Scale of university damage in wars is ‘disturbing’ – Report

Damaging attacks on universities’ infrastructure during armed conflict over the past year has been described as a ‘disturbing trend’ by the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Network which calls for reinforcement of the prohibition against wartime use, occupation and targeting of universities and educational centres.

Reflecting on the just-published Free to Think: Report on Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (Free to Think 2024), SAR Executive Director Robert Quinn said the year 2024 saw “a disturbing trend of deeply damaging attacks on university infrastructures during armed conflicts, including in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza, on scales not seen in many years”.

He added: “The prohibition on the use, occupation and targeting of centres of education, including universities, must be reinforced and honoured by all sides.”

The reporting period for the Free to Think 2024 report – 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2024 – was indeed a devastating year for universities.

The Israel-Hamas conflict resulted in the destruction of all 18 universities and colleges in Gaza, while Russia attacked universities in Ukraine, using drones to specifically attack the National Agrarian University in Lviv, a city in the far west of the country near the Polish border.

In Sudan, more than 100 universities were either destroyed or badly damaged since the start of the civil war in April 2023.

In total there were 391 attacks on scholars, students and institutions in 51 countries and territories, says the report released on 8 October. These figures compare with 409 attacks in 66 countries and territories during the previous year.

US: Diversity under fire

Last year, SAR flagged the dozens of American states that had passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory and DEI programmes, and governors who used their administrative authority to advance their illiberal agenda.

Florida’s (Republican) Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, ousted members of the board of trustees of New College (Sarasota) and replaced them with acolytes who quickly brought the politically liberal school to heel, aligning it with extremely conservative principles.

Free to Think 2024 shows these trends have accelerated as 28 states had either passed laws restricting DEI officers and programmes or had already seen state officials enact them.

“The bills that were introduced and passed were widely criticised for vague and overly broad language that would be difficult to implement narrowly and therefore create grave risks to academic freedom,” observes Free to Think 2024.

In the fall of 2023 in Wisconsin, where, though the governor Tony Evers is a Democrat, Republican supermajorities (that allow them to override the governor’s vetoes) passed a first-in-the-nation bill that prevented budgeted pay increases for staff at the state’s universities unless they cut DEI positions; a compromise agreement in December saw the universities agree to freeze the number of DEI positions and turn one-third of the positions into “academic and student success” writ large and not DEI.

After Texas’ law banning DEI went into effect on 1 January 2024, 20 DEI employees at the University of Texas Dallas were fired and another 50 at University of Texas Austin. To comply with the law, 131 scholarships at state universities that had race-based eligibility requirements were frozen.

The government of Virginia now requires syllabi for courses, such as Virginia Commonwealth University’s “racial literacy” requirement and another at George Mason University, to be submitted to the state’s education secretary for approval.

US: Campus protests

Equally troubling is the government and university administrations’ handling of the protests that erupted on American campuses following Israel’s war against Hamas.

The report notes that the hearings called by the House Education and Workforce Committee, “ostensibly … to investigate the institutions’ responses to allegations of rising antisemitism on campus”, saw representatives question leaders “about a variety of topics, including ideological diversity, foreign funding, and disciplinary actions”.

SAR states that: “Reports of antisemitism grew (on and off campuses), and some Jewish students reported feeling unsafe on their campuses”.

However, SAR continued, in some cases, “the charge of antisemitism appears to have been levied against faculty members and students in ways that threaten academic freedom and free speech on campus.

“At root are disagreements over the extent to which criticism of Israel, Israeli government policies or Zionism are antisemitic, making it difficult to assess the allegations of antisemitism”.

In the wake of protests, which included the setting up of pro-Palestinian encampments, many university administrations cancelled them, citing security concerns.

Students were suspended at eight universities and six universities suspended groups like Students for Justice for Palestine.

In response to the wave of encampments being set up, “universities began to rewrite their policies in ways that silenced free speech and protest, impinging on academic freedom”. And, in some cases, contractual faculty who publicly expressed support for Palestine or the protesters were fired.

