The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) presents itself as a socially responsible institution committed to integrity, transparency, and positive societal impact. Through frameworks like its international partnership policy and gender equality plans, the university claims to embody these values. But how deep do these commitments really go? Recent student-led movements and critical policy analysis suggest that there is a growing gap between institutional promises and structural change.
Ethics Without Limits?
The VU Amsterdam Assessment Framework is designed to evaluate ethical risks in international partnerships—particularly in regions experiencing conflict or linked to human rights violations. While the framework includes country reviews and risk assessments, it stops short of prohibiting partnerships. The emphasis remains on “guiding” decisions rather than enforcing ethical boundaries. As such, academic freedom often overrides critical scrutiny of geopolitical entanglements.
For example, in 2023, the Horizon Europe programme approved over 100 research collaborations involving Israeli institutions, including projects with Israel Aerospace Industries—a major arms manufacturer. One of these, EMPHASIS, includes both Tel Aviv University and VU Amsterdam. While it focuses on smart infrastructure, such technology can also serve surveillance and border control in occupied areas like East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
This highlights the disconnect between technical progress and ethical accountability. Technologies developed in the name of sustainability may also sustain systems of oppression.
Environmental Collapse as Political Violence
The environmental toll of such systems is staggering. Forensic Architecture reports that 83 percent of plant life in Gaza has been destroyed, alongside 70 percent of farmland, 45 percent of greenhouses, and much of the area’s water infrastructure. These figures underscore how environmental degradation can be a tool of settler-colonial violence.
Since 1967, an estimated 2.5 million trees have been uprooted in the occupied Palestinian territories—an ecological loss with profound human consequences. The university’s continued collaboration with institutions complicit in this destruction raises serious ethical questions.
Students as Architects of Another World
In response, the pro-Palestinian student movement at VU has done more than protest—it has created an alternative campus reality. Through acts like setting up tents, translating speeches live, sharing meals, and organizing teach-ins, students are engaging in what can be called “world-building.” This concept, familiar from literature and game design, takes on real-life meaning here: the creation of a political-ethical space that resists institutional neutrality.
This grassroots coalition crosses lines of identity and belief. Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ+, Black, white, and international students unite in collective resistance. Their message is clear: Palestinian liberation is not a niche concern, but a universal call for justice.
In doing so, they challenge the university’s narrative of neutrality. Through peaceful blockades, public mourning rituals, and social media livestreams, the movement explicitly makes visible and confronts the institution with its silences.
Gender Equality as Compliance
Yet it’s not only foreign partnerships that reveal institutional limitations. VU’s Gender Equality Plan (GEP)—drafted to meet Horizon Europe funding requirements—also shows signs of surface-level reform. The plan promotes mentorships and leadership training for women yet, implicitly asks them to adapt to male-dominated norms rather than change them.
This reflects what scholars like Miranda Fricker call testimonial injustice: when marginalized people are only recognized as legitimate if they conform to dominant systems. The GEP also avoids political language, referring to systemic abuse as “inappropriate conduct,” and frames empowerment through assimilation. This soft language masks deeper structural issues.
Even more paradoxically, the same Horizon Europe funding that supports gender equality initiatives is linked to companies involved in the Israeli military-industrial complex. The contradiction is stark: can a university claim to support justice while benefiting from global injustice?
Inclusion Without Power
Other policy documents, such as the VU Diversity Office Annual Plan and the broader Dutch university diversity agendas, reflect similar patterns. They emphasize awareness and internal development but stop short of redistributing power. Discussions on decolonizing curricula, shifting governance structures, or supporting political student expression are largely absent.
Diversity is often framed through employability or innovation, not epistemic justice. Despite mentions of representation and visibility, decision-making remains centralized and student influence limited. These are symbolic changes—not structural transformations.
Symbolic Resistance on Campus
Across universities, colonial power is upheld not only through policy but through symbolism—who is commemorated, whose knowledge is centered, and whose bodies are made visible. The #RhodesMustFall movement in South Africa revealed how protest art—such as removing statues or burning institutional portraits—can expose and interrupt these legacies. These acts of symbolic resistance challenge the idea that colonial violence is over; they refuse to let visual culture serve as silent complicity.
At the VU, similar dynamics unfold. From protest tents to banners and visual interventions, students confronting the university’s ties to Israeli apartheid are not just making demands; they are disrupting the symbolic order of the institution itself. In doing so, they raise urgent questions about what is remembered, what is erased, and what kind of university we are collectively building.
A Living Laboratory of Resistance
What makes the current student movement at VU revolutionary is its refusal to wait. Instead of asking for permission, it creates change through practice. It turns campus into a living laboratory of solidarity and resistance—one that confronts colonial histories, amplifies silenced voices, and demands accountability.
This is not just protest; it is pedagogy. New knowledge is produced not just in books, but in the sharing of food, grief, and ideas. It is a reminder that universities are not apolitical spaces. When students build an alternative world in real time, they expose the limits of institutional ethics—and expand what is politically possible.
Elias Agha, Jip Aukes, Babette Geurts, Janou Pop, and Sanne de Vijlder are bachelor’s students Sociology with a shared focus on the theme of decolonising the university.