All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players… This was the thought expressed by Joost van de Vondel and William Shakespeare in the early 17th century. We play our part as well, and, as you can see, we sometimes dress up to emphasise it. It is therefore no coincidence that, for the first time, we are opening the academic year with an open-air procession, from one theatre to another…
We are not doing this just for show, but because we also want to highlight our connection with the city more fully. ‘Town and gown’ – the city and the university; the mayor and the rector. The university that is part of the city and region, and that also wishes to take responsibility. United, so to speak.
The university is not an ivory tower. Indeed, that is not what the Antwerp skyline looks like. Our university is strongly positioned within society. Academics also want the best for their children, have loans to pay off, hope to grow old in good health, are concerned about their jobs and wonder about their retirement. Our students come from all segments and groups of the population (although work remains with regard to proportional distribution), and they have the same questions about the future of the world as other young people. Like everyone else, those studying or working at the university or the university college worry about the climate, they watch bewildered as wars unfold before their eyes, and they draw a red line. They live and work in the city, pay taxes and take advantage of all the benefits they receive in return.
The University of Antwerp also has an explicitly social mission. Sixty years ago, in 1965, when Antwerp’s two commercial colleges in Antwerp – both of which were more than 100 years old – were granted university status and teaching privileges, it was with the intention of facilitating access to university studies for young people from the Antwerp area, thereby strengthening the region. This is a calling that we take to heart even today. (I know we have a sister university that is already 10 times older: happy birthday!)
Making the Antwerp region more competitive is obviously not the direct mission of the university. It is the logical outcome as we provide for the development of talent and knowledge through our teaching and research. Our study programmes appeal to the interests and talents of students, helping to expand them with new knowledge and skills, and teaching them to use these tools both critically and creatively. It is precisely from this attitude that innovation can emerge. In this way, the university contributes to strengthening the city, the province and the entire Antwerp region. We obviously do not do this alone: we do it together with governments, other social partners and companies. Over the course of this academic year, we will make that commitment more concrete, together with the university colleges in our Association. You will undoubtedly be hearing more about that in a few months – because such things pay off.
According to a 2017 study commissioned by the Flemish Interuniversity Council, every euro invested by the government in university teaching and research yields a return on investment of 12 euros.
It is therefore disappointing and, in fact, incomprehensible that, for several years, the government has not allowed university funding to increase in line with the growth of students and research activities, despite this being stipulated by decree. The abrupt cuts we heard about on Monday night will make it even more difficult.
Our connection with Antwerp obviously by no means implies that our field of vision focuses solely on this bend in the Scheldt River. Quite the contrary. No fewer than 134 nationalities are represented amongst our 25 000 students and 7000 staff members, and the vast majority of our research activities are conducted with partners abroad. Of the nearly 40 000 scientific articles we have published in the past 10 years, 56% are the result of international collaborations. We are part of YUFE, a successful European Alliance University with 10 partners. Incidentally, our YUFE bachelor programme in Urban Sustainability Studies will start this year, with students taking part of their study programmes at three of the partner universities and receiving a joint degree.
In addition to focusing on innovation, science grows out of pure curiosity, and this is not limited to the university. It is for this reason that people read books, watch documentaries, listen to podcasts et cetera. As explicitly stated in the recent Draghi Report on the Future of European Competitiveness, future investments should focus on high-complexity and high-intensity innovation. This should and will be disruptive. In other words, we will have to break entirely new ground, and this can start only with research at the lowest ‘Technology Readiness Levels’.
As a university, we have a particular responsibility for such fundamental research.
Our Vice-Rector for Research and Impact envisions scientific research as a dynamic ecosystem, akin to a stream of water that rises in the mountains and takes various forms along its course. At its origin, we find basic research. Just as rivers arise from meltwater or springs high in the mountains, basic research arises out of sheer curiosity. It does not focus on direct applications, but feeds the entire knowledge chain by generating new insights and ideas.
