After nearly 12 years in the role, Meric Gertler stepped down as president of U of T, with Melanie Woodin, the previous Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science, succeeding him as U of T’s new president. 

For Woodin to make good on her promise to “deepen U of T’s contribution to human, social and economic well-being,” the Editorial Board feels that it is imperative that we not only reflect on Gertler’s legacy, but learn from it. 

Therefore, as we usher in the Woodin presidency, we want to better understand Gertler’s place within our community’s history. Most importantly, we want to understand where he went wrong and what lessons new U of T leadership can take from his tenure. 

It’s hard to deny that Gertler’s administration played a key role in elevating U of T’s global profile, as U of T remains internationally revered as a leading global higher education institution. However, Gertler’s leadership was far from perfect. Notable moments during his presidency include the faculty controversies surrounding Robert Reisz and Jordan Peterson, fossil fuel divestment campaigns, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) labour protests, and, most recently, mass student movements protesting the genocide in Palestine. 

In tracking Gertler’s response to key events over the past decade, The Varsity’s Editorial Board believes that Gertler’s priority has not been the well-being of students and faculty, nor has it been the preservation of civil discourse. Instead, we feel as though he has placed the institution’s reputation, revenue generation, and funding models above all else. 

An international institution

Gertler’s emphasis on the university’s global standing is perhaps most clearly reflected in U of T’s expanding international presence. U of T ranked 21st among universities worldwide in 2024. In 2025, Times Higher Education gave the university a score of 91.8 for its international outlook. 

U of T’s international presence was reflected in the increase in international students over Gertler’s tenure. International students made up 30 per cent of the graduate and undergraduate population across all three campuses in the 2023–2024 academic year — nearly two and a half times more compared to 2012 numbers, before he took office, when they accounted for 13.97 per cent.

As the number of international students has increased during Gertler’s tenure, so have international student tuition fees, which have risen by a steep 84 per cent during his tenure. Tuition accounts for 65 per cent of the university’s total revenue, of which international student tuition alone contributes to 42 per cent — despite representing 30 per cent of the student population.

The fact that U of T continues to charge international students upwards of $60,000 per year, despite calls from the University of Toronto Students’ Union and the International Student Advocacy Network to reduce tuition — especially during Canada’s cost of living crisis — suggests to us that the university would prefer to reap the reputational and financial benefits of a large international student body without addressing the financial struggles and well-being of those students. 

The Editorial Board believes that the duty to keep U of T financially afloat should not fall primarily on students. International students should not be used as a crutch to compensate for the government’s shortcomings. If Gertler’s administration wanted U of T to be seen as a global institution, it should have acknowledged the students’ demands and addressed the root cause of this flawed funding model. Instead of succumbing to government funding cuts, the U of T president must stand alongside advocates to mobilize against a provincial government that continues to defund education. 

Controversial professors and academic misconduct

Under Gertler’s tenure, several issues regarding faculty conduct at U of T have come to public attention, most notably the cases of professors Robert Reisz and Jordan Peterson.

Reisz has been a paleontology professor at UTM since 1975. In 2022, The Varsity reported on allegations from two of Reisz’s former students of sexually inappropriate remarks and racially motivated microaggressions while they worked in his lab. The university commissioned an independent legal counsel to investigate the validity of these claims, which ultimately found that most of the allegations were substantiated “under the Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy.”

Despite the counsel substantiating the students’ claims, Reisz remains employed by U of T as of September 2025. Our Editorial Board cannot help but feel frustrated by his continued employment and Gertler’s unwillingness to take a public stand, which comes at the cost of student safety. 

Now, we also have to address the infamous Peterson. Employed at U of T from 1998 to 2022, he is now classified as a Professor Emeritus — a retired professor who retains a formal connection to their institution. Peterson drew public attention after releasing a YouTube video in 2016 and protesting on campus, claiming that Bill C-16, legislation that added gender expression and gender identity as protected identities against discrimination and hate propaganda, would violate academic freedom and free speech.

Students held teach-ins and rallies against Peterson. And, U of T warned Peterson that refusing to use students’ preferred pronouns would contradict the Ontario Human Rights code and his faculty responsibilities. Yet, they never formally cut ties with Peterson.

It was only in January 2022 that he resigned from U of T and was made a Professor Emeritus. All the way until his resignation, students have spoken out against him, even in our paper. Yet, much like with Reisz, Gertler remained largely silent on Peterson’s controversy. 

