There are several wars going on in the world at the same time, which have already moved into departments and student classrooms. How to have a proper discussion in such times? How to teach and learn when professors and students do not know each other by sight and communicate under animated avatars? How do universities in exile try to preserve academic freedoms for those who have lost them? Why and at what point does the idea of university boycotts begin to contradict academic freedoms? Does the experience of academic boycotts in the last century of academics from Germany or South Africa apply to academics from Russia and Israel today? T-invariant talked about this in the stream “Everything is complicated” with Dmitry Dubrovsky, candidate of historical sciences, researcher at Charles University in Prague and professor at the Free University .
A free university is better than a non-free university
T-invariant: The academic year has begun at universities. Academic organisations that scientists who have left Russia were able to create have also opened their doors to students. A new industry is taking shape before our eyes – universities in exile. You work at one of them – the Free University. Can you tell us why such universities are needed? What tasks do they solve? What niches and gaps do they close?
Dmitry Dubrovsky: The Free University was created before the war by colleagues from the Higher School of Economics, who, as they say in Russia, “left” – mainly for criticising the current political regime. For example, they destroyed the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law and fired almost all of its main professors.
And so the professors decided that since they still had students, and it was no longer possible to teach them at Vyshka, they should create a new space. The free university became this new form of education.
Dmitry Dubrovsky is a Russian historian and sociologist, PhD in History. He has worked at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and St. Petersburg State University (he founded the Human Rights programme at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences). Also worked at the Russian Ethnographic Museum, conducted special forensic examinations in the field of hate speech and hate crimes. After the outbreak of war he left Russia. Currently, he is a visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University and a professor at the Free University.
T-i: And this was right at the time of the pandemic.
DD: Yes. It’s called positive externalities, that is, positive effects from a negative situation where the online form of teaching was possible and in demand. We were able to continue teaching courses that were either impossible or difficult to read in Russia. Constitutional law, human rights, gender studies, historical politics – all of these began to be excluded from the academic programmes of Russian universities. We receive several thousand applications from students for these courses. They want to know what they will not be told at home in their home universities.
But there is another interesting phenomenon related to the new opportunities that our university gives to teachers. Many of them have asked themselves: “What will my course look like if I teach it the way I want and in the volume I think I need? Without these crazy FSES, five-hundred-page programmes? And how would I read it if no one restricted me in anything?” It’s an amazing freedom.
Dmitry Dubrovsky. Photo: https://www.idelreal.org/
T-i: But it is freedom from everything, isn’t it? Including from formal regulation?
DD: A free university does not issue certificates, and we are unlikely to have any official accreditation. In Europe, too, they don’t really understand what an online university is, and even in Russian. But all in all, it’s still an amazing opportunity for teachers and students. To learn what you cannot learn in Russia, and to teach in a way that you cannot teach in Russia.
For the teacher, it is a unique opportunity to read, speak, or do his or her course in a way that he or she has dreamed of, but never could – because there are always restrictions on time, on the format, on some obligations that are spelled out in the educational programme. We are not only free from the state, but we are also free from stifling bureaucratic tensions.
T-i: This year you have 71 courses, which implies a lot of students and teachers. However, on 31 March 2023, the Free University was declared an undesirable organisation, resulting in criminal prosecution for those who interact with you. How is the security issue being addressed?
DD: Our students are advanced – not from a good life, of course. It’s funny: you switch on zoom, and there are animas sitting there. All the students work under their nicknames, and only the teacher knows their names. They also make cartoons, and you get the interesting feeling that you are talking to a blue fox or some fantastic character.
T-i: So you have never seen your students in person?
DD: Of those in Russia, no, I haven’t.
T-i: And how do you get accepted to the course?
DD: A student writes a letter to the instructor, in which he or she indicates his or her nickname, under which he or she will study, if he or she is accepted. We do some security check, as there have been attempts to enrol by people who have made a strange impression. I won’t go into detail on exactly how we handle this, but we do try to vet applicants. Although I myself don’t even mind if some sexpot comes to the course and listens carefully about academic freedoms. Maybe something in his head will change. We also have teachers who live in Russia, and they also teach under nicknames. By the way, even before we were declared undesirable, there was one telling story.
One very good student was listening to my course at home in secret. And why was she hiding? Because her parents were strongly against studying with us and threatened to write a denunciation on her for listening to our lectures.
