Vrij Nederland — How self-censorship puts academic debate at risk

By Thijs Broer · Vrij Nederland

On 15 December last year, Sirma Bilge, a renowned professor at the University of Montreal, was due to give a lecture at the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam. But Bilge had not yet spoken a word when the meeting, in a room on the second floor of the Roeterseiland complex, was roughly disrupted by a group of angry students and lecturers.

The reason for the uproar was that Bilge intended to outline how the debate about “intersectionality” — the relationship between racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression and discrimination, originally put on the agenda by black feminists — had broadened in recent years. According to the activists, the Canadian gender expert would thereby be attempting to whitewash it. Moreover, as a white woman she was not black enough to be allowed to discuss the subject. The protest was so loud that Bilge returned to Montreal without having delivered a single sentence of her lecture.

The board of the Amsterdam Center for Gender and Sexuality did not see the incident as grounds for a serious conversation with the angry students and lecturers about the value of academic freedom and freedom of expression. On the contrary: a few days after the disrupted meeting, the centre’s chair apologised to the activists on Facebook because the organisers had allegedly paid too little attention to the sensitivities: “We apologize that we did not immediately grasp the stakes of the critique and protest.”

The painful incident is not isolated. When emeritus professor Harrie Verbon wrote a rather clumsy column in Tilburg university magazine Univers in November, proposing an end to the “witch hunt” surrounding #MeToo — after all, “why didn’t the women complaining expose Weinstein’s and Saville’s behaviour thirty years ago?” — an open letter promptly appeared from more than forty lecturers. In English, they urged the editors of Univers to apologise publicly and called on the university’s executive board to distance itself from the column “in the strongest terms”, because many students were “very upset”. All this to ensure a “safe working and learning environment for everyone”.

Nor did Tilburg’s university administrators feel called upon to take a firm stand for journalistic and academic freedom. On the contrary: the board distanced itself from the column, after which Harrie Verbon withdrew as a columnist. And the editor-in-chief of Univers, who had refused to drop Verbon, was suspended by the university board a few weeks later after the editorial council withdrew its confidence in her over the editorial direction. It was half-heartedly stated that the Verbon discussion had played “only a partial and incidental” role, “without wishing to deny that, as an open letter showed, 41 colleagues believed the editors should not have published the column, or should have censored it”.

Something similar happened at the Rietveld Academie when, in February this year, its executive board cancelled a presentation by the art criticism platform KIRAC after dozens of students and former students called on Facebook for a boycott over “racist” and “sexist” statements by KIRAC’s founders, the contrary artist duo Stefan Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha.

The offending passages were a remark by Sinha in a video about Harvey Weinstein on the relationship between sexual attraction and the threat of violence — “I think many women enjoy their own desirability by seeking out that boundary of defilement” — and a provocative sentence in a critical column about the Stedelijk Museum’s “left-wing, socially engaged indifference”: “The pinnacle was surely the Zanele Muholi exhibition, where visitors were expected to take an interest in the lazy concoctions of a spoilt slut simply because she comes from South Africa and is lesbian and black.”

The thrust of the argument — that the quality of art should not be determined by complacent, politically correct engagement — was lost in the squabble over offensive language. And the Rietveld’s executive board did not take the opportunity to press for an open debate between KIRAC and its critics. Instead, it cancelled the entire event, arguing: “We give priority to our responsibility to ensure a safe learning environment.”

Such incidents have followed one another in and around universities over the past year. In Wageningen, a number of professors and students used an open letter to oppose a lecture by British climate sceptic Matt Ridley at the opening of the academic year because his views were not consistent with “our interpretation of good science, the seriousness of environmental problems and ‘optimism’” — meaning that Ridley was supposedly too optimistic about the climate problem.

In September, a debate at Leiden University with politician Thierry Baudet was deliberately disrupted by a small group of noisy lecturers who had already refused to debate him. And in February this year, TivoliVredenburg was accused of racism, including from academic circles, for organising a children’s festival with a cowboys-and-Indians theme. Tivoli subsequently declared that it had underestimated the “strong feelings” the festival had provoked and promised never again to organise celebrations that could lead to polarisation: “We regret that things turned out this way.”

