The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights was founded in 1986 by two Concordia professors with a mission to prevent atrocities through education, policy advice and public engagement.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Concordia University has closed a think tank on genocide and human rights amid a budget crisis, much to the dismay of supporters such as former senator and retired general Roméo Dallaire.
The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights was shuttered in early November, owing to what the university said was a need to reduce its budget deficit. Concordia has been hit hard by recent federal policy changes regarding international students and the Quebec government’s decision to hike tuition fees at Montreal’s English-language universities.
The institute, known as MIGS, was not a traditional academic centre, which led to friction with the university’s administration. It was focused on policy discussions and their application in the world and was not primarily engaged in scholarly research.
“In the last few years, the academic orientations of Concordia researchers involved in the area of human rights had diverged from projects taken on by MIGS,” said Vannina Maestracci, a Concordia spokeswoman.
General Roméo Dallaire served as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.Supplied
Mr. Dallaire, who led UN forces in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, was a senior fellow at MIGS. He said he was disheartened to learn that the university couldn’t find a way to keep the think tank operating.
“What really disappointed me was the statement from the university that MIGS did not meet the human rights focus of the Concordia researchers and wasn’t engaged enough in the academic dimension of the university,” he said. “A think tank that does advocacy at that scale takes research and actually makes it even more applicable, more useful, more known to people.”
He said MIGS was still active in research on subjects such as mass atrocities, “which is incredibly pertinent in these times, where we see massive abuses of human rights and extreme violence.”
Mr. Dallaire said he spoke with Concordia president Graham Carr in an effort to persuade him to keep the centre open, but his efforts were unsuccessful.
“We couldn’t really break the log jam on the research side,” he said.
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Concordia has made more than $35-million in spending cuts since last spring. Quebec’s move to increase tuition for out-of-province students at Montreal’s English-language universities to $12,000 from $9,000 annually hit the school particularly hard, with applications from that cohort down about 30 per cent this year.
Even with the closing of MIGS, which cost about $300,000 a year to run, the university is expected to run a deficit of $34.5-million this year.
“It’s in that context that we made the decision to gradually close MIGS last spring, and as it’s the core of our academic institution, we always privilege work done by Concordia researchers,” Ms. Maestracci said. “Faculty and researchers are still studying human rights and genocide.”
MIGS was founded in 1986 by two Concordia professors, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, with a mission to prevent atrocities through education, policy advice and public engagement.
Kyle Matthews, the institute’s executive director and a former UN official, said that under the direction of Prof. Chalk and Mr. Dallaire the think tank was home to the Will to Intervene Project, an attempt to make operational the concept of the responsibility to protect. Some of its proposals on the subject were adopted by the U.S. government in the Obama era.
“We began to do a lot more public-facing work. So not writing academic journals, not doing workshop seminars, but really engaging in public policy and trying to get governments, based on Roméo Dallaire’s experience in Rwanda, to not sit idle when we see atrocity crimes,” Mr. Matthews said.
John Packer, the director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa, said he was taken aback by the news that MIGS had been shut down. He said it was a relatively inexpensive outfit to run, with just a couple of staff and some office space. It had been able to convene the kinds of discussions that universities are normally keen to attract to boost their public profile, such as the Montreal International Security Summit held last month, he said.
“One of the criticisms of universities historically has been the ivory tower, disconnected from the real world. So you want to have places like MIGS that create an intersection with things that are actually happening,” Prof. Packer said. “It seems to be shooting yourself in the foot.”