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How (not) to enhance meaningful dialogue about academic relations with Israeli universities.

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After weeks of protest and student-led demands to cut ties with Israeli universities, a joint letter recently published in Dutch newspaper Trouw  by the rectors of all Dutch universities declared that they will not consider cutting ties with all universities. Whereas the letter leaves an opening for universities to evaluate their collaboration with specific institutions, the main message remains that cutting ties would run counter to academic freedom. In this (translated) blog article, Professors Thea Hilhorst, Klaas Landsman and Amina Helmi argue that the letter risks stifling a dialogue that had been going on in various forms since October of last year. Dutch universities can do well to follow the University of Gent’s example, where a ‘human rights’ commission has advised on the severing of ties with Israeli institutions, and where this advice was actually heeded, they write.

Source: Pixabay

In the last few weeks there have been mounting protests both by students and by scientific staff at universities, all of them calling for Dutch universities to cut their ties with Israeli universities. Last Saturday, the  rectors of universities in the Netherlands jointly wrote an open letter that was published in Dutch newspaper Trouw saying that there would not be a ban on collaboration with all Israeli universities, stating that this would run against the core value of academic freedom. With this decision, the rectors stifle the dialogues that had begun to be held over this issue in different universities.

Ever since the protests began, it has been painfully clear that the universities were not well prepared to organize discussion on human rights-based boundaries to their partnerships with Israeli institutions; it seems they were improvising while some entered into dialogue with protesters while others didn’t.

Two years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it took only a few days for the university boards in the Netherlands to collectively declare that they would sever all their ties with Russian institutions. It concerned a quick decision taken by the boards without consultation within their institutions. In their open letter the rectors explain that that decision was in response to an urgent request from the government. The question remains if such a decision should then not be evaluated against the value of academic freedom?

Towards the end of last year, the discussion around working with institutions and companies in the fossil fuel industry also came to the fore, again provoked by various student protests. The question then was if Dutch universities can maintain their relations with the fossil fuel industry despite their commitment to sustainability. Over the course of this debate, various study and research committees were set up to investigate, including by the Royal Dutch Scientific Academy (KNAW). That debate has yet to reach a conclusion, and no decisions have been made.

The question about the ethics of collaboration is now resurfacing in relation to the relation with Israeli universities. According to the International Court of Justice, there are several clear signs that Israel is in the process of conducting a genocide. Can universities in this situation hold on to their ‘business-as-usual’? How, in a few years, will we look back on the universities’ reluctance to act? We cannot pretend we didn’t know what was going on in view of the series of  declarations of the Court.

Many Israeli universities’ programmes contribute directly or indirectly to the continuing occupation of Palestinian land and the displacement of Palestinian people, as well as the ongoing war that is killing thousands of civilians and creating famine conditions. The letter published by the various rectors did not make any mention of the potentially unfolding genocide. They frame the situation as a conflict that has two sides that are more or less comparable in power. However, the issue concerns the disproportionality of the respons of Israel to the 7 October attacks. The rectors state in their letter that they care about supporting Palestinian collegaues, yet fail to mention that all eleven universities in Gaza have been wiped off the face of the earth by Israeli bombardments.

Indeed, the open letter published by the rectors is a top-down interruption of processes of dialogue that had been building in the previous weeks. In various universities, committees and groups had been set up to help advise and facilitate this dialogue. The Dutch universities would do well to take advice from the University of Ghent in Belgium. At that university, a ‘human rights commission’ advised the specific severing of ties with three Israeli institutions, adjudged to be materially contributing to the ongoing repression of human rights, whilst the rest of the ongoing partnerships were to continue as normal. The university adopted the advised road.

It’s quite unthinkable that Dutch universities can continue to uphold their various core values without occasionally having to make painful choices informed by these values. On the basis of recent history, we can only make three suggestions to the universities:

1) bring in an ethical committee and give them the mandate to give binding advice,

2) make sure that the commission evaluates cases against the core values of the institution, and

3) make sure that the committee reflects all stakeholders within the university.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Dorothea Hilhorst
Dorothea Hilhorst

Dorothea Hilhorst is professor of Humanitarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University.

Klaas Landsman

Klaas Landsmanis the Chair of Mathematical Physics, Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics, and Particle Physics at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Amina Helmi

Amina Helmi is a professor at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen. Helmi’s main research interests are galaxy evolution and dynamics, with emphasis on what can be learned from the nearby Universe, and in particular from our own Galaxy.