In general, despite the fact that cooperation with an undesirable organisation is a serious criminal offence, we have a lot of students. For example, we regularly have a large intake of lawyers, because today what is called international law in Russian universities is no longer international law. We are now expecting an influx of historians, because the history course of the twentieth century has undergone major changes in Russian universities. So we are closing the needs in the most stifled areas and topics. We do not aim to replace higher education. We want to help students learn what they don’t learn or learn in a crooked way in Russian higher education. Not because all teachers in Russian universities are bad now, but because their work is largely determined by censorship, self-censorship and pressure from the administration. Well, and because many good specialists have left.
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T-i: What are the applied benefits for students from your courses if there are no diplomas and certificates?
DD: This year, five universities have taken students who did our Masters in Public Law to five PHD programmes – from New Zealand and Australia to the UK. They have had these courses credited in their portfolios.
Doing science, not war
T-i: Going back to the aims and objectives of universities in exile. It turns out that they play the role of academic bridges? Do they allow students and professors, who for various reasons have been isolated from the global context and from modern programmes, to remain in the global field?
DD: I would not say that there is a moat with crocodiles between us. There are still many scientists and students in Russia who read world journals and the Western press, but in some fields they can no longer discuss it publicly. This is how the most important scientific practice disappears, when you have to present the result of your work without fear of censorship and consequences. And you have to do this not only inside Russia, but also abroad. This is already a problem for some scientific fields. That is why I have one “closed” project in which students and teachers meet once a week and talk about how they live, teach, and learn. People share their daily observations of universities in the era of the SWO: what is happening, how the university behaves, how the visual agitation is changing, what the rector says, where the lecturer has gone – whether he went to war or not. This is such an everyday anthropology of war in the Russian academy.
People come to our meetings with one simple desire: they need somewhere to breathe. It’s an opportunity to be a little bit free in an already unfree country.
T-i: In this way, you bring teachers and students back into the field of academic freedom. This raises the question: does the activity of universities in exile not contradict the political decisions that are currently being taken to restrict academic freedoms? This refers to boycotts of scientific organisations, institutions and specific researchers. Doesn’t the very story of boycotts, which has been gaining more and more popularity in the last three years, contradict the essence of academic freedom?
DD: It’s a complex issue and has several parts. Firstly, we have to remember that academic rights and freedoms are those rights and freedoms that are realised and protected within academic communication or academic communication itself. Each of us is an academic and a citizen at the same time. And we have some difficulty in understanding whether the blanket (self-imposed – T-invariant) sanctions that are imposed against citizens of the Russian Federation correspond to the logic of human rights at all. Because most of the time, when they talk about violations of the rights of scientists and teachers abroad, it is not really about violations of professional rights. It is simply about the fact that if you have a red passport, you have big problems getting a visa, opening a bank account, and even transferring money from one place to another. Which, in fact, I faced not so long ago, when it turned out that I had no right to help my colleagues in Kazakhstan who were fleeing mobilisation with money, because my bank considered it a violation of the sanctions imposed on Russian citizens. By the way, this is not always and everywhere the result of the actions of the government or the state itself. It is often the principles that various institutions themselves proclaim.
Here is a recent example that I learnt about from a colleague at a leading Russian university. She went to Poland for a conference and indicated to herself that she was an “independent researcher”. But then the Polish university decided that she was required to comply. They found her name on the website of a Russian university (not on the sanctions list, not Skoltech or MIPT) and wrote her an angry letter: since we have suddenly discovered that you are affiliated with a Russian university, we believe that your participation in the programme would be a violation of the sanctions. This, it seems to me, is precisely an example of a violation of the logic of academic freedom. She herself wanted to speak without representing the university. But she was prevented from doing so. And the second problem, which is very difficult for European scientists, is the fact that Ukrainian colleagues often, and for quite understandable reasons, do not want Russian scientists to walk down the same corridors with them at the same conference. And because of this it turns out that, having in mind such a strange choice, colleagues say: “Well, it is clear, if that is the case, then there will be no Russian scientists at the conference”.
T-i: Is this a violation of academic freedom?
DD: This is an open question. Since World War II, we have not had examples of such strange choices. And during the Second World War it was quite simple: German scientists were banned both under the terms of the war and under the terms of the general world attitude. Those who fled were helped. And everyone else was simply total exclusion from world academic exchange. And from this blow the German Academy, as I think, has not departed to this day. This is to the question of the consequences.
