Vancouver’s Langara College confirmed Friday that a professor who faced public outcry for describing the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel as “amazing” and “brilliant” is no longer an employee.
However, the school said the move was not a direct result of Natalie Knight’s widely reported comments.
Knight had been on leave since November, after she was recorded speaking at an Oct. 29 pro-Palestine rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she described the Oct. 7 attacks as an “amazing, brilliant offensive.”
Word of the dismissal came just days after Knight, an English instructor and Indigenous curriculum consultant, said she had been reinstated by the college.
At a Tuesday rally near the college, Knight told supporters she had been “reinstated as an instructor with no disciplinary actions, which means we won,” student publication The Langara Voice reported.
“It means we won. It means I did nothing wrong. It means none of you are doing anything wrong.”
On Friday, the institution issued a statement confirming — without directly naming Knight — that an employee who had made “widely reported comments” at an off-campus event in October was “no longer an employee of Langara College.”
The college said that while it condemned the comments, it had conducted an internal investigation and determined “that the employee’s comments were not clearly outside the bounds of protected expression.”
Knight was to be reinstated “with the expectation they would comply with the College’s policies and initiatives which support a safe, respectful, and inclusive learning and working environment” and was “expected to take care to ensure any future remarks could not reasonably be interpreted as celebrating violence against civilians,” according to the college.
“The employee proceeded to engage in activities contrary to the expectations laid out by the College and as a result this employee is no longer an employee of Langara College,” the school said.
The statement goes on to condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia, and pledge to provide an environment where all students can feel safe on campus.
Knight came to B.C. from the U.S. and holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University, where she was awarded the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal.
She has previously made headlines as a key organizer in blockades in Vancouver in support of Wet’suwet’en opponents of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
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