Further downstream, this water collects in a reservoir. This lake represents the body of strategic basic research. It is here that a variety of actors come together: scientists, businesses, civil society organisations, policymakers and citizens. Interaction and alignment occur around shared societal challenges. Here, knowledge is managed, pooled and aligned with broader strategic goals in a targeted manner, whilst remaining rooted in the flow of basic research.
Still further along, the power of the water is harnessed by a dam and a hydroelectric plant. This is the domain of applied research: here, accumulated knowledge is transformed into concrete applications, technologies and solutions that create added value for society and the economy.
Recurrent movements are also important within this ecosystem. Some ideas follow the natural path of the water. Other knowledge moves along a fish ladder that enables collaboration and transfer between levels. Just as water evaporates and later replenishes its source in the form of rain, insights from practice and application also return as inspiration for new fundamental questions.
This continuous game of flow, switching and feedback gives rise to a resilient and productive knowledge system that contributes to both scientific progress and societal development, as well as to prosperity through the valorisation of knowledge.
It is in this upstream ecosystem that the university’s strength resides. Without that influx of fundamental knowledge, there could also be no powerful turbines to drive applied research. We must therefore be careful not to invest only in the outflow side of the dam – where the Strategic Research Centres and Flemish scientific institutions are located, and where thematically targeted research resources are deployed. We must also continue to provide adequate nourishment for that free, basic, blue-sky research.
Even if it is sometimes not immediately clear where such free enquiry will lead. For example, a cabinet minister recently said that tax support for researchers in universities is fine, but he questioned whether the same is necessary for historians, art scientists or archaeologists. The question is absurd: it is obviously important to interpret our past properly, to understand what the current situation grew out of, or what it is on which we base our identity.
At this point, I would also like to stress once again that the university is positioned at the centre of society, and fundamental researchers are thus also bound to feel stimulated from time to time by the societal challenges that arise: climate change, the biodiversity crisis, food security, newly emerging infections, urbanisation, an ageing population, personalised medicine, artificial intelligence, our consumption of energy and raw materials, social inequality, international relations, migration, etc.
Such basic research will then search particularly for the mechanisms underlying these challenges, and others can then draw on this knowledge to devise new, sometimes unexpected or surprising solutions – solutions that sometimes go against the mainstream, gut feeling, short-term thinking or ideological beliefs.
This sometimes leads to tension or suspicion between town and gown, between the government and the academy. This brings me to the second part of my address: a second social role of the university, in addition to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
As I recently heard from Annelin Eriksen, the president of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters:
Universities are democracy machines. They are places for free enquiry and debate, characterised by an openness to dialogue and the rejection of intolerance.
These are essential features of a university.
Academic freedom has been discussed many times on occasions such as these. It is indeed a high good. For the record, academic freedom is not about allowing academics to simply do whatever they want and whenever. It is not merely a privilege. On the contrary, it is a right, within one’s own discipline, to freely pose research questions, to freely choose how best to investigate them, to freely report on their results and to be able to teach about them without undue outside interference or censorship.
It is also a duty – the duty to ensure that the research questions posed are formulated in a scientifically correct manner, without making a prior assumption in the direction of a desired result; the duty to use proper scientific methods in the process; and the duty to report the results even if we, or those around us, are not entirely happy with them.
Academic freedom thus includes a duty to constantly question ourselves critically as well. In fact, academic freedom cannot exist in the absence of an academic duty of doubt.
This also distinguishes academic freedom to speak about our research from freedom of expression, which allows us to say what we think, within legal limits, and we do not have to account for it. It is different for academic freedom: what we say as academics, within the framework of our disciplines, has much more weight than an ‘opinion’, as we must be able to argue it very thoroughly and scientifically.