T-i: Apparently, it is by this analogy that colleagues from other countries propose to do exactly the same with Russian scientists who remain to work in Russia?
DD: Yes, and this is a very strong simplification of the current situation. In one article by quite respected people in a respected journal, I saw arguments that surprised me. The authors counted the number of scientists who signed anti-war proclamations at the beginning of the war. They then divided by the total number of Russian scientists and stated that it was only 2%, so there was nothing to worry about – the other 98% were all “in favour”. This is a strong sociological deduction, “nothing to cover”. But at the same time, there is another situation, which my Ukrainian colleagues told me about.
Imagine: March 2022. Their homes are being bombed. And an online conference begins, planned even before the war. Ukrainian and Russian scientists are participating, with topics that are far from politics. And all Ukrainians expect at least some hint of sympathy. No one expected people to take to the streets with the Ukrainian flag, but at least something human could have been said? But no, nothing was said. It’s all politics, let’s do science as usual.
I think this is the most disgusting thing, and this is what Ukrainian scientists really cannot forgive us for. And I understand them. And the fact that Russian scientists are suspected of insincerity, if not lying (no matter who is in Russia, who is here – in general, it’s the same) – this is partly due to the fact that for a long period of time a large number of people tried to pretend that nothing was going on, that it was as if we were communicating during the Cold War. But it’s not a cold war, it’s a hot war: people are being bombed. And if you don’t express your attitude to what is happening, you get demands for a total boycott based on the psychological woodenness and lack of empathy of Russian scientists towards Ukrainian scientists.
T-i: Let’s now turn to the topic of another boycott that is unfolding before our eyes – the boycott of Israeli scientists. Here is one example. In 2005, the American Association of University Professors spoke out against a form of such protest – a boycott of Israeli universities. And it openly said that it was unacceptable to reject Israeli institutions. And now the same group is saying that, in fact, boycotts of Israeli institutions can be considered legitimate tactical responses. What’s changing?
DD: I urge you to still read these latest amendments carefully, in August 2024, they are published on the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) website. And it should be noted that attitudes towards boycotting Israeli universities have varied. We know that some of the American associations at the time supported the boycott. It was only the AAUP that was against it at all. And, say, recently the American Anthropological Association and part of the British universities have joined this demand for a boycott. In 2005, the main call was to boycott not all Israeli universities in general, but two: Bar-Ilan and Haifa.
There is one important point here: the only time the American Association of University Professors supported a boycott was with South Africa. But with South Africa, the situation was a little bit more clear. Because as we know from the history of apartheid, South Africa had universities for blacks and for whites. And so the people who worked in the white universities were willingly or unwillingly participating in apartheid policies. And in that sense they were directly responsible for it. And, by the way, that’s what the AAUP document is exactly saying: it’s important not to arbitrarily smear that responsibility.
Mass protests against racist policies in South Africa. 14 June 1986. Photo: James Hughes / NY Daily News / Getty Images
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Even more importantly, it says separately: it is absolutely impossible to apply this in cases of academic communication, i.e. for publication in articles or in scientific conferences. And boycott has an alternative: if you want to respond to specific people, it’s very good to respond to specific people. But I’m afraid that this is the same logic called: “Let’s fight Russian aggression! Let’s not give visas to any Russian person because they are all aggressors well or no matter what.” This blanket rule is very sympathetic to everyone. From the bureaucratic point of view, it is also convenient: it does not require any thought or reflection.
T-i: But there is a well-established basic principle that you can’t discriminate against people on the basis of group, on the basis of their belonging to a certain university, to a certain institution?
DD: I wouldn’t use the term “discrimination” here, especially with wartime laws in mind. It may or may not affect academic communications and academic communication, academic freedom directly. Not to mention that academic rights and freedoms are always a personal story. You can violate human rights on a mass scale, but you cannot violate academic rights on a mass scale. It’s case by case every time.