The discussion of social inequality, racism and sexism is becoming polarised, including in higher education. In the name of a “safe learning environment”, controversial speakers and columnists are increasingly boycotted and denied a platform at the insistence of students and lecturers. Where does this new academic moralism come from? And what does it mean for free thought?

For many years, British sociologist Frank Furedi has pointed out that one postmodern cultural phenomenon after another — from the LGBTQ movement to the radical anti-smoking lobby, from gender-neutral toilets to the rise of health food, from the culture of litigation to parents’ paranoid attempts to shield their children from every possible setback — begins in California, the testing ground of detached, hyper-individualistic life. It then crosses to the American East Coast and, sooner or later, reaches continental Europe by way of Britain.

In his latest book, What’s Happened to the University? A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilisation, Furedi argues that the growing tendency towards self-censorship at universities has made the same journey across the ocean. Partly under the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which flared up in the United States in 2013 in response to excessive police violence, many American and subsequently British universities have developed a hypersensitivity to behaviour and opinions that might be experienced as hurtful, Furedi argues.

Concepts such as microaggression — statements and behaviour that can unintentionally be experienced as hurtful — and cultural appropriation — adopting practices from another culture — have taken on such a life of their own that students at Oberlin College in Ohio launched a perfectly serious campaign against the Vietnamese spring rolls and sushi in the cafeteria. At Bowdoin College in Maine, students faced possible suspension after fellow students complained about their wearing sombreros at a tequila party. At the University of Ottawa, yoga classes were cancelled because several participants had cultural issues. And at Cambridge in Britain, university administrators banned a party themed around Around the World in Eighty Days because wearing costumes from other cultures might lead to controversy over cultural appropriation.

Following the American example, a number of British universities have now also established safe spaces where students, surrounded by cuddly toys — in Bristol, Exeter and Leicester even by actual petting-zoo animals — can recover from confrontational conversations.

In that sensitive climate, Furedi shows, universities increasingly resort to self-censorship at the urging of activist students. In the United States, and now in Britain too, there are numerous examples of controversial speakers already invited by universities who were nevertheless denied a platform following student campaigns for disinvitation.

“So that development is spreading to universities in the Netherlands too,” says Furedi, who gave lectures in Groningen and Amsterdam in May 2017. “Until now, the greatest threat to academic freedom came from outside academia, from intolerant politicians who wanted to silence academics with unwelcome opinions. But nowadays, calls to ban controversial speakers increasingly come from within academia, most loudly from the students themselves.”

The question is why the discussion of social injustice, sexism and racism has also taken such radical forms in Dutch higher education in such a short time, including attempts to prevent potentially offensive voices from speaking. It is difficult to explain that tendency without considering a specifically Dutch circumstance: the debate about Zwarte Piet, which has flared up intensely since 2010.

At first, black activists such as Quinsy Gario and Jerry Afriyie appeared to stand alone in their attempts to expose Zwarte Piet as racist. But when television presenter Sylvana Simons and actress Anousha Nzume also spoke out on television against the racial stereotyping, the opposition reached a wide audience. Precisely because of the smug and often explicitly racist responses to the anti-Zwarte Piet movement, a growing number of people gradually came to realise that the debate had to be held, and the activism slowly met with greater understanding.

In Amsterdam, for example, cautious steps were taken in 2014, under Mayor Eberhard van der Laan and Minister Lodewijk Asscher, to replace Zwarte Piet with a less offensive “soot Piet”, as Vrij Nederland described in a major background article.

Scholars such as Philomena Essed and Gloria Wekker have researched racism in Dutch society for decades — Essed published her book Everyday Racism in 1984, for example — but their work received widespread media attention only on the waves of the Zwarte Piet debate, with the appearance of Essed’s Dutch Racism in 2014 and Wekker’s White Innocence in 2016, published a year later in Dutch as Witte onschuld. In her book, Gloria Wekker took aim at unconscious racism in the Netherlands. The title in particular provoked fierce reactions because, according to critics, it suggested that white people are by definition guilty of racism. Wekker herself argued in NRC Handelsblad that the title was intended as a “playful, teasing summary of the dominant Dutch attitude towards race”, but that did nothing to soften the criticism.

