Academics for Palestine: Rectors, talk to us!

The names of the signees appear at the bottom of the post.

We are four representatives of Academics for Palestine: a group of employees from all eight Danish universities who fight against the apartheid of the Israeli state.

789 employees – primarily from UCPH – recently signed our petition in support of ‘Studerende mod Besættelsen’ and an academic boycott of Israeli universities.

READ ALSO: Staff from Danish universities come out in support of student action

We have tried to contact the association of Danish Universities several times in an attempt to present our demands and to discuss these issues with Denmark’s eight university rectors.

Unfortunately, they haven’t wanted to meet up with us.

10 minutes, please

Therefore, we decided – together with representatives from ‘Studerende mod Besættelsen’ – to show up at one of Danish Universities’ meetings, which took place on 8 October.

The lack of democratic tradition in Danish academia strongly degrades the international image of this country

The idea was to recite a text with our demands and in particular challenge UCPH rector Henrik C. Wegener’s arguments against a boycott. We also wanted to use the occasion to offer each rector a book by Maya Wind, an Israeli scholar who has studied the ties between Israeli universities and the apartheid.

READ ALSO: Rector Henrik C. Wegener: This is why there will be no UCPH academic boycott of Israel

All rectors denied us access to the room. Apparently, 10 minutes of their time was too much to ask for. Instead, we handed over the text and gave them the books.

We come from many different countries where it would be easily doable to have a meeting with your university rector to discuss such important topics. But in Denmark that isn’t the case. The lack of democratic tradition in Danish academia strongly degrades the international image of this country.

Here are our demands

We simply ask the Danish universities to follow the International Court of Justice ruling recognizing the crime of apartheid and urging each UN member state to work towards its end. And to drop the scandalous double standard they hold with regard to the boycott of Russian and Belarusian universities in 2022, but not Israeli ones in 2024.

We therefore ask for:

• Transparency: We need an up-to-date system for tracking existing collaborations and investments between Danish universities and third parties such as private companies and academic institutions.
• Cutting existing ties: Given the immensity of violence documented by UN bodies in Palestine (war on children, scholasticide and genocide), our existing relationships with Israeli institutions and third parties should, at minimum, be discontinued until a thorough ethical assessment has been made.
• Rigorous ethical screening: The review process for establishing academic ties must be strengthened and made transparent, so that problematic collaborations cannot be instituted in future.
• Protection and collaboration with Palestinian universities, academics and students: In the same manner that systems were set up to help Ukrainian scholars in 2022, Danish universities should offer protection and help to researchers who are endangered by the current genocide, as well as cooperate with Palestinian universities, whose buildings have been destroyed in Gaza.

Talk to us

We would like our rectors to organize a public debate where we can present our position to the general public. We hope that this call for democracy will be heard and that the Danish rectors will seize the opportunity to finally turn their back on a position that represents an ever-shrinking fraction of the population, breaking their complicity with a list of international law and human rights violations that is growing every day.

Signees:

Georgios Pappas, postdoc at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research
Fernando Racimo, associate professor at the Globe Institute
Vasiliki Angelopoulou, postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute
Thibault Capelle, postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute

All four signees are from UCPH and members of Academics for Palestine.