What does Nan Goldin’s Artwork have to do with GIVING VOICE to the Less Powerful of Harvard, StFX, and Palestine?

Follow the Money. 

A commitment to truth and justice marks the resistance of the less powerful against the exercise of institutional power. Again and again, that resistance collides with a familiar quid pro quo: the inscription of billionaire donors’ names on our most beloved cultural and educational institutions, and their influence on policy. Sackler at Harvard University. Dahdaleh at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX). Schulich at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Nan Goldin’s art—and her activism—makes this bargain visible. It exposes how money colonizes culture, how dissent is disciplined, and how institutional leaders retreat from responsibility when power is challenged from the margins.

In January 2026, photographer and activist Nan Goldin confronted the global cultural elite after accusing the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) of censorship. An 11–9 vote by the AGO acquisitions committee reversed a prior commitment to acquire her video installation Stendhal Syndrome. According to The Globe and Mail, AGO trustee and major donor Judy Schulich led the internal effort to block the acquisition, characterizing Goldin’s November 2024 speech at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie as “offensive” and “antisemitic.”

The Schulich name is prominently displayed across Canadian universities—Law at Dalhousie, Engineering at the University of Calgary, Business at York, Medicine and Dentistry at Western, Education at Nipissing—underscoring how donor power travels effortlessly across academic and cultural spaces.

Goldin, who is Jewish, rejected accusations of antisemitism that circulated in some German media after she condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She was criticized for not explicitly referencing Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack. Goldin responded by challenging Germany’s conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism:

“The term antisemitism has been weaponized and lost its meaning. Labeling all criticism of Israel as antisemitic makes it harder to identify and combat genuine hatred against Jews.”

Resistance followed swiftly. As reported in The Globe and Mail, AGO curator John Zeppetelli—who had championed the acquisition—resigned from his position after the committee’s vote.
https://hyperallergic.com/nan-goldin-speaks-out-on-censorship-at-art-gallery-of-ontario/

This pattern—the silencing of dissent, followed by institutional retreat—reappears across public organizations in the educational, health, and cultural sectors.

Celebrating the voices of the less powerful is a central theme in Imagine Antigonish: A Photographic Inquiry into Health Equity (HARP, 2023), particularly in its final chapter, which documents the social epidemic of corporate greed infecting political, academic, cultural, and healthcare institutions. bell hooks reminds us that resistance from the margins is the site of radical possibility—a space where dissent finds its voice.

In my doctoral research on the “Service University,” I used the metaphor of the veranda to situate service work at the margins of the dominant knowledge discourse. Veranda, a Hindi word introduced into English during colonial rule, captures how certain forms of labour and knowledge are simultaneously essential and excluded.

It was while writing Imagine Antigonish that Nan Goldin’s resistance art first came into view for me—part of a broader inquiry into how corporate greed obstructs the social determinants of health equity, including activism, free speech, democracy, and a free press. Goldin’s leadership in protesting Harvard University’s naming policies intensified my own indignation when my alma mater, StFX, followed a similar path.

At StFX, buildings and institutes were named after billionaire donors with well-documented criminal connections—without meaningful consultation or accountability. Although the StFX case did not receive the global attention afforded to Harvard, the dynamics of power and resistance were strikingly similar. In 2024, Harvard chose not to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from two campus buildings, despite years of protest inking the Sackler family to the opioid epidemic driven by Purdue Pharma.

Goldin was a central figure in those protests. Through the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), she mobilized performances and images that exposed institutions accepting Sackler “blood money.” Under sustained pressure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Serpentine Galleries in London, and the Louvre in Paris removed the Sackler name. Harvard did not.
https://hyperallergic.com/despite-years-of-protests-harvard-university-to-keep-sackler-name/

Malcolm Gladwell frames Revenge of the Tipping Point with the opioid crisis, tracing how Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin tipped a public health catastrophe. He highlights Sackler testimony before Congress, including Kathe Sackler’s assertion that there was “nothing that I would have done differently.” Gladwell dissects the family’s use of the passive voice—“our product… has been associated with abuse and addiction”—as a linguistic retreat from responsibility (p. 263).

That same retreat is evident at StFX.

University leadership and the Board of Governors did not respond meaningfully to protests from students, faculty, alumni, the Xaverian Weekly, CAUT, and investigative journalists at The Halifax Examiner, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. Specifically, these protests challenged the accelerating practice of bestowing honours—gold plaques, honorary degrees, naming of buildings and institutes—on mega-donors like Wafic Said and Victor Dahdaleh, both of whom are deeply implicated in corruption activities in the Middle East. 

The Dahdaleh name remains attached to the Institute of Innovation in Health at StFX; Neuroscience and Genomic Medicine at McGill University; and, Health Research at York University.

For the record, Victor Dahdaleh is the named middleman in the corruption scheme that forced Alcoa, one of the world’s largest aluminum companies, to plead guilty in 2014 to U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) charges that it paid millions of dollars to “an international middleman” in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  The Toronto Star/CBC investigation revealed evidence from U.S. officials that Dahdaleh “enriched himself” with $400 million US in mark-ups, and paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Bahraini officials.   (Alcoa and Dahdaleh might well have fared better under today’s DOJ. By executive order, Trump paused the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for four months in 2025 and the new approach of selective prosecution is determined by loyalty to the President and contributions to his personal wealth or pet projects like the White House ballroom.)

This naming practice continues unabashed, as the StFX leadership invents new positions in the name of Dahdaleh, including Practitioner-in-Residence and (without a trace of irony) Research Chair in Democracy and Governance. Two Directors at StFX approached me directly to defend the naming policy of honouring the billionaire donor connected to the Panama Papers and the corruption accomplice for Alcoa: one raised his status to “loyal alumnus” on the basis of receiving an honorary degree (Dahdaleh “earned” a degree from McGill but not from StFX). Another StFX Director put forward “for the greater good” and “everybody is doing it” arguments: that universities in order to survive and compete, must accept donations at direct odds with their foundational values.  For example, donations accepted from the coffers of the fossil fuel industry coincide with establishing a leading-edge interdisciplinary program—BASc in Climate and Environment.

The mainstream media is keeping the resistance-power dynamic on the world stage.  In his acclaimed speech for the World Economic Forum at Davos on January 20, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney referenced the essay “The Power of the Powerless” written in 1978 by the Czech dissident Václav Havel, who later became president. The power of the less powerful must begin with the refusal of ordinary people to live the lies of the powerful elite.  The mobilization of ordinary people (civil society) in Minneapolis against the ICE Gestapo builds on a cultural tradition of mutual aid. The Streets of Minneapolis composed and sung by Bruce Springsteen—the Boss—released on January 29, 2026—received 3.8 million views in slightly less than a day and took the #1 spot in 19 countries. 

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2363328450776891

Being among the less powerful, we can take inspiration from these celebrity resistance movements and know that we can make a difference in the smallest spheres of influence.