University of Toronto’s Trevor Young is the Dean of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, the Vice-Provost of Relations with Health Care Institutions, the Professor and former Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, and Senior Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). In June 8, 2021, Dean Young wrote an open letter responding to local responses to tragedies in Israel-Palestine, including rising “anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of racial and religious discrimination.”

Young described the Faculty of Medicine’s efforts to curtail this discrimination, but he also reinforced their commitment to academic freedom and freedom of speech: “We have received calls for some academic appointees to be removed from their roles within the Faculty due to allegations of anti-Semitism relating to social media posts made in their personal capacity. We do not intend to remove any appointees based on these events. This is a recognition that faculty members are entitled to exercise their right to academic freedom and freedom of speech, including expressing their personal perspectives on social media, subject only to limits set out in applicable U of T policy and human rights laws.”

In October 2022, Dean Young discussed the Faculty of Medicine’s antisemitism in the mid-20^th century, in which the school capped the number of Jewish students in each year’s incoming Doctor of Medicine class. He said: “I want to publicly recognize that the Faculty of Medicine’s actions to exclude Jews from the medical profession were wrong and morally reprehensible… I acknowledge and accept that these actions caused widespread harm to the Jewish community, to the medical students who endured the antisemitic environment, and to those who were excluded entirely.”