UvA-committee: “Academic freedom and responsibility go hand in hand”
Over the past few weeks, a UvA working group has gathered input for a supplementary assessment framework for international collaborations between the UvA and third parties. Eleven recommendations were made to the Executive Board and the deans.
The eleven recommendations came about through roundtable discussions, a townhall meeting and through the digital UvA participation platform ‘Denk Mee’, where everyone could contribute to the debate. The recommendations will be further developed after the summer. The committee, led by professor of international human rights and cultural diversity Yvonne Donders, came about after the ongoing pro-Palestine demonstrations by students and staff and the violence that accompanied them, including counter-demonstrations and the deployment of the police.
“Through everyone’s efforts, a basis for supplementing the assessment framework has been laid,” says Rector Magnificus Peter-Paul Verbeek in an explanation. “The reactions from our academic community endorse that diligence takes precedence over speed here. I assume that, even when the framework is ready, we will remain in constant dialogue about how to apply the framework with additional criteria in academic practice.”
New and existing
Among other things, the working group concludes that there is sufficient support for the idea that “academic freedom and academic responsibility go hand in hand”. “Therefore, the framework should be supplemented with additional assessment criteria for other core university tasks, besides research,” the committee writes.
Until now, it has always been the case that existing external collaborations continued to go ahead, even when criticized by the UvA community. Only new collaborations are then not entered into. That seems set to change, the committee suggests. “New and existing collaborations should be judged by the same standards. Since the current framework covers only new collaborations, the supplemented framework should include indicators that could call for (re)assessment of existing collaborations in exceptional political circumstances,” the committee says. The committee does say that the “general principle” is that the assessment of ongoing collaborations should only be reconsidered in the most serious circumstances, “taking into account contractual obligations.”
An “explainer” should also be developed, outlining the types of collaborations (institutional, project-based, et cetera.), as well as the relevant mandates and responsibilities for decision-making for each type of collaboration. In addition to the project-level assessment that currently applies, collaborations with organizations in exceptional political circumstances should be viewed “extra critically”. A risk assessment framework should be developed for this purpose. See here for the committee’s other recommendations.
Internal review by external agency
In addition to expanding the assessment framework, the Executive Board is also commissioning an investigation into the demonstrations at the UvA between May 6 and May 17. An external agency will conduct an independent evaluation of the events on the campuses. This included a lot of criticism of the Executive Board, which led, among other things, to the Central Student Council submitting and adopting a no-confidence motion against the UvA administration. Incidentally, the actions during the demonstrations by other parties - municipality, Public Prosecutor’s Office and police – will not be part of the evaluation. Which agency will conduct the evaluation is not yet known.