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Gender Studies is yet to make its mark among university students in Pakistan: Findings from a study on perceptions and attitudes towards gender studies among students in Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan.

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Since 2010 I have been working as a lecturer at the Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies at  the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. I am also pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Sociology, with my research focusing on understanding the challenges and opportunities related to offering gender studies as an academic discipline in universities in Pakistan.  Moreover, I will also be joining the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) as external Ph.D. candidate beginning in May 2022.

Main Entrance Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Credit: Ghulam Mustafa GMG, November 2021

 

Quaid-i-Azam University is a public university, established in July 1967 under the Act of National Assembly, and offers research programs for PhD and MPhil degrees across several disciplines. The university is renowned internationally, and attracts many foreign students, although gaining an admission is fairly competitive. However, the student body is quite diverse, with students from across Pakistan enrolled at the university.

The master’s program in Gender Studies was first started in 2008 at the Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies[i]. The data show that between 2008-2020, more women (252) applied to study gender studies than men (220). Moreover, overall, the total number of students who applied for gender studies increased after 2008, although there was also a decline observed in the number of students who enrolled in the program in 2015.

Myths and misconceptions associated with Gender Studies among students

The data to examine perceptions towards the discipline of gender studies has been gathered from  show that between 2008-2020, only 37% students outlined gender studies as their first choice for field of study in university application. While it is unsettling to see such low interest among young people towards this discipline, these findings not only reflect the low awareness and commitment in Pakistan toward gender justice, but also illuminate how factors such as merit, affirmative action, and broader socio-cultural dynamic in Pakistan contributes towards certain academic disciplines being perceived as less important or prestigious than others.

One possible reason for this interesting enrolment trend could be that new study programs usually garner a lot of attention initially from students, but gradually the numbers decline as students begin to question the market utility of the degree, particularly if there is a sizeable number of past students who remain unemployed post-graduation, with bleak prospects for employment. Another reason could be the considerable reduction in the higher education budget in Pakistan in the past few years, leading to limited financial aid and scholarship support for new students.  There is also the additional factor of master’s degree programs all over Pakistan, since 2020, being replaced by four-year bachelor’s degree programs, thereby translating into additional cost of pursuing higher education for students across Pakistan.

As part of this study, I also conducted in-depth interviews with students to further unpack the enrolment trend and perceptions held by students towards gender studies as a discipline. I have categorised these perceptions into the following themes:

 

  1. Assuming that studying gender studies makes one a feminist

The foremost assumption among the new students is that gender studies, as a field, is limited to studying about patriarchy and social construction of gender, and hence focusing on these issues makes one a feminist.  Feminism and feminist activism are some of the most controversial terms in the context of Pakistan, viewed as being against the Pakistani society and harming its social fabric. Moreover, feminist activism, soon after the emergence of Pakistan as an independent state, has remained confined largely within the bounds of bourgeois respectability, thereby misunderstood, and sometimes even despised, by the masses. As a result, students are often oblivious or unaware about the richness of this discipline and its diversity. In this sense then, teaching gender studies has become a deconstructive project (Bari 1996).

  1. Misplaced focus on jargon rather than lived experiences by the students and teachers

In term papers, students are often more concerned about using terminology and jargon, instead of grasping a deeper understanding of concepts such as social constructionism, feminism, and patriarchy. In other words, pedagogy in our context involves unpacking these assumptions. Adding to Dr. Bari reflections, I point out that at times teachers’ in terms of assignments, reflection papers, and critical essays from students are unrealistic as they come with a specific cultural baggage and presuppositions. It is true that students feel burdened to use certain type of language and jargons, hence feeling burdened by the discipline rather than enjoying it.

  1. Low market utility of a degree in gender studies

Concerns related to employability of a gender studies degree in the job market are highlighted in the lived experiences of students pursuing gender studies. For example, one of the respondents from the study shared:

“Where we will go for a job after this degree. The development sector has already shrunk in Pakistan, and gender studies is not being offered at college level. What is its scope after college?”   Our concern is a job after all our parent’s will not feed us throughout the life and we have seen that most of our seniors in gender studies are not doing any job, they have no work.

