TU Delft passed columnist’s name to police

A lecturer at TU Delft wrote columns about climate protest in 2022. Because of that his name ended up on a list of activists that TU Delft passed to the police in 2024, university paper Delta reports.

Why don’t students glue themselves to the campus to protest the influence of the fossil fuel industry on TU Delft? Why don’t they smear a statue? Delft lecturer Bob van Vliet asked these questions aloud in 2022. He discussed them with students and wrote a column for the university paper Delta.

Because of that column the university’s security service passed his name to the police. That happened two years after the column appeared, ahead of a demonstration in 2024 that the police considered ‘risky’.

Van Vliet was not involved in the demonstration in question. It is, however, known that he is a climate activist, Delta writes. Earlier he had taken part in protests.

The university also shared the names of four student activists with the police, it emerged earlier from Delta’s digging. The Dutch Data Protection Authority asked TU Delft for clarification and last week the university acknowledged that it was wrong.

Journalists’ union NVJ, human rights organisation Amnesty International and the Association of Higher Education Media warn of a chilling effect: if columns or demonstrations attract police attention, that could discourage participation in public debate.