The Cromwell Report: Professor Joe Carens on why it can’t be taken seriously

The abrupt withdrawal of an offer to Dr. Valentina Azarova to become the director of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law’s Director of the International Human Rights Program continues to be a source of controversy. After several Canadian newspapers published a series of stories claiming that the offer to Dr. Azarova was withdrawn after David Spiro, a sitting judge on the Tax Court of Canada, contacted the then Dean of the Law Faculty, Ed Iacobucci, and informed him that she was an unworthy hire because of her scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Judge Spiro, before joining the bench, had been a director of a pro-Israel advocacy group, The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. (Ultra Vires, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, maintains a website with links with the numerous articles and social media posts and tweets that have been written about the controversy since it first broke out in September 2020). In an effort to quell the controversy, Meric Gertler, President of the University of Toronto, appointed Thomas Cromwell, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, to conduct a review of what happened. Justice Cromwell’s report was released to the public on March 29, apparently two weeks after it was completed. Justice Cromwell, despite the limitations he placed on his own findings, namely, that he was not in a position to resolve the conflicting factual accounts regarding what happened, ultimately concluded that he was not prepared to conclude that the former Dean acted to appease pressure from donors. Instead, Justice Cromwell concluded that the Dean sincerely believed that immigration rules posed an insurmountable hurdle for hiring Dr. Azarova, who was not a Canadian citizen. The President of the University seized upon the Cromwell Report’s conclusions, issuing a letter in which he expressed his view that the Report was a complete exoneration of the University and the former Dean’s conduct in the Azarova affair.

I expect at a later date that I will give my own analysis of what is wrong with the Cromwell Report. In brief, I believe that the Reports conclusions go well beyond what can be supported by the facts the Report relates and the limitations that Justice Cromwell imposed upon himself with respect to resolving factual disputes. In the meantime, however, a retired colleague in Political Science, the political theorist Joseph Carens, kindly shared with me his executive summary of a much more detailed criticism of the Cromwell Report that he has prepared but is not yet complete.

In my opinion, his executive summary provides more than sufficient reasons for an objective observer to look at the Cromwell Report with a fair degree of suspicion, and that instead of representing an honest effort to resolve what actually happened, the Cromwell Report was just another step in covering up serious wrongdoing at the University of Toronto, and another case of academic administrators failing to respect academic freedom, especially when if it relates to Palestine and Israel.