  1. Gender studies perceived as not relevant to daily life

Another important perception related to gender studies was the belief that the discipline doesn’t relate to their lived experiences. As one student noted:

“If the research and theory is not produced in our own local context, then this whole exercise is detached from our society, and it is less relevant for us.’’

In fact, some students also claimed that gender studies, as a discipline, was a form of western propaganda, with little relevance to their daily life. Moreover, it is also important to note that such misconceptions persist event among students pursuing other degree programs at the university. They question the relevance of gender studies as an academic discipline, given that they are unaware of what it entails, as it is not a subject that is offered during undergraduate studies in Pakistan.

  1. Perceived judgment from fellow students

Most students reported feeling judged by fellow students from other socials sciences departments because of the course content, with a common assumption being that the focus of the discipline is primarily on teaching about sexuality. As one student shared: “He considered it [gender studies]  to be useless.”

 

Increasing awareness about Gender Studies key to making it more accessible

It can be concluded that discernments, disillusions, and self-transformation struggles are important for a newly emerged discipline. However, we have now had gender studies at the graduate level in Pakistan for 30 years, and there is an urgent need to devise and implement strategies to address these myths and misperceptions about the discipline. For instance, introduction of gender studies at the undergraduate level across Pakistani universities can help increase awareness about the discipline and address the associated stigma and misbeliefs. In this context, in-depth interviews with educators and policymakers can also help identify ways to incorporate ownership and state patronage to this discipline.

Moreover, to increase awareness about gender studies within the university, organising engaging events and session, such as reading groups or movie screenings can help students from across disciplines not only learn more about gender studies, but also encourage them to see and understand, in a relatable way, its relevance to their own life, and to that of their communities. Lastly, valuing students with this degree in the job market, by increasing access to job opportunities for gender studies graduates across different sectors – non-profits, policy jobs, education, healthcare, etc. – can encourage current and future students to build a stable and inspiring career with a gender studies degree.

 

Bibliography

Ahmed, A. (2019, December 17). DAWN. Retrieved from dawn.com/news.

Bari, D. (1996, April). Women’s Studies: a Cause betrayed? Islamabad, ICT, Pakistan.

Khan, R. A. (2021). From Antagonism to Acknowledgment: Development of Gender and Women’s Studies as Academic Discipline in Pakistan. Progressive Research Journal of Arts and Humanities, 3(1), 171-185.

[i] Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

Rabbia Aslam is currently working as a lecturer at the Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies at the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan for more than ten years. She is enrolled in Ph.D. Sociology at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. With an Academic background in Sociology and Gender, her research and teaching areas include Violence, Sociology of Knowledge, Sociology of Gender, bifurcation in the Education system, Post and Decolonial thinking in Pakistan. She writes for newspapers and blogs as well. She has been a speaker for national and international forums, also has been part of international projects. She will be joining ISS as an external Ph.D. candidate in May 2022.

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EADI/ISS Series | Empowering African Universities to have an impact by Liisa Laakso

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Discussions on the impact of higher education and research have increased, together with the rise of strategic thinking in the management of universities during the last decade. Governments, taxpayers and private funders want to know which benefits they get from universities. Academic Institutions, in turn, want to prove how their work is beneficial to society in multiple ways. This tells us much about the global management culture in public services – and about a new pressure against the academic authority and standing of universities.

For example, the government of Zimbabwe’s new plan for higher education, the so-called 5.0-University vision, stipulates that universities must also include innovation and industrialisation in their activities – in addition to their three academic tasks education, research and community service.

The stated purpose of this plan is to reconfigure the education system of the country to create jobs and economic growth along with the fourth revolution “to transform the country’s economy into an upper-middle income by the year 2030”. Simultaneously, however, political turmoil and rampant corruption have created an economic crisis that is dramatically weakening the previously good working conditions at the universities in terms of resources, infrastructure and salaries.

Zimbabwe might be an extreme case, but it is not alone. The rhetoric of the importance of industry and ‘value for money’ invested in universities and the simultaneous cuts in their public funding resonates both with the technocratic and populistic views of higher education, if not reactionary voices against educated elites all over the world.

What does this rhetoric mean for the production of scientific knowledge in different disciplinary fields and in governance and development studies in particular? For medical sciences or engineering, identifying and measuring their impact and relevance can be quite straightforward. But for sciences focusing on policies and their critiques, such a task is complex, as their impacts are diverse, often indirect, slow and long-term.

