‘Enough is enough’, states the petition, which was initiated by Dimitris Pavlopoulos, Elif Keskiner, and Ismintha Waldring. They believe that VU has kept a ‘deafening silence’ in the face of the genocide in Gaza. The long-awaited and delayed ‘Assessment Framework for International Collaborations’ also fails to impress the signatories. According to them, the assessment framework prohibits virtually no collaboration with Israeli institutions.
Call to action
The petitioners consider that the VU’s executive board ‘has been considerably more cautious than other Dutch universities’. For this reason, the signatories are calling on the faculty board and the department heads of Social Sciences and Humanities to take action themselves. The petition has been signed by lecturers, PhD students, professors, and support staff from the faculty.
According to spokespeople Pavlopoulos and Keskiner, the petition has been handed over to the faculty board. The full list of signatories, known to Ad Valvas, has not been made public.
The overwhelming majority of the senior staff of the Computer Science Dept (assoc. & full profs) have sent a similar letter to the VU Board (“we are ashamed that the VU is not matching its words with actions”). Response of the CvB: we operate under the assessment framework for international collaboration. But indeed, as our colleagues from Social Science and Humanities correctly observe, that assessment framework is so weak that in practice it would pretty much never raise any objection to any international collaboration. The UvA is no longer collaborating with Israeli institutions, the KNAW has called for stopping EU funding, and the VU?