So when we talk about boycott, the most important thing is to define the basis of responsibility of, say, an institution. And in this logic, the situation in Israel is quite complicated for me. If we prove (I won’t say it’s true) that a particular institution legitimises what critics of Israel call apartheid, then this logic becomes legitimate. But not the other way round. That is, you can’t impose a boycott because no matter what, all Israeli, so to speak, scholars, academics must be banned. No, you can’t boycott all Israeli academics in general simply because they are Israeli. Maybe, suppose we have a disputed territory: Israel considers it its own, and, say, Palestine considers it occupied territory. And on this occupied territory there is an Israeli university, I won’t say which one – it doesn’t matter. If we proceed from this logic, then the principle of academic freedom in this case comes into conflict with the principle of international law. If, for example, the UN considers this territory to be Palestinian, and Israel has built a university on it in addition to settlements, then the question arises: “What are we dealing with?” Are we dealing with a whole institution that legitimises, again, from the UN’s point of view, this very seizure? So the settlement does it in its own way, the university does it in its own way. If that’s the case, then the people working at that university, at least the leadership, can be boycotted precisely because of their immediate right. Again, this is not about all employees, this is not about students, this is not about a blanket rule. It’s about the leadership that represents a particular institution. That’s why, by the way, I emotionally understand when people say, “There are 450 Russian rectors over there who have come out in favour of supporting the war, let’s break off all relations”. Because institutional communication goes legally through the leadership.
This is a very sensitive, emotional topic that creates political splits and conflicts, not only American, but also European. And the Arab-Israeli conflict is just such a conflict. Everyone who is involved in political science knows that it is almost impossible to keep a sober head in it. There is always a very powerful desire to solidarise with someone, to take sides.
So, I think that the biggest problem here is to determine the degree of responsibility and the real responsibility of a particular person. That is, not in a blanket way, not for everyone, but to define the principle, and then the violation of this principle should be punished not in general, I don’t know, with a lifetime ban or a political ban, but with concrete consequences.
Threads and corridors
T-i: The Boston Globe recently published an article by Uri Simon, president of Technion University, where he addresses the academic community and reminds them that calling for a boycott of all Israeli universities undermines fundamental academic values. And he also says that in Israeli society, the academic, university community is one of the most democratic and progressive. And if we imagine the balance of political forces in Israel, it is the university community that is least responsible for the actions of its government. And it turns out that the call for a boycott of Israeli universities is an attempt to place responsibility on those who are certainly not responsible for what the defenders of Palestine oppose.
DD: Yes, this, I must say, is very similar to the logic of my Ukrainian colleagues who say that since they work in academic institutions, they are all working for the war. And therefore this academic boycott is rational and legitimate. This is roughly the same logic.
Technion, Israel. Photo: https://www.technion.ac.il
T-i: It is interesting that at the same time there are people in the global academic community who oppose the boycott of Israeli universities, but at the same time actively support the boycott of Russian scientists, universities. Simultaneously. How do you explain this?
DD: Lack of systematicity, lack of a common logic. We have to agree on it. But it is difficult, because no one was prepared for a war in the early 21st century on the territory of Europe between countries with a developed educational and scientific system, with a huge number of scientists involved in European international knowledge production. No one knows what to do about it. The situation is different in this sense with Israel, where there is a long history of boycotts…
T-i: Here is another example. There is such a big International Medical Students Association IFMSA – about half a million medical students all over the world. And they are now expelling Israeli members from their organisation. This is not a political but a purely professional community, reacting to Israel’s military actions and its defence after the October 7 attack, decides that Israelis have no place among them. How was that possible?
DD: You know, this reaction was not only there, but in many other human rights organisations. And I’m afraid that simple answers, like that everyone is anti-Semitic, are not going to do it. I think most people are guided by some other principles. And that’s why I think that, coming back to personal logic, institutional logic is, strangely enough, easier to define.
I would like to emphasise once again that it is necessary to agree on principles from the outset. There is a very important subject related to anti-Semitism that I have drawn attention to. In America, for almost 30 years, there has been a well-known person who teaches electrical engineering at one of the colleges – Arthur R. Butz, Associate Professor, Northwest University. But outside the college, he’s one of the most famous Holocaust deniers. They had this nest at the Institute of Historical Review, a bunch of weird freaks who discussed Holocaust denial, ufology, reptilians, all kinds of crazy stuff. And, in particular, the Jewish community in America tried for a very long time to kick him out of this college. And the chancellor of this college says: “You know what, as a citizen there, he is implementing the First Amendment. He can print anything he wants. And he doesn’t say a word about it in the classroom. He seems to be a good teacher, he seems to have good students.”
