\n<\/p>\n
Calls and legal tools to ensure \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d in universities proliferate across European countries<\/a>. As I argued elsewhere<\/a> in relation to the presumed neutrality of higher education institutions and knowledge production in the context of the genocide in Gaza, what we see at work is a process of extreme abstraction and decontextualisation, intentionally leading to a reversal of reality. In psychoanalysis this is considered a part of narcissistic personality disorders and known as DARVO<\/u> Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender<\/em><\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n Far from expanding democratic debate, many of these calls also invert relations of power: individuals and movements committed to maintaining racial, gendered, or class-based hierarchies increasingly portray themselves as victims of discrimination when their views are challenged. In this discursive framework, victim and perpetrator, racist and racialised, colonial domination and anti-colonial struggle are turned upside down. Racist and supremacist positions and actors are reframed, at best, as \u201ccontroversial\u201d or \u201canti-conformist,\u201d while demands for justice and accountability are recast as censorship. Such reversals not only obscure relations of power but also reshape the very terms through which violence, injustice, and resistance must be publicly understood. As Sara Ahmed<\/a> notably argued what counts as speech or as harassment is political.<\/p>\n In Europe, university campuses have transformed into an active zone of surveillance, where the bounds of permissible thought are tightly policed by administrative bodies yielding to external political and economic pressures. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Disquieting is the way those striving to readdress the reproduction of inequalities in neo-liberal institutions are framed as \u201cpolitical\u201d and cast as mobilising outside legitimate academic boundaries. This strategic concealment operates quite consistently across various institutional battlegrounds. It functions when actors actively engage in exclusionary projects targeting Black<\/a> and brown<\/a> scholars and their scholarship or roles. It manifests when gatekeepers attempt to restrict the discipline of anthropology to an epistemic framework where scholars experiencing structural racism, colonial violence, or genocide in Gaza are deemed the threat rather than the threatened.<\/p>\n Over this hot 2026 summer, we witnessed Professor Jason Arday, a young life, a father, and a Black academic hounded to death. This was the epilogue of an intense, merciless and ruthless campaign by right-wing forces and outlets in alliance with liberal media. The hunt followed a campaign orchestrated by a former postdoc at Cambridge, Nathan Cofnas, connected to a wide network of race pseudoscientists<\/u><\/a>, backed by multimillionaire supporters of eugenicist ideas with overlapping wings in the UK and the US that for years have been engaged in wars against diversity equality and inclusion in Higher Education.<\/p>\n Cofnas was fired by Emmanuel College at Cambridge University<\/u><\/a> for views expressed in a Substack blog advocating for \u201cracial distinction\u201d and for suggesting that in a true meritocracy, Black scholars would \u201cdisappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment\u201d because intelligence and talent are not equal across groups. He defines these views as \u201crace realism,\u201d and calls for a \u201chereditarian revolution\u201d against the \u201cDEI devil<\/u><\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n This was followed by Free Speech Union<\/u><\/a>, an organisation championing Islamophobic<\/a>, transphobic<\/a> and conservative<\/a> views framed as \u201cfree speech,\u201d assisting Cofnas in suing the college. A University of Cambridge\u2019s investigation concluded that the ideas presented in the blog were \u201clawful free speech<\/u><\/a>.\u201d Ghent University, which had suspended Cofnas, later reinstated him thanks to heavy intervention by no less than the US embassy. A campaign that collected hundreds of signatures was also organized in support of Cofnas\u2019s \u201cacademic freedom.\u201d<\/u><\/a>Notions of academic freedom and free speech are conflated and weaponized in defence of a \u201cview\u201d that, when situated within its broader networks of white supremacist billionaires and race-realist actors, reveals a social and political reactionary project which extends far beyond equality and diversity initiatives in academia. Universities end up reproducing an entrenched hierarchy that considers some sensibilities worthy of protection and freedom while others are to be managed, contained, repressed or discarded.