Watch the NIAS Opening of the Academic Year 2024/2025
Watch the NIAS Opening of the Academic Year 2024/2025 with contributions by Tamar de Waal, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Yvonne Zonderop, Miriyam Aouragh, Marijn Kruk and Gulnaz Sibgatulinna. The contributions by Michael Ignatieff, Tamar de Waal and Jan Willem Duyvendak are also avaliable in Dutch, in the Dutch Review of Books’ special issue on academia and academic freedom: Academia Quo Vadis?
Across the globe, recent years have seen academic institutions come under growing political pressure. From Hungary to Poland, from Brazil to Turkey, and increasingly also in the US and Western Europe, forced closures, armed sieges, nationalizations, mass layoffs and defunding and licensing initiatives are on the increase. Universities have been battlegrounds for bottom-up generational protest and political change forever, and – as is in full view today – will surely remain so for as long as they remain credible and vibrant liberal democratic institutions. The political reaction now building momentum across liberal democracies, however, appears to be materially different: post- or illiberal, top-down, and in a fight not to make academia live up to its democratizing potential but, on the contrary, to erode academic freedoms as well as the resolve and means to actively promote them as the democratic civil institutions that they are.
But what, then, are these academic freedoms? How are they threatened? With which results? What happens if they crumble? What lessons may be learned from countries that have been there, and back again – and from recent developments in Dutch academia? And, finally, what might a broader response across the institutions of civil society (the press, the judiciary, civil service, education, ngo’s) look like?
Michael IgnatieffI fear that universities are vulnerable because they lack a constituency willing to defend them in the wider public debate and often struggle to stand up for themselves.
