{"id":169797,"date":"2024-06-18T15:05:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T13:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=169797"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:27:24","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:27:24","slug":"dutch-university-rectors-have-issued-a-threat-to-academic-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2024\/06\/18\/dutch-university-rectors-have-issued-a-threat-to-academic-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Dutch university rectors have issued a threat to academic freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

The letter signed by all the rectors of Dutch universities on severing ties with Israel\u00a0is an insult to academic freedom, states professor in Sociology Willem Schinkel in an opinion piece.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The encampment after the protestors left.<\/span><\/p>

\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDaan Stam<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>

The conjoined rectors of Dutch universities have issued a threat to academic freedom. In a letter<\/a> signed also by our rector, the administrators of our institutions make clear that they will protect what they see as academic freedom, unless the state tells them otherwise. The letter states that Dutch universities will not cut ties with Israeli institutions, unless asked to do so by the state. Both parts of that statement are an insult to academic freedom: not cutting ties with Israeli institutions means supporting and legitimating institutions that actively undermine academic freedom in Israel and Palestine. And changing course the moment the state deems it advisable to do so signals a blatant disregard for the fundamental nature of academic freedom in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s first be clear about one thing. Academic freedom is not an academic version of the right to free speech. It is a relation between an employer (the university) and its employees (teachers and researchers) that exists to ensure that teachers and researchers can do their job in accordance with evaluative criteria set by their peers and unhindered by forms of power, whether these are wealthy trustees, university boards, dominant professors, corporations, or politicians and the state. The main vehicle for safeguarding academic freedom as it developed in the last century is tenure. Academic freedom, then, has been under attack for a much longer time, since universities have over the course of decades moved to a significant number of flexible staff, who will be less likely to speak out against power if their new contract is pending.<\/p>\n\n\t

\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t
\n\t\t\u2018Academic freedom is not an academic version of the right to free speech\u2019\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

Show a spine<\/h2>

With the recent letter, a new threat to academic freedom has been issued. It is now clear that university administrators see the state as ultimate arbiter in matters concerning the academic community. Emphasising academic freedom and, in the same piece, suggesting that they will only cut ties \u2018when our government advises us to do so\u2019 is a laughable contradiction and intellectually dishonest. With an extreme right government in the making, this political servility bodes ill. What other demands by the state will cause universities to yield to political pressure? When will they show a spine? What lessons does history teach us? Recent history, we are sorry to say, teaches us that the only times university boards are ready to confront government are when money is concerned. They\u2019ll do anything to ensure more research funding and to protest cuts.<\/p>\n

Dance to the tune of politicians<\/h2>

Who are these rectors speaking to? And on behalf of whom are they speaking? By by-passing academic communities and their consultation bodies, they speak as administrators, not as academics. And by opting for a newspaper op-ed and speaking not to their community but to a general public they signal to the incoming government that they will merely mewl \u2018how high?\u2019 when politicians say \u2018jump\u2019. They will dance to the tune of politicians. Similarly, as our rector said in Erasmus Magazine<\/a> earlier this year, responding to comments that a Ukrainian flag had been raised but not a Palestinian one: \u201c\u2026 there was a clear call from the Dutch government to start a boycott. It explicitly asked all Dutch universities to cut ties with Russia and Russian universities and to raise the Ukrainian flag in solidarity.\u201d Rector Bredenoord later said she regretted this, but her recent collaboration with the joint rectors amounts to a repetition of this logic. Granting the state an immediate role in academic affairs, a role not mediated by democratic consultation, but translated top-down, is a clear violation of academic freedom \u2013 of real<\/em> academic freedom, not the empty slogan rectors summon when they repackage submission to the state as faux-academic piety.<\/p>\n

