CAUT Council, November 26 - 28, 2010

By Tracy Whalen, UWFA Secretary

For three days at the end of November, Kristine Hansen and I attended the sixty-ninth Council Meeting of the Canadian Association of University Teachers in Ottawa. As a group, we discussed CAUT policy language, heard updates about legal cases in Canadian institutions, and began to consider post-secondary concerns in light of a pending federal election.

Against this backdrop of policy statements and model clauses, a few particularly interesting topics stood out. One notable session included a panel about higher education in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. University of Windsor law professor Reem Bahdi discussed the difficulties of conducting research with Palestinian colleagues. Bahdi told the group that when she arrives in Israel on her way to Palestine, she often faces invasive searches in the airport, carries the phone numbers of Canadian journalists just in case she goes missing, and calls friends and family before passing through check points. Bahram Bekhradnia, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute in Oxford, described the barriers Palestinian faculty and students face and spoke of the distressing negative response he received when he chronicled such barriers in a scholarly article.