The university between truth and activism
On administrative cowardice, moral selectivity and the loss of academic Courage
There are moments when a university must redefine itself—not through buildings, rankings or policy documents, but through the way it relates to truth, power and public pressure. The continuing protests surrounding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict represent such a moment. What began as student activism has, in many places, evolved into an institutional crisis in which university leaders appear increasingly uncertain about the principles they are expected to defend.
The problem is not that students protest. Protest is a legitimate feature of a free society. The problem arises when universities themselves cease to act as places of intellectual distance and instead become participants in political and moral struggles. In doing so, they risk abandoning the very role that distinguishes them from other institutions: the pursuit of truth through open inquiry.
The university as a moral actor
A university should be a place where ideas collide without individuals being destroyed. It is therefore troubling how quickly intellectual dissent can once again become morally suspect. Not through formal censorship, but through social pressure, reputational damage and collective intimidation. Contemporary academic culture presents itself as open and pluralistic, yet increasingly exhibits signs of intellectual conformity. Those who challenge dominant narratives often discover how quickly disagreement becomes social suspicion.
Dutch universities increasingly present themselves as moral actors, issuing statements on war, colonialism, climate change and international affairs. Yet the moment a university adopts explicit moral positions, it inevitably influences what is regarded as legitimate within its own community.
This dynamic has become visible in the treatment of Israel and of Jewish scholars within parts of academia. Activist narratives are often given considerable space, while dissenting perspectives encounter heightened scrutiny. Demonstrations aimed at severing ties with Israeli institutions are facilitated or tolerated on some campuses, while Jewish students and staff regularly report feelings of isolation, insecurity and, in some cases, intimidation.
These concerns are no longer merely anecdotal. Research conducted by Amanda Kluveld and Eliyahu Sapir into the experiences of Jewish and Israeli students and employees in Dutch higher education points to growing feelings of exclusion, insecurity and hostility since 7 October 2023. Respondents describe an academic climate in which pressure to distance oneself from Israel and the concealment of visible Jewish identity have, for some, become part of everyday university life.
A similar dynamic emerged during a meeting at Leiden University on academic freedom. The fact that a discussion about the conditions necessary for free inquiry itself became the target of disruption reveals a broader paradox: conversations about protecting intellectual freedom increasingly become occasions for attempts to restrict it.
The deeper question is whether universities remain willing to accommodate perspectives that diverge from dominant assumptions. Once events are judged less by the quality of their arguments than by the perceived acceptability of their participants or conclusions, the university begins to shift from a community of scholars to a community of ideological arbiters.
Perhaps most striking is not the intensity of activist pressure, but the hesitancy of university leadership. Administrators speak readily of inclusion and safety, yet often appear far less certain when Jewish students and staff report feeling isolated, stigmatized or unwelcome. The challenge facing universities today is therefore not merely political. It is institutional. The question is whether they still possess the confidence to defend the principles upon which academic life depends.
The danger of one-sided narratives
A university ought not to be a space for propaganda. Its purpose is to examine dominant narratives critically, not to reproduce them. Yet contemporary academic debates increasingly reveal a striking moral asymmetry. The issue is not that certain perspectives are discussed—that is central to academic freedom—but that some interpretations are treated as self-evident truths, while others are regarded as suspect before the discussion has even begun.
This tendency is particularly visible in the treatment of complex historical and geopolitical conflicts. Concepts such as the Nakba are often presented less as subjects of historical inquiry than as moral points of departure. At the same time, alternative historical perspectives and competing interpretations frequently receive far less attention.History ceases to function as scholarship when it is reduced to a simple division between oppressors and victims.
The same pattern can be observed in the treatment of slogans and symbols on university campuses. Expressions whose meanings remain contested are often embraced with little critical examination. Many students encounter only one interpretation of these slogans, while others understand them as denying Israel’s legitimacy or as implicitly justifying violence. A university should be the place where such tensions are explored rather than assumed away. Yet there is often a curious certainty, as though the meaning of these expressions has already been settled.
The deeper problem is not the presence of particular viewpoints but the suggestion that only one moral interpretation is acceptable. Universities should not provide students with a single political framework through which to understand the world. Their role is to equip students with the intellectual tools required to evaluate competing claims, assess evidence and tolerate complexity. When higher education becomes the transmission of approved narratives rather than the cultivation of independent judgement, it loses its distinctive purpose.
A genuine academic community subjects all assumptions—including its own—to scrutiny. Once a particular interpretation acquires moral immunity, academic freedom does not disappear overnight. It erodes gradually through social pressure, institutional signals and cultural expectations. The question then ceases to be what is true and becomes instead which truths may safely be expressed.
The university loses its essence the moment it ceases to be a place of inquiry and becomes an instrument of moral mobilization. Scholarship demands a willingness to engage with ideas that challenge prevailing assumptions. Without that willingness, universities risk producing certainty where they should be cultivating understanding.
Selective outrage
One of the more uncomfortable features of contemporary academic debate is not simply the disproportionate attention devoted to a single conflict, but the reluctance to examine that disproportionality itself.
