Neoliberal academia has quietly yet increasingly undermined UofT’s moral principles
On May 27th, 2024, Israel struck a refugee tent in Rafah, which it had designated a safe zone, and murdered at least 45 displaced Palestinians. Videos emerged of onlookers helplessly throwing sand on the flames as it engulfed the trapped survivors. One witness described the incident as “tents were melting and the people’s bodies were also melting.” The same day, University of Toronto executives reasserted their views on the genocide in a conversation with encampment members: a political issue. Their stance stripped Israel’s actions of their human rights violations and settler colonial aims, and reduced it to a “war between Hamas and Israel.”
The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared that Israel’s policies and action in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide as asserted by the United Nations. United Nations experts labelled Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian education system as “scholasticide.”
The University of Toronto’s response was not grounded in any reasonable moral principle. For students, the question remained of how to convince an institution, a soulless structure, of basic empathy.
Yet, UofT ostensibly adheres to two crucial guidelines that dictates its policies and procedures. The first, The Procedures for the Human Rights Review of International Projects (2025) holds that, “certain proposals [can] be declined in countries with governments with clearly unacceptable human rights records.” The second, The Policy on Social and Political Issues With Respect to University Divestment (2008) states investments should follow the “Yale University concept of social injury.” Per The Ethical Investor, “social injury” relates to “activities which violate, or frustrate the enforcement of, rules of domestic or international law intended to protect individuals against deprivation of health, safety, or basic freedoms.” Israel’s human rights violations clearly meet UofT’s policies for divestment. So what’s driving UofT’s moral callousness?
The sidelining of moral principles are rooted in the neoliberal structure of the institution, made possible by the corporatisation of universities following their federal defunding. These principles have evaded criticism because of their normalization, but it is essential not to take neoliberalism as a given truth and critique its foothold in the university’s governance.
The neoliberalisation of universities is a recent phenomenon in the United States and Canada. In his book, Academia, Inc, Jamie Brownlee argues that profit is the guiding principle for the neoliberal university’s actions and policies. In an interview with The Jacobin, Dennis M. Hogan labels Ronald Reagan the pioneer of this institutional model because of his defunding policies in the 1960s and 70s. While governor of California, his policies were in reaction to the rise of leftist student activism. Reagan saw student mobilisation under the banner of anti-war and civil rights protests as “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates” partaking in actions to do “with rioting [and] with anarchy.” In attempting to discipline the students, Reagan slashed funding and aid to universities across California.
The punishment for intellectualism and leftist student activism extended to Canada in the 80s. Undergirded by capitalist aims, the Canadian government and its business leaders believed the purpose of universities was to better Canada’s economic strength. However, they viewed university policies and actions as adverse to this. Courses relating to gender, race and social inequality were “useless” because they failed to address market demands. The university was a failing public institution and required a radical transformation. In his essay, Digital Diploma Bills, historian David Noble argues that capitalist elites held that “the universities had become too important to be left to the universities.” Following the 1970s, the Canadian government began defunding universities with the intention of making them vulnerable to market forces. Hence, universities would redirect their resources from overtly political curriculum to those that benefit knowledge-based corporate industries.
Canadian universities shifted towards private sources of revenue through donations, partnerships, and investments. Between 1986-87 and 2001-02, private revenues increased by 167 percent, with much of this increase being “corporate donations, non-governmental grants, contracts and investments.” By 2009, public funding dropped to 58 percent from a substantial 84 percent in 1990, while private donations, grants, and bequests occupied 10.8 percent of total university revenues. The sudden and significant reliance on private funding entrenched corporatisation and neoliberalism in Canadian universities.
We can observe the same shift at UofT and Victoria College through their financial statements. As of 2024-25, Victoria College credits 40 percent of its income to donations, real estate, and investment, and UofT credits 15.3 percent to private donations and investments. On the other hand, direct government funding comprises 26 percent for UofT and 1.7 percent for Victoria College. In a recent statement, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association remarked that the 2026 provincial budget neglected the financial demands of Ontario universities. They argue that the significant lag of per-student domestic students from the national average, nearly $7 000 per student, “doesn’t provide the adequate, stable funding for universities required to serve Ontarians now and in the future.”
The reliance on private revenue has had a two-fold consequence of implicating universities in the interests of private donors and being cost-conscious in their investments. Private donations and partnerships carry the expectation that institutions align with their values. UofT significantly relies on donors with ties to Israel, two such examples being Peter Munk and the Azrieli Foundation. Munk’s philanthropic portfolio is not limited to the eponymous Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy; he has openly donated to Israeli institutions such as Honest Reporting Canada and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Peter and Melanie Munk Charity has historically based its donations on its view of the university’s objectives. In the Memorandum of Agreement for the construction of the Munk School, the foundation conditioned its 2011 gift of $15 million on “the donor’s determination” of the university’s progress from independent performance reviews. The charity continues to financially aid the Munk School with its most recent donation of $17.5 million in November of 2025. Similarly, the Azrieli foundation funds an annual $90 000 stipend for the Azrieli Brain Medicine Fellowship, while publicly claiming to “support transformative philanthropic institutions across Israel.” As UofT relies on private donors for its revenue, cutting ties with donors associated with Israel would risk the capital growth and sustainability of its programs and institutions. Even platforming critiques of Zionism and Israel’s actions risks deterring donors who view such discussions as hostile to their perspectives.
