{"id":156953,"date":"2023-07-03T16:13:39","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T14:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=156953"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:26:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:26:51","slug":"report-no-out-of-control-woke-culture-at-uva","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2023\/07\/03\/report-no-out-of-control-woke-culture-at-uva\/","title":{"rendered":"Report: No out-of-control woke culture at UvA"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to an independent committee, there are no wrongdoings affecting academic freedom at the UvA faculty where anti-woke lecturer Laurens Buijs was working.<\/p>\n

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Laurens Buijs as a guest in the Youtube channel of Flavio Pasquino, a self-declared complot theorist.<\/span><\/p>

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Lecturer Laurens Buijs appealed to the whistleblowers regulation after having written an opinion piece<\/a> for university magazine Folia<\/em> in January. In the piece, he claimed that \u2018non-binary\u2019 and the \u2018obsession with personal pronouns\u2019 are an \u2019empty hype\u2019. It caused a lot of controversy. Several UvA students called for Buijs to be banned from teaching. Buijs was later suspended<\/a>, after he verbally abused several colleagues on social media.<\/p>\n

The whistleblower accused the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (University of Amsterdam), where he was teaching at the time, of \u2018severe institutional wrongdoings\u2019 that posed an \u2018imminent and fundamental threat to academic freedom and the quality of education and research\u2019. He added that there is an \u2018out-of-control woke culture\u2019, in which scholars are in constant fear of being fired.<\/p>\n

An independent committee led by Carel Stolker, former rector of Leiden University, investigated the allegations by Buijs and published<\/a> a report last Thursday. It states that the 53 researchers, students, teachers, administrators and employees consulted by the committee feel sufficiently free.<\/p>\n

Academic freedom<\/h2>

The committee also investigated if Buijs\u2019s own academic freedom was unacceptably and structurally infringed. \u201cThe committee did not find any evidence for this either\u201d, the report reads.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the committee does feel that the university needs to monitor academic freedom, as it\u2019s coming under increasing pressure. The report contains a few recommendations to this end, for example warning the university to \u2018stay away from woke versus anti-woke disputes\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\t

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