Conflicts in Syria, Sudan and Yemen, the persecution of Christian minorities in parts of Africa and the Middle East, the internment of Uyghurs in China, and countless other humanitarian crises rarely provoke prolonged campus occupations, institutional statements or boycott campaigns. Yet the Israeli–Palestinian conflict continues to generate extraordinary moral mobilization within Western universities.
Why?
The answer may lie less in the Middle East than in the intellectual culture of the West itself. Universities increasingly organize debate around themes of colonialism, power, identity and historical responsibility. Within that framework, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has acquired a symbolic significance that extends far beyond the realities of the conflict itself. It becomes a stage upon which broader Western anxieties about oppression, privilege and historical guilt are projected.
Such symbolism encourages simplification. A conflict that becomes a moral symbol ceases to be a historical and political problem requiring investigation. Instead, it is transformed into a narrative in which the roles of victim and oppressor appear self-evident before any serious inquiry has begun.
Intellectual life should resist precisely this tendency. Societies often project deeper tensions and unresolved moral concerns onto visible symbols. When that happens, proportion is lost. Certain conflicts become moral obsessions, while others—often equally tragic—remain largely invisible.
Criticism of Israel is neither illegitimate nor exceptional. The problem arises when criticism becomes disproportionate, complexity gives way to caricature, and a political conflict is transformed into moral certainty.Universities, of all institutions, should be wary of such certainties. Their responsibility is not to organize outrage but to analyze it; not to affirm prevailing narratives but to examine the assumptions that sustain them. The task of scholarship is not to provide moral comfort, but to cultivate intellectual clarity.
The paradox of the academic boycott
Perhaps nowhere is the intellectual uncertainty of the modern university more visible than in calls for academic boycotts of Israeli universities and scholars.
By its very nature, a university should defend international collaboration, particularly in times of conflict. Scholarship flourishes through exchange, not political exclusion. Yet on a number of Western campuses, demands to sever ties with Israeli institutions have become increasingly common.
This raises an uncomfortable question: why Israel?
Collaborations with universities in authoritarian states such as China or Iran largely continue. Institutions operating within systems where academic freedom, political opposition or basic civil liberties are severely restricted seldom become the target of comparable campaigns. Nor do we witness prolonged campus occupations concerning the persecution of religious minorities, the internment of Uyghurs, or the victims of civil wars elsewhere in the world. The disparity is difficult to ignore.
The paradox becomes even sharper when one considers the nature of the institutions being targeted. Israel remains a democratic state governed by the rule of law, where governments are openly criticized, courts operate independently and scholars are free to challenge public policy. These are precisely the conditions that make genuine academic inquiry possible. Yet it is institutions within such a society that increasingly become the objects of boycott campaigns.
An academic boycott does not affect governments in the abstract. It affects individual researchers: scientists, physicians, historians, jurists and engineers whose work often contributes to international knowledge and innovation. Collaboration ceases to be judged on scholarly merit and becomes instead contingent upon national origin and political association. In doing so, the university abandons one of its most fundamental principles: the universality of knowledge.
This raises a deeper question. How can institutions that champion diversity, inclusion and international cooperation simultaneously justify excluding scholars because of their connection to a particular country? Once national identity becomes a criterion of academic legitimacy, universities enter historically dangerous territory.
The modern university has been profoundly shaped by generations of Jewish scholars whose contributions helped define the intellectual landscape of the modern world. It is therefore troubling when academic environments once again become places where ancestry, identity or perceived collective affiliation invite suspicion.
For the moment knowledge becomes subject to political approval, the university ceases to function as a community of inquiry and begins to operate as a gatekeeper of ideological legitimacy. In that transition, it risks sacrificing the very principle upon which scholarship depends: the conviction that truth matters more than political allegiance.
The cowardice of the crowd
The contemporary university appears increasingly unable to resist the psychology of the crowd. Social media, activist pressure and perpetual moral agitation have created an environment in which administrators often focus less on defending principles than on preventing disruption. As a result, institutional caution increasingly replaces intellectual leadership.
University leaders operate under intense pressure from media scrutiny, campus occupations and demands for immediate action. The problem arises when the desire to avoid conflict becomes more influential than the principles a university is meant to uphold. The question subtly shifts from What is right? to What will minimize controversy?
Yet academic leadership demands precisely the opposite. A university exists to defend inquiry, especially when doing so is uncomfortable. Its leaders should not merely manage tensions; they should safeguard the conditions that make intellectual freedom possible. Moments of public pressure are therefore the moments that reveal whether an institution genuinely believes in its own values.
This contradiction becomes visible when universities champion inclusion and academic freedom while appearing less certain when students or staff report intimidation. More troubling is the willingness to tolerate activism or rhetoric that would provoke concern in other contexts simply because it aligns with prevailing moral assumptions.
Increasingly, it seems that institutional responses are shaped less by principle than by pressure. This creates a dangerous precedent. Every concession made to defuse a conflict temporarily shifts the boundaries of what is considered normal. What appears exceptional today may become accepted tomorrow and institutionalized the day after.