Lack of understanding<\/h2>

That our university administrators don\u2019t have a clue as to what academic freedom means also becomes apparent in the absurd equation between academic freedom and ties with Israeli institutions complicit in apartheid, colonialism, and genocide. Not only do they fundamentally misrepresent the call for an institutional boycott<\/a>, which does not bar individual scholars from working with individual Israeli colleagues; they also display a willful lack of understanding of the realities of Israeli universities<\/a> and their ongoing and enthusiastic participation in Israeli state policies of dispossession, apartheid, criminalization, and the current genocide. For a good overview, I refer the rectors here to Maya Wind\u2019s excellent study of these complicities titled Towers of Ivory and Steel<\/em>. They are undoubtedly aware of this book and its contents, as our university recently hosted Maya Wind<\/a>, as they are of the overwhelming evidence that academic freedom is severely lacking at the Israeli universities. Those curious to see what Israeli institutions do when their state is committing a genocide, should look no further than this promotional video by Reichmann University<\/a>, in which Israeli university administrators proudly show their and their academic community\u2019s full support for the extreme violence against Palestinians. Obediently churning out war propaganda, rallying behind the very troops with a sordid history of war crimes and atrocity crimes, and proudly claiming their allegiance to the Israeli state: these are the universities our rectors are eager to dialogue with.<\/p>\n

Political choice to disregard expertise<\/h2>

By consistently reducing the curtailing of academic freedom in Israel to a matter of opinion, the rectors display a blatant disregard for the scientific and legal consensus<\/a>. A shockingly anti-intellectual ignorance about the very meaning of academic freedom is mirrored by an equally ignorant stance on what we know about the complicity of Israeli institutions of higher education. Yet this is a learned ignorance. It is, in fact, a political choice to disregard expertise in this field and to reduce it to the level of opinion in a \u2018two sides\u2019 showdown. This is the format in which our university administrators like to capture the world. It gives them the comfortable role of facilitators of \u2018dialogues\u2019 in which \u2018polarisation\u2019 \u2013 conceived as inherently problematic \u2013 is to be smoothed over. Meanwhile students\u2019 rightful protest of what they recognize as the university\u2019s complicity with Israeli universities is systematically translated into a vocabulary of emotions, thereby translating a fundamentally public question into the language of private feelings. There is nothing private about living through the most well publicised genocide in history, however \u2013 and pretending that dialogues focused on safety and feelings are an adequate response to our responsibilities as an academic community is a depoliticisation strategy that is sure to fail.<\/p>\n\n\t

\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t
\n\t\t\u2018The answer [\u2026]is that they failed to act, failed to take responsibility, and failed to make the tiniest of difference in the lives of millions of Palestinians\u2019\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n

Disrupt business as usual<\/h2>

Most of all, it ensures the smooth functioning of business as usual. The main reason for rectors\u2019 willingness to collaborate with what their own experts call a \u2018textbook case<\/a>\u2019 of genocide is that research funding is at stake, specifically in the form of various ERC-funded Horizon 2020 projects. Similarly, at our university, the board\u2019s real solidarities are exemplified by the clearing of the student encampment \u2013 sneakily conducted on a Sunday, maximally out of sight, though recorded by the new CvB CCTV \u2013 to make way for a \u2018Wellbeing Week\u2019 and a \u2018HeartBeat Festival\u2019 (I\u2019m not kidding, and it isn\u2019t funny). Their solidarities lie not with students exercising their right to demonstrate (which means: to disrupt business as usual as a democratic right), not with academic freedom, and not with human rights, as is so piously proclaimed in the letter in Trouw<\/em>. Their real alliance, it becomes ever more evident, lies with the continuation of business as usual in times of \u2013 and in the service of \u2013 genocide.<\/p>\n

And so, nine months into a horrifying textbook case of genocide on the Palestinian people \u2013 itself an intensification of the 75-years old, ongoing nakba<\/a> \u2013 it is clear what the members of our executive boards will have to tell their children and grandchildren when they ask what they were doing when a genocide was unfolding. The answer, based on the rectors\u2019 letter, is that they failed<\/em> to act, failed <\/em>to take responsibility, and failed<\/em> to make the tiniest of difference in the lives of millions of Palestinians.<\/p>\n

History teaches us lessons. How do we judge rectors who, in the South African anti-apartheid struggles in the 1980s, continued to work with criminals pending political directives to do otherwise, and called it\u2026 academic freedom?<\/p>\n\n\t

\n\t\t\n\t\t
\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Read more<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t