Dear chair, dear council, dear board, 

This speech is unsolicited advice supported by a majority in the university council.

This year, in 2024, more people than ever in the entirety of human history, will be heading to the voting booths in many more democracies than just the EU, the US, India, and Mexico. But the toll that recent crises have taken on real or fake democracies is immense: the Economist Group’s Democracy Index, comparatively assessing the health of democracies worldwide, has measured the lowest global average since its inception in 2006. Amongst the various variables that the Economist Group includes in its calculation, are the civil liberties available to citizens: as defined by the law, but also crucially, as they are enforced or not in practice. 

I provide this general introduction to make us think more globally about what really is at stake. As the state of the world deteriorates, our university must remain a space for criticality. We must foster that sense of critique and engage with the difficult debates, not shy away from them. I say this not out of an ideological conviction of what the university should be. I say this out of the sobering realization that there is simply no other place to allow for an exchange of opinions, ideas, and standpoints to take place without the interference of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and demagogic bad faith argumentation. 

It is with this in mind that I partly repeat my points here I made in the committees two weeks ago: such a democratic exchange needs a platform and it needs to allow those who fear repercussions to express themselves in a safe manner, such as expressing their dissent anonymously. By creating a type of automatic mechanism, such as the forceful eviction of the building after 19:00, we are restricting access to that platform. By creating these strict rules that ban anonymous speech and require protesters to address their dissent to the faculty or central board, we increase the threshold for democratic expression of dissent to far too restrictive levels.

One final point I’d like to make is that of the type of message the university will communicate to the public. The proposed automatic mechanisms for evicting the building will inevitably communicate that regardless of how important the content of the demonstration is, the university will opt to ask state violence to be applied to protesters. As a scenario not too improbable, imagine that a populist right-wing government introduces discriminatory laws against members of our academic community, and our staff and students protest within our buildings against such a measure. The demonstration lasts on for hours, crossing the 19:00 line with no end in near sight. Do we really want to communicate to the world that regardless of how pressing a political issue may be, we would rather have a good night’s sleep than show solidarity with the affected members of our community? 

I therefore strongly urge the board once more to take back the proposed framework for manifestations and to deal with the issues on a case by case basis, rather than create automatisms like the ones proposed in this memo. Thank you.