The Department of Sociology is honouring the Censure placed upon the University of Toronto by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). This censure is a response to significant evidence that university administration facilitated attempts by an external donor to influence the impending hire of the Director of the International Human Rights Program at the Faculty of Law. The specific stipulations of the censure can be found here and include a call to those outside of the University of Toronto to not accept speaking engagements and to not accept faculty appointments. During this time, the Sociology Department will host neither its Speaker Series nor other departmentally-sponsored events at the University that involve outside speakers. Individual faculty members should, of course, exercise their academic freedom in deciding how to respond to the censure. In the future, the campus-based sociology hiring departments will assess whether hiring processes will go forward. Our decisions will be aligned with how such hires might support early-career scholars and/or diversity goals. Similar to our colleagues in the Department for the Study of Religion, we wish to state that we “support the University of Toronto’s stated purpose of ‘fostering an academic community in which the learning and scholarship of every member may flourish, with vigilant protection for individual human rights, and a resolute commitment to the principles of equal opportunity, equity and justice.’”
Please note: Our statement is adapted from the statement posted by the Dept. for the Study of Religion (DSR).