to the principles of academic pluralism.
The Institute’s assertion that feminism is incompatible with Zionism disregards the brave efforts and achievements of thousands of Jewish women who dedicated themselves to defending and advancing the welfare, dignity, and rights of women both at home and globally throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The University of Ottawa Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies exclusively amplifies the most extreme and unrepresentative voices from the Jewish community citing in their letter, for example, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), a self-proclaimed anti-Israel organization, whose views reflect at most 3% of Canadian Jews. Members of IJV, but not members of the mainstream Jewish community, have been invited to give presentations in the Institute’s classes. The Institute thereby silences Jewish perspectives insisting instead on tokenism because it aligns with their anti-Israel ideology.
The letter also quotes from various academics, including Jasbir Puar. Puar notes she has no evidence but still argues that, “Israel deliberately and systematically maims Palestinians in an attempt to quell their resistance to Israeli settler colonial violence.” Puar has been criticized for claiming that Israel steals organs from Palestinians for transplant or research.
In her 2016 article, “Speaking of Solidarity and Its Censors”, published in Jadaliyya, Puar claimed that Palestinian families “speculate” that Palestinians killed in the conflict have their bodies mined for organs for scientific research. She says she is not making an “empirical claim about current organ mining” but only arguing about how Israel treats the bodies of “those they colonize.”
Puar’s assertion means that if Palestinians believe organs are harvested, it is not her concern if it is factual or not. No one has ever harvested organs from a corpse, so the claim is obviously baseless. Similarly, if members of the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies believe Israel is evil incarnate then it must be true even in the absence of evidence. In what other case are such lurid, distorted claims taken to be true?
Their letter also references Indigenous groups in Canada who have endorsed Palestinians as an indigenous people as well as cite Ellen Gabriel who welcomed student encampments on Indigenous land. But apparently they do not know other Canadian Aboriginal groups reject this view and acknowledge the the indigeneity of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, which pre-dates Arab colonization by thousands of years. They ignore Anishinaabe people like former Justice Harry Laforme and Karen Restoule who objected to the viewpoints being promoted at the encampments including on the University of Ottawa’s campus.
Students are main casualties of the authoritarianism imposed by the professors in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies who are betraying feminism and academic norms. Students deserve the opportunity to learn about multiple viewpoints on complex issues and learn to sharpen their critical thinking skills for their future careers. Learning how to engage in civil discourse on contentious, divisive, and controversial topics is vital to the future of our liberal democratic society. Instead, the Institute’s self-serving professors are shirking their duties and responsibilities as educators and attempting to indoctrinate students out of a misguided belief that only they hold the one truth.
Cary Kogan is a full professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa and the co-founder of the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA, neca-rdace.org). NECA is a non-partisan organization dedicated to tackling antisemitism on campuses, upholding genuine fairness and inclusivity, and championing academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. Its members include nearly 400 hundred Jewish and non-Jewish academics from 45 universities and colleges across Canada.