The use of force on campus by police breaking up the encampments and the arrest of more than 1,000 students across the county have contributed to the decline in the academic freedom, as calculated by the Academic Freedom Index (AFI), from 0.89 (fully free) in 2020 to 0.69 (mostly free), the lowest point for the United States since 1917.

Israel: Persecution of Palestinian sympathisers

SAR’s analysis of Israel begins by recognising that the attack on 7 October left the country “traumatised and reeling”.

It stated: “Once classes started [they had been delayed by a week], scholars and students found themselves trying to address trauma and dealing with the death and abduction of their community members.”

One of the undiscussed costs of the calling up of reservists was that almost all academic research ground to a halt.

The report details the case of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who held the Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law at Hebrew University (HU, Jerusalem).

On 29 October, HU called for Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to resign after she signed a petition that “expressed concern about the effects of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on children’s well-being and emotional and physical health and called ‘for the immediate cessation of the Western-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza’”. (HU’s public statement triggered threats of violence against Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her family.)

On 12 March, HU suspended Shalhoub-Kevorkian after she rejected a report, presented to the United Nations Security Council by Pramila Patton a day earlier, that found “reasonable grounds” to believe conflict-related sexual violence occurred in Israel during the 7 October attacks; further, Shalhoub-Kevorkian had said, “Zionism is a crime, and only by revoking it will we be able to go on.”

Two weeks later, in response to a letter from current and former faculty members concerned about the lack of due process in Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s case, HU reversed the suspension.

On 18 April 2024 Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested “on suspicion of incitement to terrorism, violence and racism”. She was released the next day and reported being mistreated by the police.

SAR documents the cases of one Arab-Israeli and one Jewish-Israeli scholar who lost their positions for criticising the actions of the Israel Defence Force in Gaza.

According to SAR, there were dozens of cases of Palestinian students studying in Israel who were disciplined for their criticism of Israel’s policies that was, for the most part, made on social media.

Citing Adalah – the Legal Centre for Arab and Minority Rights in Israel – the report says that 124 Palestinians, at 36 universities and colleges were summoned to disciplinary hearings. Of the 95 represented by Adalah, 47% were suspended or expelled: women account for 79% of students who faced disciplinary actions.

Occupied Palestinian territories

Freedom to Think 2024 discusses Gaza and the West Bank under the rubric of “Occupied Palestinian Territory”. In 2023, both areas were rated by the Freedom Index as being “mostly restricted”; in 2020 the West Bank received a score of 0.76, meaning it was “mostly free”.

Citing figures published by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on 26 August, SAR reports that Israeli military actions had killed 40,000 people and injured 93,000.

On 17 January, media reported that the Israeli Defence Forces blew up Al Israa University, which they had occupied for about two and a half months, using it as a military base and detention centre. With the destruction of Al Israa University every university in Gaza has been destroyed.

According to SAR, Israeli air strikes have killed dozens of professors and hundreds of students. The SAR report highlights the deaths of two professors: Sufyan Tayeh, president of the Islamic University of Gaza and a leading researcher in physics and applied mathematics; and Refaat Alareer, a renowned poet, writer, activist and professor of literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.

It should be noted that the report does not assert that their deaths were targeted; in military parlance these deaths are categorised as “collateral damage”.

In the West Bank universities have remained open under difficult circumstances. “According to the Palestinian minister of education and higher education, the presence of Israeli military checkpoints made it essentially impossible for the West Bank’s students and scholars to access their universities,” the report states.

On 24 September 2023 and again on 8 November 2023, Israeli security forces raided Birzeit University, damaging school property and, in September, arresting eight students. On 16 November, Israeli forces damaged the university’s infrastructure while raiding the Palestinian Technical University, Kadoorie.

Imad Barghouti, a prominent astrophysicist and professor of physics at Al Quds University, was arrested on 23 October 2023. A week later Barghouti’s family announced he had been sentenced to six months administrative detention.