The nature of activism has changed since the publication of Everyday Racism in 1984, says Amsterdam sociologist Herman Vuijsje, who examined multicultural thinking and Dutch political correctness in his 1986 book Vermoorde onschuld and is now working on a new book about the resurgent debate over race and identity. “The big difference is that political correctness in the 1970s and 1980s was prompted by the baby-boom generation’s guilt about what had happened in the Second World War: never again,” he says.

“That feeling has now evaporated, certainly among the current generation of students. The new engagement is primarily carried by young ‘people of colour’ who believe they have been humiliated and excluded long enough and are now demanding their rights.” Examples abound: Sylvana Simons, who founded the party Bij1 last year, focusing on fighting discrimination and the “decolonisation” of education and public space, with Gloria Wekker as a supporting candidate at the bottom of its Amsterdam list. Journalist Seada Nourhussen, who attacked unconscious racism in the Netherlands in her Trouw columns. Anousha Nzume, who published Hallo witte mensen last year and has since continued her offensive against “white privilege” and other forms of covert racism on the podcast Dipsaus.

The internationalisation of universities also plays an important role in the revival of the academic anti-racism debate. Especially in the social sciences and humanities, the American vocabulary and fierce tone of the racism discussion have taken hold in recent years, not only because of the Netherlands’ growing orientation towards American publications — Philomena Essed and Gloria Wekker also conducted research in the US — but also through the attitudes of academics from the English-speaking world who came to work at Dutch universities.

A striking example is the American scholar Darryl Barthé, until recently a lecturer in American Studies and himself of Native American descent. On the digital platform Over de Muur, responding to the cowboys-and-Indians party at Tivoli, he argued that wearing a traditional Native American headdress is not as innocent as Dutch people think. It contributes to the misconception that “real Indians” are relics of a bygone era and “diverts attention from the existential struggle for survival against colonial violence that is still continuing”. In this way, the highly charged American discussion of Native Americans was brought to the unsuspecting Netherlands too.

Last year, the fierce discussion around #MeToo was added to this. Following revelations of sexual misconduct by powerful men in the American film industry in California, the movement spread like a peat fire, including to the Netherlands. Many women felt liberated. Bitter stories of sexual intimidation and abuse suddenly surfaced, often having been kept quiet for years out of shame. But, as in America, the discussion here also threatens to go too far, as the Verbon affair at Tilburg University shows.

Meanwhile, student culture has also changed rapidly in recent years, especially in progressive cities such as Amsterdam. This helped the anti-racism debate and #MeToo discussion imported from America assume radical forms in Dutch academia in a short space of time.

During the liberal 1990s, when the demise of the great ideologies was being proclaimed, social engagement in student circles was quickly associated with the political correctness of a bygone age. Around the turn of the millennium, that gradually began to change. In 2002, Vrij Nederland published a major article about the tentative return of engagement among what we called “the borderless generation”, a term later adopted by research agency Motivaction.

A series of VN conversations with people in their twenties and thirties showed that social commitment was no longer taboo for them, but took a different form from the political engagement of the 1980s: more personal, more individualistic, less ideological and averse to political correctness. In brief: willing to work for Shell, but in the sustainability department; willing to go on holiday to Peru, but also to spend a week working in an orphanage. In 2006, Natasha van den Berg and Sophie Koers coined the term “practical idealism” for this in their book of that name.

The next phase in the return of engagement among students became visible five years later, with the rise of the international Occupy movement and its encampments on Amsterdam’s Beursplein and The Hague’s Malieveld. The engagement was fiercer and more activist, directed against social inequality and the power of the financial world.

In Amsterdam, traditionally the heart of student protests, the real turning point came with the occupation of the Maagdenhuis in 2015. Earlier occupations in the 1990s had often been symbolic and quickly ended, prompting scornful remarks from baby boomers such as “at least we brought our sleeping bags”. But 2015 was different.