In an interview with Times Higher Education in October 2022, Gertler referred to Peterson as a “provocateur extraordinaire.” Despite student calls for his removal, Gertler justified Peterson’s continued affiliation in the interview, and said: “if we are doing the right thing, we should be creating a platform to debate the positions that somebody like Professor Peterson would bring to the public realm, and that’s what we did.” But our Editorial Board argues that it’s one thing to protect the academic sanctity of discourse, and another thing to debate about students’ human rights. 

We believe that Gertler’s response to these controversial professors has been abysmal. Neither Reisz nor Peterson has been removed from U of T in any meaningful capacity. Reisz, who has been documented harassing students, has been ignored to preserve the university’s reputation, and Peterson, who discriminates against trans students, has been protected under the guise of promoting free speech. This inconsistency regarding the role of the university administration in campus debate becomes especially egregious when we consider how other professors have been silenced for speaking out on the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Labour unions and wage disputes

Beyond individual faculty members, a defining issue during Gertler’s tenure was negotiations with U of T’s staff unions. Two main unions represent workers at the university: CUPE 3261 — which represents service workers — and CUPE 3902, representing instructors, teaching assistants, and exam invigilators. 

Disputes between Gertler and these unions began in March 2018, when Premier Doug Ford made large cuts to education funding, creating a wave of strikes across Ontario universities, including one from CUPE 3902. In January 2020, CUPE 3902 called on the university to open negotiations about salary increases, and no agreement was reached until January 2021. 

In a November 2023 CBC article, Gertler expressed concerns about how Ford’s cuts would affect the way Ontario universities are perceived globally. Still, after nearly five years of silence, he did not acknowledge how such cuts would affect students and faculty.

In 2022, CUPE 3261 would go on strike as well, due to disputes over an increase in contract staff who earn less than non-contract workers, have fewer health care benefits, and have less job security. The union reached a last-minute tentative agreement with the university only “72 hours before their strike deadline of November 21.” 

The agreement came a day after CUPE 3261 held a campaign in front of Sidney Smith called “Good Jobs U of T” to raise awareness about job losses and low pay due to contracting out positions. The university’s decision to cut the pay and benefits of the university’s caretaking staff began in 2015. 

It is also difficult to reconcile these cuts as the university’s operating revenue increased from $2.16 billion in the 2015–2016 academic year, to $3.52 billion in the 2024––2025 academic year. With this under consideration, we are forced to ask how the university could not afford to increase, let alone maintain, its staff’s salaries?

Gertler repeatedly failed to address the concerns of faculty and staff until he was pushed into a corner by the accumulation of years of petitions, open letters, and strikes. As such, it is clear to us that he did not lead U of T with concern for the community, as leading with care would be reflected in union negotiations and the proper treatment of staff.

Mental health on campus

While U of T is known for its academic rigour, it also carries a reputation for overworking students and providing little support to help them manage the pressure. U of T students have often relied on online forums to express concerns about their well-being due to the lack of accessible mental health services. 

Three students died by suicide at the Bahen Institute of Science and Technology from 2018–2019. In 2020, another student died by suicide off-campus. Although Gertler expressed condolences and implemented policies for better student support, U of T’s mental health support model remains police-based. Student advocacy groups have called on U of T to defund campus police and implement “anti-carceral community safety initiatives.” 

In a 2019 letter to students, faculty and staff, Gertler outlined several steps the university would take in response to the suicides. These included calling on the provincial government to increase funding for mental health resources, instructing the Expert Panel on Undergraduate Student Educational Experience to consider mental health issues in its decisions, and coordinating with Toronto health services to support student care. Physical guard rails were also added to the Bahen Institute in 2019 to prevent further attempts. 

Despite these new policies, in September 2019, a UTM student was handcuffed by Campus Safety while seeking mental health support and was escorted to a hospital via police vehicle, which Gertler’s administration only addressed in a 2022 Campus Safety report. 

In subsequent years, many student unions and organizations have called on the university to defund the police-based model or at least implement models with de-escalation techniques for mental health crises. 

A 2024 Campus Safety Report announced that Mental Health Acts — characterized as responses to students experiencing a mental health crisis — increased from 56 incidents in 2023 to 89 incidents in 2024. The same report found that only four officers participated in the optional “Mental Health and Violence Risk Workshop,” and five in the “Scenario Based Mental Health and De-Escalation Training,” all while 23 officers attended “Preparedness and Protest Management Training,” highlighting the priorities of many of the officers.