Russia: Tackling ‘undesirables’

In Russia, the report notes that the government of President Vladimir Putin has continued its campaign to control higher education and destroy liberal arts education.

The prosecutor’s office considers gender studies, feminism, human rights, current politics and historical interpretations of World War II contrary to the official narrative to be “undesirable”, resulting in them being removed from the curriculum, it says.

Russian officials accused the Berlin-based Centre for Eastern European and International Studies (ZoiS) of “initiat[ing] anti-Russian sentiments”.

The Budapest-based Central European University (CEU) was declared to be “undesirable” because it discredited Russia’s leadership and criticised the war against Ukraine; the categorisation of CEU as undesirable means that Russian students are banned from participating in CEU programmes and courses.

Eight British scholars and researchers were banned from entering Russia on 12 February 2024 in retaliation for “alleged efforts [by the United Kingdom] to demonise Russia and promote anti-Russian narratives”, SAR reports as one instance of Moscow’s undermining of international academic cooperation.

China: A ‘restricted’ HE ecosphere

China’s AFI rating of 0.07 is the same as last year’s rating, meaning that its higher education ecosphere remains “completely restricted”.

In August 2023, the report notes, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) rewrote its code of conduct to bring it in line with new “restrictions on academics’ ability to express dissent” that had been adopted by the Chinese Communist Party.

Among the changes in the new code of conduct was the requirement that “CAS members adhere to the policies of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and contribute to Chinese national security”.

SAR also drew attention to the fact that Chinese faculty and students abroad are under surveillance and subject to assaults (by Chinese agents in what in the United States are called “police stations”), as are their families in China.

“Chinese students abroad who have attended protests against the Chinese government or memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre have commonly described Chinese authorities making threatening phone calls to family members still living in China,” the report states.

Among the nine imprisoned scholars Freedom to Think 2024 highlights, five are from China: each is a Uyghur, a Turkic ethnic group in the far northwest of China.

Since 2014, under the guise of fighting Islamic terrorism, the Chinese government has sent millions of Uyghurs to forced labour camps and into prisons, while suppressing the Uyghur language and cultural practices.

Arrested in 2014, Professor Ilham Tohti is an Uyghur economist. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times and is a recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought; he also ran a website on which he called for dialogue between the Uyghur and Han Chinese.

After his arrest, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his academic work. Since 2017, prison authorities have not disclosed where he is being held and have denied his family visits.

Professor Rahile Dawut, an expert in Uyghur folklore and traditions, “disappeared in December 2017”, notes Freedom to Think 2024. She was convicted of “endangering state security” and received a life sentence. Chinese authorities have refused to provide information on her health and where she is being held.

Tashpolat Tiyip and Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, geography and literary scholars, respectively, were also arrested in 2017.

“Authorities have not disclosed the whereabouts or wellbeing of the scholars and students [SAR does not supply student names] and have reportedly prosecuted detainees through closed-door trials, during which detainees have been denied access to legal counsel and forced to retroactively choose a crime,” says the report.

Academic freedom: Already protected in law

Although the United Nations Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on the right to education has called for academic freedom to be recognised as an autonomous self-standing human right, both in Freedom to Think 2024 and in email to University World News, Quinn said a “stand-alone right” is not needed.

“SAR and many others, including two UNSRs and the CESCR [Committee on Economic, Social and Community Rights], among others, are working to build awareness that academic freedom is already protected by existing human rights law.

“Awareness of existing protection is a step towards positive change because it exposes the illegitimacy of attacks on the higher ed space. It reinforces the legitimacy of claims to academic freedom and free inquiry, and opens pathways to seeking redress for violations through existing international, and ultimately national, human rights mechanisms.

“Change comes from recognising the violations, as such, and demanding greater protection. Change comes from seeing that academic freedom and free inquiry are as essential to stable, prosperous, democratically-legitimate societies as free and fair elections, a free press, or an independent judiciary,” Quinn wrote.