And that logic seems very important to me. Within this approach, we have to separate the scholar and the citizen. As a citizen, Arthur Butz can use the First Amendment and write whatever nonsense he thinks is important. The issue is that Arthur Butz never says anything about it in lectures. However, if it is a historian who says in lectures that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that is a bad historian and should not be teaching due to qualifications. And if a professor says this in lectures to engineers, he is wasting paid time on a subject that is outside of the discipline being taught. And then the administration should respond to what he says. And if he does it outside the classroom, then it’s none of the administration’s business.
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This absolutely does not mean that we are obliged to consider such a scientist in actual scientific interactions. Yes, if I don’t want to meet him or her, I say, “Nah, guys, you know, I don’t want to meet that person. We will not invite him to a conference, we will not make him a keynote speaker, let him sit at his place and develop science the way he wants. Just because he’s a person that we ethically can’t accept.” And I think that direct pro-war appeals may not be sanctioned with the help of the state, but simply be considered a breach of academic ethics. And in that sense one cannot be excluded from international communications simply because it’s a violation of academic ethics. But this is not about science, this is about academic hygiene, if you will.
T-i: There’s another case that shows how you can avoid a carpet boycott on the basis of one nationality. This is the story of the renewal of the agreement between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and CERN. When CERN decided to continue co-operation by a majority vote, it was a sensational decision.
DD: Here I have a suspicion, turning into a certainty, that scientists from STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics. T-invariant) look at academic freedom a little differently than academics in the social sciences and humanities. For them, it seems to me, it is less a matter of values than of pragmatism. Apparently, they believe that since the result of their work has nothing to do with war, but with the mysteries of nature, it would be wrong to bury such work from thirty years ago.
There is a feeling that we are creeping towards the logic of the Soviet time, the Cold War, when ideological things, humanities, social sciences did not allow any communication between the West and Russia, because they are disconnected in terms of purpose, task and content. As for physics, chemistry, ecology, one can imagine some partial return. No matter how the war ends (it will end someday), it will not make the situation better. And it seems to me that there is such a split between the pragmatic logic of long-term STEM projects and the value logic of the social sciences. Because the humanities and social sciences are too strongly connected with public policy, with values, with democracy and so on. And, of course, common scientific projects in the field of humanities and social knowledge with an authoritarian state waging a war of aggression are hard to imagine. And CERN and JINR, apparently, can continue to interact.
And I think it is rational to have some corridors, strings, because for everyone, first of all for Russia of the future, it is better to have at least some strings than none. But, again, I am not sure that in this case we are dealing with the defence of academic freedom. This is more of a political decision than a decision based on principles. And I think that my Ukrainian colleagues from CERN would agree with me. Because it is not clear why suddenly it is impossible to communicate with Russian universities, but with JINR it is possible.
T-i: The fact is that there is really no unified approach. We can see it in the policy of scientific journals, in the policy of professional scientific associations: they behave differently. Even conference organising committees behave differently – this is true. Does this mean that we are living in a time when some established communicative rules are collapsing and new ones are being formed?
DD: Absolutely. I was recently struck by an episode at a conference in Vilnius where we were discussing academic issues. In the final session, a physicist, a refugee from Iran, stood up and said: “I really want to support my Russian colleagues. Do you know what strikes me most of all? When you come to Europe from Syria, you are a refugee scientist from Syria. When you come from Belarus, you are a refugee scientist from Belarus. And when you’re from Iran, you’re an Iranian creep and a potential spy. This is how Russian scientists-emigrants or newcomers-are perceived.” So we have brothers in distress who are perceived in Europe really more from a security point of view and from the point of view of such blanket norms. For example, her husband, also a scientist, who lived in Iran for three years, now can’t find a job in Germany because he doesn’t pass Security Clearance.
This is just a small illustration of the fact that there is a powerful problem with scientists from authoritarian countries who actually flee from there because they don’t want to be there because of war, repression and so on. But when they come to Europe, they immediately become citizens of this very cursed state and inherit the full programme of curses. So I think it is very important to separate the discussion of sanctions and human rights from academic rights and freedoms. Academic freedoms concern internal academic communications and academic institutions. This is a more subtle and complex issue that has yet to be properly approached.
Editors 17.09.2024