This dynamic is visible when activist movements move beyond protest and acquire a more permanent presence within the institutions they seek to influence. An illustrative example can be found at Maastricht University, where the pro-Palestinian movement was granted a dedicated space on campus. Whether one agrees with the cause itself is beside the point. The more significant question is why a university should position itself within a geopolitical conflict by providing institutional space to a movement organized around a particular political agenda.
The history of institutions suggests that principles rarely disappear through dramatic acts of abandonment. More often, they erode through a succession of small exceptions, temporary compromises and seemingly reasonable concessions. Each step appears defensible in isolation. Only later does it become clear how far an institution has drifted from its original purpose.
For universities, the consequences are profound. Once activism takes precedence over argument, once moral conviction outweighs evidence and once social pressure becomes more influential than intellectual curiosity, the university ceases to function as a community of inquiry. It becomes a community of affirmation, in which the central question is no longer what is true but which beliefs are considered acceptable.
The consequences do not end at the campus gates. If future judges, journalists, teachers, scientists and public officials learn that pressure matters more than argument and conformity is safer than critical thought, those assumptions will not remain confined to academic life. They will spread into the institutions upon which democratic culture depends.
The fundamental question, therefore, is not whether universities can withstand activist pressure. It is whether they still possess the confidence and courage required to defend the principles that justify their existence. For the moment a university abandons neutrality out of fear of conflict, it begins to lose precisely that which makes it worthy of public trust.
The university and the loss of truth
The central question is ultimately a simple one: what is a university?
Is it a place where knowledge is pursued, even when that knowledge is uncomfortable? Or has it become an institution whose primary function is to affirm prevailing social and political convictions?
For centuries, universities were defined by a distinctive intellectual discipline. Their foundation was not certainty but doubt; not the defense of established beliefs, but their continuous examination. Scientific progress emerged precisely because accepted truths could be challenged, hypotheses could be discarded and even the most persuasive theories remained open to revision.
Today, that tradition appears increasingly fragile.
Across a growing range of subjects, attention has shifted from the question of what is true to the question of what is desirable. Research is no longer judged solely by methodological rigour or argumentative strength, but increasingly by its alignment with prevailing moral and political assumptions. In this subtle shift, the purpose of the university begins to change. The pursuit of truth gives way to the production of consensus.
The problem is not that scholars possess moral convictions. No serious intellectual inquiry is entirely detached from values. The problem arises when convictions begin to determine conclusions before investigation has even begun. Once the desired outcome is implicitly known in advance, scholarship ceases to be inquiry and becomes affirmation.
For this reason, activism and scholarship remain uneasy companions. Activism begins with a goal that one seeks to realize. Scholarship begins with the possibility that one may be wrong. The former seeks change; the latter seeks understanding. Both have legitimate roles within a democratic society, but they serve fundamentally different purposes and should not be confused.
The greatest threat facing the university is therefore not protest, political engagement or public debate. It is the gradual loss of intellectual humility: the disappearance of the recognition that every theory, every conviction and every worldview must remain open to challenge.
A university performs a unique function within society because it remains one of the few places where it must still be possible to be wrong. It must remain a place where individuals are free to revise their views, reconsider their assumptions and pursue lines of inquiry that challenge prevailing orthodoxies. The health of scholarship depends not upon certainty, but upon the willingness to question certainty.
Once that willingness disappears, the university may continue to exist as an institution, but it ceases to exist in spirit. For the essence of scholarship is not the conviction that one possesses the truth. It is the willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including to conclusions one would rather not reach.
Science does not begin with the certainty of being right. It begins with the courage to acknowledge that one may be wrong.
Conclusion
The crisis facing the university is ultimately not about Israel, Gaza, decolonization, identity politics or any other individual controversy. These are merely the arenas in which a deeper problem has become visible.
The real question is whether the university remains willing to take its own intellectual mission seriously.
For centuries, the university was one of the few institutions capable of suspending the certainties of the age. It existed not to protect prevailing beliefs, but to examine them; not to provide moral reassurance, but to cultivate understanding. Its authority rested not on power or popularity, but on disciplined inquiry and intellectual honesty.It is precisely that commitment that appears increasingly fragile today.
More and more, universities seem tempted to act as participants in social and political struggles rather than as institutions capable of standing back from them. In doing so, they risk exchanging the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of moral approval. Yet the purpose of a university is not to tell society what it wishes to hear. Its purpose is to investigate what may be true, even when the conclusions are unpopular, uncomfortable or inconvenient.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson of the present moment. Free societies depend not only on laws and institutions but also on the virtues of open inquiry, self-criticism and intellectual restraint. When those virtues weaken, public debate increasingly becomes governed by pressure and conformity.
The university must remain a place where questions matter more than slogans, evidence more than identity, and the search for truth more than the comfort of certainty.
For the moment a university ceases to investigate what is true and begins instead to prescribe what ought to be true, it ceases to be a university.
And perhaps, in an age of permanent outrage, intellectual humility remains the most radical form of courage.
