On a cold day last March, a few days before reading week, several hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators besieged a meeting of the senate at York University, its highest academic decision-making body. Chanting slogans and beating on doors and walls, the protestors, led by a group called Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demanded that the school’s president, Mamdouh Shoukri, come out and listen to them. They wanted to tell him why York should join a U.K.-based movement to launch an academic boycott of Israel. One of the ringleaders, shouting into a bullhorn, threatened to damage the property and blockade buses if they didn’t get their way.

After about an hour, Shoukri gave in and agreed to meet with the group. “Inshallah,” said one protestor gleefully to the members of the senate, who were forced to file out of their meeting room to let the students in. At the sight of Shoukri, however, the joyful tumult quieted. At 61, he’s tall and lean with short-cropped, steel grey hair; he favours ele­gant pinstripe suits that complement his frame. Born and raised in Egypt, Shoukri came to Canada in the late 1970s to do graduate work in mechanical engineering at McMaster. In 2007, he became the first Muslim president of a Canadian university. He’s often described as the “new face” of York, whose student body, one of the most ethnically diverse in the country, is increasingly drawn from the immigrant communities of the 905.

Shoukri listened to the protestors’ arguments, then told them there was no way he could endorse a boycott. It would be a mistake, he said, to blame a university for the actions of its country’s government. And by telling faculty members with whom they could and could not collaborate, he would be violating York’s commitment to academic freedom. “Instead of York being known as a university where people debate things through fighting and arguing and shouting,” Shoukri said, “I want this to be the place where meaningful debate happens, debate at the highest level.”

Ahmed Habib, one of the leading pro-Palestinian voices on campus, spoke up. An activist, journalist and Iraqi refugee, Habib said, “Dr. Shoukri, I know you have a disdain for shouting and screaming, but otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to meet with you.”

Shoukri’s gaze narrowed. He asked the students if they had ever invited him to a meeting or discussion group. “Your office is on the ninth floor,” Habib replied. “You’re in an ivory tower.” Shoukri bridled. He walks through the campus every day to make himself available to students. “You could have invited me to your meetings,” he said. “But you never have. Do you want a photo op, or do you want to discuss the issues? If you want to discuss the issues, ask for an appointment.”

Shoukri never faced anything like this at McMaster, where he served as dean of engineering and more recently as vice-president of research and international affairs. His most significant accomplishment at Mac was transforming a derelict Hamilton factory into a research centre the school calls Innovation Park, which supports such areas as nanotechnology and biotechnology. Shoukri represents exactly what administrators want to communicate about York: its cultural diversity, corporate-friendly attitude and forward-thinking approach to higher education. He also comes with the reputation of a diplomat—a leader with a natural ability to reach across divides.

But some interpret his peacemaking skills as a weakness. They worry that he’s too conciliatory, too passive to be effective as president. He inherits from his predecessor, Lorna Marsden, a legacy of conflict and mistrust among students, faculty and administrators, and an intensely uncivil political culture. Has he taken on an impossible job?

Even Torontonians who have never visited the city’s “other university” know its reputation: ugly architecture (the raw brutalist style of the Ross Building led students to dub it “the Kremlin”), low academic standards (“If you can hold a fork,” the saying goes, “you can go to York”), remote northern location (it’s so far from anything, it has its own shopping mall, York Lanes) and hothouse culture of left-wing politics, where you can still hear the phrase “Marxist economy” uttered without a titter. In the popular imagination, York is a Communist Shangri-La run by bearded, tenured radicals, Trotskyist unions and window-smashing hooligans.