The students, by then called millennials, held out for six weeks. They opposed not only the university board’s spending cuts and its emphasis on efficiency and returns, but also demanded radical democratisation. For anyone who remembered academia in the 1990s, when students had little inclination to stand for departmental boards or faculty councils, this was a great surprise. Moreover, there were all-night meetings — in English — about social inequality, gender-neutral toilets, racism and sexism, all peppered with the vocabulary imported from America.

“A new kind of activism was visible during the 2015 occupation of the Maagdenhuis,” says Frans van Heest, an editor at ScienceGuide, the digital platform for higher education. He has closely followed the development of engagement at universities for years, first as a student and now as a journalist. “Those studying in 2015 belonged to the first generation allowed only four years to complete their studies, saddled with heavy student debt and then given few prospects of a job by the economic crisis.

“It isn’t so strange that activism is stronger among that generation than among the generations before it. Moreover, more and more people with a migration background have entered university in recent years, especially at the big universities in the Randstad, so themes such as racism and white privilege have become much more immediate for students.”

The rise of social media has also meant that fierce discussions about racism and sexism at American universities spread to the Netherlands much faster in recent years than before. This was already apparent in 2014, when the “I, too, am Harvard” campaign circulated social-media photographs of black students holding signs with short statements describing their personal experiences of covert racism and microaggression at university. Within days, the campaign had been taken up in Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, Auckland and at the University of Amsterdam, where students with a migration background posed with texts such as “Sorry, I thought you were Moroccan” and “Wow, you speak good Dutch”.

The polarisation of debate also spread through social media, as it had earlier in the United States. Facebook and Twitter began as a promise that it would become possible to connect with people of every imaginable background worldwide. But, as a major study by Utrecht Data School for Vrij Nederland and Nieuwsuur confirmed earlier this year, in practice the dynamics of social media cause people in the Netherlands too to live increasingly in separate worlds, mainly following, liking and retweeting those who think alike. Their own opinions are thus reinforced again and again, while other views are quickly ridiculed. This development is visible at both ends of the spectrum, from the “new right” to “social justice warriors”.

This was also the subject of a student-organised Happy Chaos debate at the Stadsschouwburg in March this year. On stage, De Telegraaf journalist Wierd Duk and activist feminist Anne Fleur Dekker, known on Twitter as ideological opposites, said that both felt trapped in polarisation. Duk admitted that Twitter had made him a harsher person than he liked. Dekker, who was first threatened by right-wing extremists because of her activism and then by left-wing extremists when she adopted a milder position, argued that on social media it is almost impossible to take any position at all without coming under full attack.

That is especially true of the racism debate: in 2016, Sylvana Simons received such severe threats through social media that she had to be given protection, as later happened to Anne Fleur Dekker. Polarisation through social media also penetrates the universities. Scholars who put racism into perspective come under fire just as fiercely as academics who speak out against racist ideas. Recently, Gloria Wekker, Anousha Nzume and Seada Nourhussen have even indicated in different ways that they are so tired of the lack of understanding and the accusations that they no longer wish to debate with “white people” whether racism exists.

This also became apparent while preparing this article: despite repeated requests from Vrij Nederland, both Gloria Wekker and Anousha Nzume declined to contribute. Understandable though that exhaustion may be, it is a sad observation. On the one hand, speakers with supposedly racist views are increasingly driven off the stage; on the other, leading anti-racism figures are now avoiding the difficult conversation with their critics. In short, free debate threatens to be stifled by polarisation.

The remaining question is why university administrators yield so quickly to students demanding that unwelcome speakers be denied a platform. Herman Vuijsje considers this the most surprising aspect of the new moralism. “Political correctness has always been there over the past few decades, in varying degrees. What is really new is that administrators capitulate to it so easily.”

According to Frank Furedi, universities in recent years have developed a culture across the board in which students are increasingly seen as vulnerable children who must be protected, and less as autonomous, independent adults who have to find their own way. This may be even more pronounced in the United States and Britain, where students usually live on campus and are therefore entrusted to the university’s care to a much greater extent than in the Netherlands.

