“Disclose! Divest!” is the chant students have used to call on universities across North America to disclose their financial investment to the public and divest from companies profiting from the war in Gaza. At the University of Toronto, students and faculty taking part in this protest movement are making specific demands of President Meric Gertler and the university’s Board of Governors. We lend our support to students’ demands for financial transparency and the refusal to fund genocide, genocidal violence, unjust aggression and the dehumanization of any people at any time and in any place.
The TST Graduate Students Association (TGSA) is an association of graduate students who study at colleges who have membership in, and are affiliated with the Toronto School of Theology (TST) at the University of Toronto. TST functions as an ecumenical consortium of Christian theological schools that welcomes students and scholarship from diverse faith traditions. We recognize the sufferings of students on all sides of this conflict.
As students and residents living and working at the University of Toronto we acknowledge that the land on which the University of Toronto operates is part of the traditional territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the Credit, an Anishnaabe people, land covered by the Dish-with-One-Spoon wampum belt covenant. In borrowing from the words and lived commitments of a member college of the Toronto School of Theology’s land acknowledgment we also acknowledge:
“…the stewardship of this land by First Nations, the continuing presence here of Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and the harm caused by colonialism. We commit ourselves to seeking a new and honourable relationship with the First Peoples of this land.”
TGSA understands our commitments to honour the land and heal from harms caused by colonialism on these lands and all lands. We hope that student demands to disclose and divest will set a precedent leading to increased awareness of similar genocidal situations elsewhere in the world and to a more widespread divestment from any corporate support of genocide anywhere.
TGSA recognizes the horrific suffering of all those being subjected to violence, war, the destruction of their homes and communities around the world, and the millions of refugees who have been forced to flee from their ancestral homelands. We prayerfully unite ourselves to them in their suffering and also in our calls for all oppression to cease. We pray that justice will ultimately triumph with the attainment of a just and sustainable peace for all those being subjected to illegal and immoral aggression throughout the world.
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