By providing mental health training as an optional module for Campus Safety, there is no way students can trust that officers are equipped with this skill. Campus Safety is one of the few resources offered to students by the administration in times of immediate crisis, and the Editorial Board believes that having supplementary mental health training instead of essential mental health training is an oversight. Gertler’s policies ultimately ring hollow to us when precisely investigated, simply an illusion of care.

Student calls for divestment

Postsecondary institutions have long been hubs for social movements, and U of T is no exception. Climate advocacy groups on campus, such as Toronto350 and UofT350, have been campaigning for fossil fuel divestment since 2012. 

In 2016, Gertler’s administration published a report that rejected their recommendations, which directed the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM) to adopt more ethical investment policies that “determin[e] investment worthiness on a firm-by-firm rather than industry-wide basis.”

After years of protests and rallies, including those by advocacy groups like Climate Justice UofT, Gertler announced in 2021 that the university would divest from the four billion dollars in fossil fuel investments remaining with UTAM at that time. 

However, three months prior to the divestment commitments, UTAM — which was created to manage U of T’s endowment, expendable funds investment pool, and pension plan — transferred the management of its pension fund to the University Pension Plan (UPP), a joint pension plan across several Ontario universities. We believe this move was a strategic effort to relocate the funds into a business structure that would obscure the public details of these investments, making it more difficult for students to hold the university accountable for the 10.2 billion dollar pension fund it transferred to the UPP. 

Finally, it’s impossible to discuss the Gertler administration without addressing the pro-Palestine encampment on King’s College Circle, the People’s Circle for Palestine — one of the longest-running pro-Palestine encampments at a Canadian university.

Gertler categorically condemned the October 7 attacks in a formal statement on October 18. Meanwhile, with Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and the genocide that followed, Gertler maintained that the university would retain “neutrality on issues of scholarly debate.” 

In light of its promises to civil discourse and “neutrality,” we believe that the university should never have threatened police action against students protesting genocide via a court injunction, a view made clear in our June 2024 Editorial.

We are especially perplexed by the dismissal of former UTSC Imam, Omar Patel, for allegedly sharing an anti-Israel Instagram story, which Patel denies. When Patel was let go, there was no transparent investigation — distancing the university from controversy rather than engaging Muslim students and the wider U of T community. 

Reisz continues to be employed, Peterson got a slap on the wrist, yet Patel was forced out with no further statement. This inconsistency baffles us.

Rather than aligning with student demands, the university has historically ignored student social justice movements until increased federal and institutional support. 

The South African divestment movement at U of T began in 1983, but the first major protest for full divestment on campus took place on March 4, 1987, when students occupied President George McConnell’s office after unsuccessful negotiations. It was not until an optional request from the Canadian government to divest from companies involved in segregation or pay inequality in 1988 that McConnell’s administration finally divested. 

By eventually joining much of the world in divesting from South African apartheid, U of T contributed to the pressure that led to the end of the apartheid regime. With the privilege of hindsight, U of T knows it made the right decision to listen to its students and divest from injustice. 

The International Court of Justice has warned Israel to comply with the Genocide Convention, and human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Why should the university wait to side with the overwhelming student voice for justice and peace? How much longer must U of T remain complicit in genocide?

Melanie Woodin and Gertler’s legacy

U of T is a public institution, an educational home for thousands of students and staff, and yet Gertler has led U of T like a business. 

Gertler is a skilled businessman — he increased U of T’s revenue and raised our international presence. Gertler also knows how to maintain the university’s reputation: staying silent to appease donors and the government, leaving negotiations to the 11th hour, and implementing ultimately performative policies. 

Being president of U of T is no small task. However, the president represents more than the operational and business side. The president represents and serves the faculty and student body, and it seems to us that Gertler has neglected the human aspect of being president. 

Gertler’s exploitation of international students, passivity with violent professors, attacks on unions, inadequate mental health strategy, and indifference towards the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, were not only avoidable mistakes, but lessons to learn from. 

Melanie Woodin, as you begin your tenure as president, we must ask: will your presidency be a continuation of Gertler’s legacy, or will it mark a shift towards justice for our staff, students, and wider global community?