Moreover, it is entirely legitimate in itself for students to believe that gratuitous offence should not be the norm in public debate and that nobody should be excluded at universities. But the language with which Dutch higher-education institutions justify excluding controversial speakers does point in the direction already taken by the hypersensitive American debate. In Tilburg, as noted earlier, the 41 concerned lecturers argued that many students were “very upset” by Harrie Verbon’s column and that the university should be a “safe working and learning environment for everyone”. And at the Rietveld, traditionally a place of experimentation and artistic freedom, the executive chair cited this as the main reason for cancelling the event with the controversial art critics: “We give priority to our responsibility to ensure a safe learning environment.”

A safe learning environment: the phrase comes directly from the American vocabulary of safe spaces. There are as yet no known examples in the Netherlands of rooms at universities where students can recover from unsettling conversations with cuddly toys, as in California and Britain. But, Furedi says, through this kind of self-censorship in the name of a “safe learning environment”, universities risk gradually being turned into safe spaces in their entirety, in which every controversial voice is silenced, “and that is actually much worse”.

The management culture in higher education also plays a role. University administrators in the English-speaking world, as well as in the Netherlands, used to be scholars steeped in academic freedom. Increasingly, however, they have had to make way for managers, professional or otherwise, who respond to public controversy not by engaging in a debate of principle, but by swiftly reaching for communications manuals. To limit “reputational damage”, “wrong” decisions must immediately be acknowledged, even when they are not wrong, while students are increasingly pampered as sensitive consumers. “Students need universities that prepare them for a life of freedom and independence,” says Furedi, “not a safe environment that reduces them to consumers in need of protection.”

Reports of increasing self-censorship at universities, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, prompted the then VVD MP Pieter Duisenberg to submit a motion in February 2017 calling for an investigation into academic freedom. In the eventual report, published in March this year, a committee of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, KNAW, concluded that there were “no indications of structural self-censorship and restrictions on diversity of perspectives in Dutch scholarship”. According to the committee, “local schools of thought” need not impede diversity at the national level. Education Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven then declared that the conclusion was “a compliment to scholarship”.

The congratulations were not only inappropriate — independent scholarship does not need compliments from government ministers — but also premature. The sting in the KNAW’s conclusion lies in its precise wording: “structural”. How many more instances of self-censorship must occur before the problem becomes structural? Moreover, the investigating committee was necessarily limited to the broad outlines of academic research, leaving the quality of debate with and among students below the radar. And that is precisely where instances of self-censorship are becoming more frequent.

Frank Furedi points out that incidents such as those at the University of Amsterdam, the Rietveld and Tilburg are the first signs of a development that has only just reached Dutch higher education. “It is very unwise to pretend nothing is wrong. The Netherlands is the country of Spinoza, of tolerance, where academic freedom was more or less invented. Before you know it, there will only be tolerance for one’s own opinion, whereas real tolerance means that, although you may challenge other views with arguments, you must also be willing to listen and to tolerate the intolerable. Academia, above all, must defend that freedom.”

At the University of Amsterdam, Amade M’charek, professor of the anthropology of science, has witnessed the polarisation among activist students at close quarters. For years she has organised debates about racism and social inequality with students and speakers from inside and outside the university. On the margins of a summer school about the colonial past that M’charek organised in 2010, activist Quinsy Gario first printed T-shirts bearing the words “Zwarte Piet is racism”.

Throughout that time, the anthropologist of science has tried to protect students and other participants from simplifications and to keep engaging in open debate. But that is becoming increasingly difficult. In an interview in Vrij Nederland in November last year, M’charek spoke of how important it is that Zwarte Piet is finally on the agenda, but also of the danger that importing the American racism debate obscures the fact that the Netherlands has a different history, including migration from former colonies and North Africa that does not fit easily into the “black” story.

She criticised not only the identity politics of Geert Wilders, Thierry Baudet and Sybrand Buma in their defence of “Judeo-Christian culture”, but also the tendency among young black anti-racists to identify entirely with their colour and deny others the right to speak. “Since November,” she says now, “that tendency has only grown stronger.”

M’charek is firmly resolved to continue her series of meetings on racism and social inequality without yielding to the polarisation, suspicions and self-censorship now spreading. “That is the only way,” says M’charek. “If you are no longer willing to engage in debate with one another and to immerse yourself in views other than your own, academic freedom is put at risk. Then we will be much further from where we need to be.”