Making disciplinary knowledge on governance and development relevant again

Research-based disciplinary knowledge on governance and development is not directly connected to innovation or industrialisation, but it has very much to do with the legitimacy and functioning of the social, political and economic organisations and structures that enable them. In a context of political transitions or struggles for democratisation happening in large parts of the Global South, one could assume that such a role is very important. But how to show that? Judgments about the importance of particular degree programs and research fields are also judgments about the marginalization of others. It is easy to give concrete examples of the usefulness of administrative studies, but not of political theory. The whole exercise relates to very fundamental values and epistemological premises of university disciplines.

Much of this epistemological discussion has centered on the necessity of state-led development or on decolonisation. The first one formed an important part of the expansion of higher education after the independence of African states and again in late 1970s and 1980s with the heyday of the dependency school. It resulted in the establishment of institutes or university departments of development studies, often with a political economy or an explicitly stated socialist orientation. One of the forerunners was the University of Dar es Salaam. In Zimbabwe, the Institute of Development studies ZIDS was first established under the government and later integrated into the University of Zimbabwe. But ZIDS does not exist anymore. In order to respond to today’s demands of the government, the profile of development studies apparently is no longer as relevant for the university as it used to be.

Do University curricula respond to the societal needs in the Global South?

Calls for decolonisation in the aftermath of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Fees Must Fall” student uprisings at the University of Cape Town have drawn attention to the fact that a decades-long evolution of higher education in the independent South has not abolished global asymmetries in knowledge production. Western traditions and theorizing still dominate much of the academic literature, including that on governance and development. Thus the concern that imported content of university curricula or models of analysis do not grasp the real problems of societies in the Global South. One example of how to respond to it, again from the University of Zimbabwe, is to bring a module of local inheritance into all degree programs.

New demands and pressures provide unique constraints but also unique opportunities for universities and scholars to develop university teaching and research. Research funders and development cooperation agencies should react to this looming backlash for development studies in social sciences in the South. It requires close interaction with public authorities from the local level to intergovernmental organizations, private stakeholders and academic associations. What is certain is that there are plenty of issues that can be clarified by development knowledge: the widening inequalities, international corruption, discontent amongst marginalized groups, simultaneous political apathy and new modes of radical mobilization by social media. This alone should be enough to justify the role of universities in these fields.

This article is part of a series launched by the EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) and the ISS in preparation for the 2020 EADI/ISS General Conference “Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice”. It was also published on the EADI blog.

About the author:

Liisa Laakso is a senior researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. She is an expert on world politics and international development cooperation. Her research interests include political science, African studies, democratisation of Africa, world politics, crisis management, foreign policy, EU-Africa policy and the global role of the European Union.

Together with Godon Crawford from Coventry University, UK, she will be convening the panel ”Production and use of knowledge on governance and development: its role and contribution to struggles for peace, equality and social justice” at the 2020 EADI/ISS Conference.

Image Credit: Tony Carr on Flickr.

Striking for a transformative university by Karin Astrid Siegmann and Amod Shah

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Budget cuts in higher education limit universities’ transformative potential. A big strike is therefore planned in the Netherlands for all sectors of education on 15 March 2019. This strike follows demonstrations amongst others by university staff and students in The Hague in December 2018. This post is a conversation between ISS PhD researcher Amod Shah and senior lecturer Karin Astrid Siegmann about what motivates them to participate in the protests.

Karin: So many people came for the demonstration in The Hague—many more than I had expected! There were 1,000, some say even 2,000 people. What motivated you to join, Amod?

Amod: I was very impressed at the size of the demonstration, too. Being part of an educational institution, an element of solidarity motivated me to join. And there are very real impacts of these proposed cuts on us as PhD researchers. We are already in a situation where there is limited capacity for PhD supervision and training because academic and administrative staff are stretched and need to balance research and teaching responsibilities. The budget cuts aggravate that. There’s also a broader discussion to be had: these cuts are huge and structural. What does that mean for the university?

Karin: I see people without permanent contracts and tenure often don’t dare to speak up, criticise, or do anything that would distract their attention from getting those publication points necessary to get tenure. Overall, I see a move towards the neoliberalisation of universities: universities are more and more managed like ‘knowledge factories’. There’s more attention to quantifiable outputs than to the contents of your research, the meaning of what you teach, and of your research for society. To me, a public university should be a space where people manage to think out of the box, creatively for a better, more just society.

