Gaza Has Shown European Universities Are No Longer Places of Free Inquiry
Tasnima Uddin and A H Misbach | 01 September 2024 | Al Jazeera
Jamaican-British academic Stuart Hall once said “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing”. Indeed, universities have an important role to play in upholding the imperatives of academic freedom and critical inquiry, especially today, amid the growing debate and protests over Israel’s war on Gaza.
However, despite their ethical and legal commitments to scholarly freedom, many Western institutions of higher education have failed to protect or even suppressed faculty and students who have expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the United Kingdom, we have observed a worrying pattern in which universities have ended up doing the bidding of a British government fully supportive of a war that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled could be plausibly genocidal and that has potentially left 186,000 Palestinians dead…