<\/p>\n Similar dynamics are at work in struggles within professional academic associations. An emblematic case is that of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Working Group on Human Rights and `Academic Freedom, which some firmly entrenched, members of EASA were heard naming as a kind of \u201cSpanish Inquisition\u201d during its launch in 2024. This hyperbole reveals a deep-seated defensive mechanism within dominant scholarly structures: when an institution tries to support academic victims of freedom violations who speak out against colonialism, genocide, and repression, opposing actors reframe the accountability mechanism as violent persecution. Through this deep process of structural inversion, the political projects of dominant figures are rendered invisible or recast as innocent subject-positions pursuing \u201ctrue anthropology\u201d focused on theory. Alisse Waterston\u2019s essay<\/a> highlights these similar attacks to the AAA in the recent Vanderbilt<\/u><\/a> report on humanities and social sciences scholarship.<\/p>\n The backlash against calls for severing academic ties with Israeli institutions reveals the machinery most clearly and violently at work. While academics, professional associations, and teachers\u2019 unions advocate boycotts or the suspension of institutional ties given Israeli universities\u2019 complicity in the systematic targeting of Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions and the existential threats they face, these acts of solidarity are often portrayed as breaches of academic freedom<\/u><\/a> and attacks on<\/u><\/a> democracy. The result is a striking paradox: calls to confront the destruction of academic life are themselves cast as the greater danger to it.<\/p>\n We must ask: whose academic freedom and which democratic processes are at stake here?<\/p>\n Far from respecting academic freedom, Israeli universities exercise systematic repression against the expression of dissent. Already in 2024 Adalah, the largest human-rights organization for Palestinian citizens of Israel, had carefully documented<\/a> 124 cases of punitive and retaliatory proceedings specifically targeted against Palestinian students across 36 Israeli universities and colleges. These severe disciplinary actions were triggered by simple expressions of opinion: posts published on the students\u2019 private social-media accounts. This policing of private thought extends into the physical space of higher learning. Major academic centres -Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, Haifa University, Ben-Gurion University, and the Technion \u2013 have gone as far as reporting their own students directly to the Israeli police, endangering their lives.<\/p>\n the increasing repression of Palestinian advocacy on campuses has exposed the deep contradictions at the heart of many Western liberal academic institutions and the violence afforded and obscured by universal notions of the pursuit of \u201cfreedom.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n By contrast, Palestinian universities are constantly and physically under attack. In Gaza, under ongoing genocidal violence, universities have been destroyed and the academic body in some instances decimated, with the Palestinian Ministry of Education reporting<\/a> nearly 50.000 students either killed or injured and more than 200 academics murdered in targeted killings , with other thousands injured. In the West Bank -where Palestinians are facing a violent occupation and barbaric attacks by settlers and the army \u2013 about 150 students of Birzeit University are held in Israeli prisons, a figure that does not even account for the continuous raids, arbitrary arrests, and systemic property seizures occurring across other West Bank universities. This is not a new or temporary predicament; Birzeit University alone has been violently attacked and looted by the Israeli army at least 22 times since 2002.<\/p>\n In Europe, university campuses have transformed into an active zone of surveillance, where the bounds of permissible thought are tightly policed by administrative bodies yielding to external political and economic pressures. This intensified after the adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism<\/a> across Western universities and organizations, including the UK, Germany, France and soon Italy<\/a>, which might soon be the first country to make IHRA a national law. The ELSC<\/u><\/a> (European Legal Support Centre) issued a report<\/u><\/a> detailing how the IHRA definition, that conflates criticisms of Israel with antisemitism, has been weaponised on UK campuses, leading to severe limitations of freedom of expressions of staff and students. The report<\/u><\/a> shows the definition to be an\u00a0instrument\u00a0of institutional control that actively undermines freedom of expression and is used to discriminate against Palestinians and others on campuses who are invested in teaching, studying and discussing the oppression of Palestinians.<\/p>\n\n
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