The university’s reluctance to take a stand on moral and political issues is similarly reflected in its endowment investments. As of 2024-25 income from investments alone constitutes 12 percent of Victoria College’s revenue, and 37 percent inclusive of real estate. Additionally, the 9 percent share growth of these revenues since 2015-16 is a testament to the institution’s growing reliance on private sources of revenue. This privatisation has corporatised the university’s financial decisions. Calls for divestment on moral grounds are adverse to the cost-conscious calculus of university administration. A recent example is Victoria College’s ongoing divestment from its oil well in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Although President Rhonda McEwen claimed that divestment was a “top priority for the board of regents” in a late 2022 interview with The Strand, the property had been operating and producing revenue since its bequest in 2003. In the Winter 2023 Caucus, President McEwen revealed the reason for not divesting earlier was fear of financially burdening the college’s funding of academic and extracurricular activities. This supports Hogan’s argument that universities depoliticise their endowments and choose investments primarily on the basis of their income. Hogan claims “there is no real ethical finance capitalism,” as it is inherently exploitative. Universities only concern themselves with divestment if “it becomes a PR issue or they just feel gross about it.”
Importantly, UofT and Victoria College are not victims of the government’s policies because of their acquiescence. According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Federal Government contribution per student adjusted for inflation dropped from $3 291 to $2 007 between 1992-93 and 2015-16. As mentioned above, the OCUFA claims that Ontario universities are “far short of the Canadian funding average.” More recently, Doug Ford’s decrease of the portion of OSAP funding as grants from 85 to 25 percent has further financially burdened students and universities. Yet, UofT does not push back against government defunding. Instead, the institution entrenches itself in corporatisation and neoliberal ideals. An exemplar of this is former UofT president Robert Prichard: between 1990-2000 Prichard attempted to restructure the university into a “market driven, deregulated, competitive and differentiated [product mandated] system.” Prichard held that relying on government funding discouraged universities from producing skilled labor and services necessary for market demands. Brownlee points to the inclusion of business executives on the boards of Canadian universities as another example of the entrenching of neoliberal academia. This strategy is rooted in the philosophy of ‘managerialism’ where private sector corporate management is necessary for efficient budgetary and accounting processes. The increasing dominance of business executives on the board has emboldened corporate management values over social, moral and academic concerns.
Discourse over university decisions has largely shifted from academic centred issues of “well-equipped libraries, low faculty/student ratios, open democratic governance procedures [etc]” to performance in the “delivery of knowledge and skilled labour to the corporate economy […], the dollar value of incoming grants and the level of research commercialisation.” On the University of Toronto governing council, five out of eight of the alumni governors and 12 out of 18 of the lieutenant governors are businesses executives, including the Council Vice Chair Sandra Harington who is the director of Extendicare and the Bank of Canada, and the Council President Anna Kennedy who was Chief Operating and Chief Financial Officer of KingSett Capital. Similarly, the chair and vice chairs of the board, property committee, and finance and audit committee of the Victoria College board of regents come from prominent business backgrounds. In a 2022 Strand interview, President McEwen noted that her power on divestment “isn’t as high as people think.” The corporatisation of leadership and acceptance of managerial governance models by the university has restricted its stance on political and social issues. Their framework of ethical commitment is founded on contemptuous pity and public image rather than moral understanding.
The solution to moral indifference in institutions is student movements. Historically, UofT students have stood as a bulwark against the university’s neoliberal policies and reforms. In 1983, students organised under the “Anti-Apartheid club” and called for the University to divest from holdings with ties to South Africa. Despite the university’s attempt to cut a deal on the grounds of a partial divestment, students continued agitating for full divestment. One student protestor claimed, “the University had a moral responsibility for its effect on the surrounding world.” By 1988, student pressure had influenced council members, and former President George Connell was forced to allow a vote on the issue of divestment. The vote’s result led to the divestment of investment holdings in 1998, and eventually pension funds in 1990. 8 years later, students protested tuition hikes caused by Mike Harris’ defunding of post-secondary institutions. Between 1990-98, tuition rose by 140 percent, out of which 60 percent was during Mike Harris’ term. Then educational minister John Snobelen explained the defunding as a strategy to create a “useful crisis to push for school reforms.” Student backlash from protests in 1998 forced the next Premier, Dalton McGuinty, to freeze tuition fees and increase funding in the sector by $6.2 billion.
The UofT student body is capable of making tangible changes in the institution’s policies. Students have been at the forefront of a decades-long resistance: students fighting for the university’s divestment from Israeli occupation and South African apartheid shared the concern of the university’s moral callousness. The University of Toronto can not present itself as a bastion of progressive thought while succumbing to neoliberal academia.
