Climate stakes: universities versus their students

For context, I’m a French academic, working for the last ten years at Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. In 2009, I graduated from Sciences Po Lille, one of the national Grandes Ecoles, a type of selective tertiary educational institution specific to France. I have therefore experienced both the French and Dutch academic systems.

Over the past five years, I have worked extensively on environmental education and ecological transitions in my teaching and research, focusing on developments in France and the Netherlands. I’ve been hoping to capitalise on synergies between the different institutional cultures to accelerate the transition. France has been mainstreaming serious climate and energy experts like Jean-Marc Jancovici and Aurélien Barrau for almost two decades, engaging the French public in sobering, realistic discussions on post-growth economics in a warmed and depleted world, far ahead of most other European nations. Although the discussion on environmental issues has been progressing in the Netherlands over the past few years, spurring in particular by the farming question, our national universities constantly seem to be on the back foot on these subjects. On the one hand, they pride themselves on educating a generation of "global citizens" who will solve our social and environmental problems through "positive impact". On the other hand, they struggle to translate these ambitions into coherent policy proposals. Weak sustainability ambitions, a propensity to call the riot police to deal with student protest and the omnipresence of the oil giant Shell in public debates place universities in an uncomfortable position: make painful and possibly unpopular changes required to participate in the transition, or maintain the status quo and lose relevance in a future in transition? What can French and Dutch university administrators and academic learn from each other in this regard?

28th November 2022: a tale of two protests

Paris

A dozen students carrying cardboard signs staged a sit-in during a recruitment forum hosted by France’s top business school, HEC Paris, to protest the presence of the French oil giant Total Energies at the event. The organisers let the students have their say and the protest ends peacefully

Rotterdam

At Erasmus University Rotterdam, about 40 students and teachers carrying banners sat in the middle of the Law Faculty, demanding (among other things) that university sever its various ties with Shell. They were treated as criminals: the university board sent in the police, and 10 students were arrested and taken into custody. I experienced the occupation of French universities against the Pécresse reform in 2007-2009, during which the entrance to my university was blockaded with tables for weeks. 400 students crammed into a lecture hall to debate the occupation, the floor of which eventually collapsed under the excess weight. That year’s final exams only covered 30% of the course contents, because there was no time for the classes to be taught.

By comparison, the day of action in Rotterdam – led by a group known as OccupyEUR – was rather gentle: run-of-the-mill Marxist speeches, sewing workshops, banner painting, coffee and vegan soup for everyone. Nothing was blocked, damaged or spilled. Where evening classes were cancelled, this was solely at the discretion of the university board. And yet despite the peaceful, unthreatening nature of the event, cometh 6pm, cometh the riot police. The national academic community was outraged. 600 people signed an open letter to the university board, demanding respect for academic freedom on public campuses. A heated public debate ensued. "Never again", said professors, students, and even board members. But then, two months later, it was the University of Amsterdam’s turn called the police on its own professors and students undertaking a similar protest. 30 people were arrested in scenes of police violence that once again shocked the academic community.

I may be getting ahead of myself, and things are changing fast in France, but I think that today, no French university board would dare to call on the police to crush a student protest on its own campus. It would trigger a mass mobilisation that might last for weeks, and it is unlikely that the careers of the implicated board members would survive. So how do we explain the actions of Dutch university boards? And does this mean that what is happening here could not happen in France? First explanation: it's a different culture.

A different culture

The Dutch public debate culture is so peculiar that it even has a name: the poldermodel. It is a culture of consensus, compromise and incremental politics, a modus operandi of taking it easy and, above all, not rushing. This model was epitomised by Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his far-right opponent Geert Wilders, berating each other in the middle of a parliamentary session with the emblematic phrase: 'doe effe normaal man!’ (translating loosely as: ‘behave normally, man!’). The Dutch are not overly keen on eccentricity.

General strikes, demonstrations that block entire cities, yellow vests, and student movements are not a common sight here. Labour disputes are usually settled before they get to that point. And then, suddenly, EUR’s board, which has never had to deal with any kind of student protest, finds itself confronted with a seemingly spontaneous demonstration at the centre of its main campus. Attempting to justify himself in an interview with the university's independent newspaper, the president of the board explained that the demonstration simply caught him off-guard, that he heard (unfounded) rumours of interference by outside groups, and called in the police without verifying the rumours or taking time to talk to the protesters.

This occupation is perhaps a symptom of a changing culture of protest in the Netherlands: from climate activists to angry farmers, more people are taking to the streets to call for change, and politicians are struggling to respond. Right now, it’s survival of the fittest: when farmers descend on the streets of The Hague in their tractors to demand their right to pollute, politicians – not used to engaging with citizens in this way - promise willy-nilly to maintain the status quo, while the police look on from afar. When a few dozen poor and powerless students and environmental activists demand their right to a liveable future, decision makers and police forces use aggressive, even violent, tactics to disperse them.