In my research and teaching, I use Polanyi’s work quite a bit. He looked at European societies from the perspective of efforts to commodify everything in society, driven by business interests and also pushed by governments. I see similar dynamics in the neoliberalisation of universities. Yet they are a space that should not be commodified in a healthy society. The effort will backfire, I think. But Polanyi also perceived simultaneous counter-movements by ordinary people, by social movements. I see the protests as such a form of resistance.

Amod: Very real conflicts of interest are created when, instead of government funding, you rely on a private organisation, foundation, or company to provide funds for research.

Karin: ‘Conflict of interests’ puts it very politely. I see an increasing influence of corporate interests that want to uphold the status quo. For instance, I see many more calls for research on climate change adaptation rather than what can be done to prevent climate change. That allows us to not question a westernised consumerist way of life, a dogma of economic growth.

For the ‘knowledge factory’, a similar model is being implemented not only in universities but also other sectors, such as in healthcare or in government offices where you should care about the public good rather than higher productivity. This model works through individualisation and competition. It provides disincentives for people to collaborate, but also encourages them to recycle their own work in order to make a career.

Such an individualistic model also makes it easier within institutions to divide and rule and silence critical voices. Michael Burawoy has written a really interesting class analysis of how a university manages to silence protest against new public management restructuring by dividing academic staff from admin staff, through the provision of some privileges to academic staff.

Amod: This is a very good point! As a former MA student and now as a PhD researcher, I see that playing out at ISS, too. By creating such differences—that as a PhD student you are not a student but you are not a staff member either—you intentionally or unintentionally harm the ability for people to collaborate.

We are of course aware that there are funding pressures, but it’s important not to let go of the ethos of a university that contributes to social change. There should be space for collaboration, to think more broadly, not to be oriented solely towards the next publication, or finishing your PhD or getting a job. There are universities and spaces where people are trying to get away from this rat-race kind of orientation The University of Gent is one example: their new system for faculty evaluation de-emphasises quantitative metrics and focuses on what faculty members are proud of[1]. There are real examples out there about how things can be better—these are not ideas which are just up in the air.

Karin: Yes, I was really touched by that example. Another example I have heard about is the planned cooperative university in Manchester. Because of the increasing privatisation in universities, students don’t have the funds to study. That way, universities becomes a more and more exclusive space. With a cooperative university, they want to develop an alternative model with students and staff as the main stakeholders.

Amod: For me, what’s happening in the Netherlands is symptomatic of a more global phenomenon, of the state withdrawing from higher education. What do you think?

Karin: I just referred to Burawoy’s class analysis of neoliberalised universities. I heard him speak about that two years back in Lahore, Pakistan, at a private university. I found it so interesting that somebody coming from a public university in the US presented an analysis that spoke both to the situation of students at a private, elite university in Pakistan and somebody like me who is teaching at a public university in the Netherlands. Very different contexts, but his observations rang a bell for so many people in the audience.

Amod: I would add to this the idea of the university as an egalitarian space, where people from very different backgrounds are able to come and study together. I think that’s a hallmark of public education across the world. This egalitarian space is one of the first casualties of the privatisation and neoliberalisation of higher education. I see that a lot in India now, with the mushrooming of expensive private universities.

Karin: I think even in the publicly funded universities in countries that claim to be very egalitarian like the Netherlands, you very often see the reproduction of class, racial, and gender hierarchies. I don’t pretend that right now public universities are egalitarian spaces. But in private universities, it is very clear that the customer-pays principle rules. Whereas in public universities you can contest that, and there’s space to demand more inclusiveness.

Amod: I agree. I think that’s what these protests are about—maintaining a space for contestation in the public higher education system.

Karin: So, we will take to the streets again on 15 March?

Amod: Yes!

The 15 March demonstration at Malieveld, The Hague will start at 12:00 (noon) and will continue until approximately 13:30.

[1] We would like to thank Zuleika Sheik for sharing this information.

Image Credit: Alice Pasqual on Unsplash

About the authors:

csm_5abd70057687ec5e3741252630d8cc66-karin-siegmann_60d4db99baKarin Astrid Siegmann is a senior lecturer in gender & labour economics at ISS.

 

 

 

amod-photoAmod Shah is a PhD candidate at the ISS.