NIAS Academic Year & Semester Openings

The Opening of the Second Semester welcomes the incoming second semester fellows and combines their introduction with the launch of a new volume in the NIAS Book Series Studies on Academic Freedom and Epistemic Diversity. Together, these events reflect NIAS’s commitment to fostering an open and inclusive academic community.

On 11 Februari 2026 NIAS welcomed its incoming fellows, alumni, partners and others to our Opening of the Second Semester. Our opening marked the official launch of the NIAS Studies in Academic Freedom and Epistemic Diversity and the publication of the first volume in the book series – Annelies Moors’ groundbreaking and insightful Doing Ethnography: Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity.

More about the NIAS Second Semester Opening of the academic year 2025 – 2026.

For its 2025 – 2026 Opening of the Academic Year, NIAS welcomed Claudine Gay, former Harvard president and Professor of Government and African-American Studies, for a keynote on academic freedom under siege. She addressed how political and economic pressures, including the Trump agenda and the fraught culture of philanthropy, are reshaping universities into spaces where dissent is suppressed and hard-won commitments to inclusion are being undone. The event also brought together scholars, a poet, a judge, and a newspaper editor-in-chief to explore what the academy, the judiciary, and the press share, and how they might ally to protect liberal democracy.

• Read the event-page of the NIAS Opening of the Academic Year 2025-2026
• Read the keynote delivered by Professor Claudine Gay on September 3, 2025
• Watch the powerful conversation with Professor of Ethics of Institutions Ingrid Robeyns on YouTube
• Harvard professor Claudine Gay in conversation with Marcia Luyten (YouTube)

• Poet Maria Barnas, Professor of Administration of Justice and Legal Philosophy Jonathan Soeharno, and Trouw editor-in-chief Wendelmoet Boersema join this panel to discuss the missions and vulnerabilities of three pillars of liberal democracy — the academy, the judiciary, and the press. Together they examine what protections these institutions need most and how they can work together to establish and maintain them. Listen to the audiofile on YouTube.

For its 2024 – 2025 Opening of the Academic Year, NIAS hosted Michael Ignatieff (former president of the Central European University, which was forced out of Hungary under Viktor Orbán) for a keynote on the state of academic freedom worldwide. He warned that universities are particularly vulnerable because they lack a broad public constituency ready to defend them. The event brought together scholars, legal thinkers, and journalists to explore how academia and other pillars of civil society might join forces to push back against the rising tide of illiberal pressure.

• Read the event page of the NIAS Opening of the Academic Year 2024-2025
• Michael Ignatieff on Academic Freedom: What’s At Stake? (And Who Cares?)
• The Academy and the Rule of Law by Tamar de Waal
• The Academy as a Pillar of Liberal Democracy – Jan Willem Duyvendak

For its 2023–2024 Opening of the Academic Year, NIAS explored the nature, meaning, and limits of academic freedom. A theme made extra special by the simultaneous launch of the book Academic Freedoms: What is at Stake?, edited by Lukas M. Verburgt and NIAS Director Jan Willem Duyvendak. Speakers including virologist Marion Koopmans and journalist Saar Slegers examined pressures on academic freedom from social media, authoritarian regimes, and beyond. The event made a compelling case that academic freedom is not one thing but many — plural, contested, and urgently in need of defence.

Read more about the NIAS Opening of the Academic Year 2023 – 2024