Still, one might have through that the reputedly left-wing University of Amsterdam would deal with protest more constructively, especially after the debacle at Erasmus University, but no. To understand this, we need to consider another factor, which poses a newer and greater threat to French universities: the privatisation of education and research.

Netherlands Inc.

The privatisation of the education system is usually associated with the United States and the United Kingdom, where decades of neoliberal governance have wreaked havoc on higher education as a public good. But 'New Public Management', the doctrine of running public institutions like businesses, has also hit Dutch universities hard. The idea of NPM is to improve the international competitiveness of universities by reducing public research funds, abolishing public student grants, and removing civil servant status from employees. There are national research grants that are very difficult to obtain (the competition for the national post-doctoral fellowship has a success rate of 12%), but most scientists in all disciplines are dependent on private funding. This largely comes from big businesses and trust funds, such as the Erasmus Trust Fund in Rotterdam, backed by wealthy patrons. As a result, researchers spend as much time looking for funds to finance their work as they do conducting scientific research.

Companies and entrepreneurs don’t fund research and education for the love of science, but because they want something in return. As a result, university research and education programmes are too often steered by the priorities of national industrial groups, like Shell. In 2017, an investigation showed that Shell was influencing the content of courses at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), EUR’s highly influential business school. Everyone knows this; indeed, it regularly makes the front page of the university newspaper. Serious concerns have been voiced for years about the importance of freedom from corporate influence. But nothing fundamentally changes because, in the absence of public funds, EUR needs Shell and other large industrial players to pay its bills. Little wonder, then, that the board decided so quickly to crush this occupation.

This is where the danger lurks for French universities: the signs of a similar process of privatisation are already apparent. In 2020, the presidential majority passed a new law that clearly takes up the principles of NPM in academia: more competition between researchers, change in the status of researchers as civil servants, more precarious jobs modelled on the Anglo-Saxon system, financing on a project-by-project basis, and the promotion of private research in public laboratories.

French universities would be wise to learn from the 20 years of experience their Dutch counterparts have with NPM, or they too may soon find themselves caught between the interests of their students of those of their financiers.

A change of course?

One thing has certainly changed since OccupyEUR’s first demonstration back in November: things that were once kept quiet are now under scrutiny – like the source of the Erasmus Trust Fund’s money. The voices pushing for a more sustainable university are no longer content with weak ambitions like a vegan campus by 2030. There is a growing appetite for concrete action, and the kinds of authentic dialogue that can lead us there. Even the university board, under the guidance of DIT, is attempting to bring campus stakeholders together to debate bolder transition measures. The next steps are still up in the air.

Sometimes I get the impression that our leaders sincerely believe that talking about sustainability loudly enough makes one sustainable. This is known in academic language as ‘performative discourse’: speech substituting for action. As a lapsed Catholic, I might even suggest that leaders will submit to a public punishment of their failures to act on sustainability in the same way that one confesses at mass: not to stop sinning, but because the confession acts as a license to continue sinning and seek forgiveness later. So, I’m cautious with ambitious declarations: perhaps our institutions’ leaders are beginning to feel the pressured to engage in authentic dialogue and leave green-washing behind, perhaps not. One thing is certain, though: with every passing day, the climate catastrophe accelerates.

Many international academic colleagues have contacted me in recent weeks to ask me how I see the future of sustainability in Dutch universities. I see a spectrum of possibilities for the near future. Taking EUR as an example – on one end of the spectrum, we could become a leader in the ecological transition, inspiring universities around the world with an ambitious transition programme and concrete actions for research and education compatible with planetary limits. At the other end, we could continue to promise a great deal but do very little, and ultimately render ourselves irrelevant to a world in transition. We at DIT intend to do all we can to ensure that the former is the case, but there is a lot of work to be done.

The outcome of dialogues on sustainability transitions in the Netherlands, whether in the agricultural or academic sector, could set the tone for Europe as a whole. But there is one major factor in France's favour here: a greater extent of awareness of the urgency of sustainability issues among student bodies and the general public, thanks in particular to the continued public interventions of spokespeople like Jean-Marc Jancovici, Aurélien Barrau, Cyril Dion, and Pablo Servigne. It is possible that the direction and speed of the shifts ongoing here in the Netherlands depend on our ability as scholars and spokespeople of transitions to convey this same consciousness and openness to action-centric dialogue to Dutch students and citizens alike, in time to deal with the problem. Before it deals with us.