Last week, our brand-new associate rector Petra De Sutter said that any professor who claims that there is no genocide going on in Gaza should be held accountable for it. My response: yes, that is obviously correct – but not, as some seemed to understand, through sanctions imposed by the rector for unwanted statements (incidentally, I do not think Petra meant it that way), and certainly not, as a colleague from our university wrote, because professors ‘remain deaf to the calls of thousands of students and staff’. We should never adjust our scientific findings to external pressure, even if it comes from a large group.
That a genocide is occurring in Gaza, however, is the clear conclusion of both international bodies and most scientific experts on the subject. A professor who then makes controversial statements should be able to be challenged on this by other scientists and must then obviously produce good scientific arguments to be taken even more seriously. If not, the professor should be addressed by the dean or the rector, not about what has been said, but about how the academic mission is being fulfilled. With academic freedom comes academic responsibility.
This is because debate is the second crucial element of how science should be done. Any scientific statement should always be open to discussion; it should be open to question. Admittedly, such doubt must also be based on scientific grounds.
Although personal and ideological opinions may be expressed freely, they are not very relevant in a scientific discussion.
Unfortunately, the latter seems to be under pressure. For example, consider the debates on the usefulness and risks of vaccines.
The debates we have at universities should be distinct from polarisation that is devoid of nuance. As argued last week by Minister Demir at the opening of the academic year in Hasselt (as already cited by the previous speaker), polarisation is not necessarily a bad thing: positive disruptive developments have often actually grown out of social polarisation. A scientific debate can also tolerate polarisation, but only if everyone is prepared to bring nuances into the discussion, not to demonise the other party’s point of view (let alone the other party itself), to engage critically with the arguments of the other, but also, again and again, to critically examine their own truth.
Whether a glass is half-full or half-empty is a matter of perspective and frame of mind, and that is open to discussion; but if everyone pretends that the ‘half’ is not there, the discussion becomes sterile. At the university, let us make sure that we avoid this trap. At times, it can help to adopt a completely different approach.
As machines of democracy, part of our mission is to learn to cope with a diversity of ideas, to learn to think before asserting, to learn to think about what the other person is saying – to put facts before opinions as the basis for discussion. We should not explode immediately, even before the other person has spoken or before we have heard their arguments. Instead of flying into each other like fighting cocks, we should circle each other, trying to understand each other’s perspective, without giving up our own perspectives in the process. We should provide a safe environment in which others can express themselves, while also focusing on resilience, because what is safe for one person may not be for another. We should also make use of the democratic opportunities for participation in policy, which includes accepting it when the democratic process leads to decisions other than those we might have preferred.
When I addressed you here last year, government formations and presidential elections were still in the pipeline, and I indicated that they might determine our policies more than our own plans. I was right more than I would like to have been.
The violations of international law and human rights in so many places around the world – with the war in Ukraine, the massacres in Darfur and Eastern Congo and the genocide in Palestine receiving the most attention here – are appalling, and we stand by helplessly and filled with frustration, not knowing how to make any real change. It is cynical that the recent budget cuts withdrew funding from our Institute for Development Policy, whose topics of study include precisely such situations.
As a university – and we are not alone in this – we also watch with wide eyes, uneasiness and, yes, even alarm at what is happening in the United States. A democratically elected president who acts like a narcissistic dictator – that was not entirely unexpected. What is unexpected and frightening is how quickly the whole system seems to be going along with it, how easily the independent checks and balances have fallen by the wayside. The government is completely gutted, officials who report objective facts are shown the door if the facts do not please the president, court rulings are simply ignored, universities are threatened and cut off – not because they are not teaching well or not conducting high-level research, but because they have students and staff who make statements the president does not like …
Four years ago, J.D. Vance (now the Vice President of the United States) gave a speech entitled ‘Universities are the enemy’, in which he stated: ‘I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities …’
He is probably right:
For an anti-pluralistic government that does not tolerate dissent and that demonises and criminalises other opinions, universities are indeed a danger. Free research and critical education are indeed threatening that government.
Both of these aspects are under pressure, and not only in the United States.
Taken from the recent ‘Academic Freedom Index’ report by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, this graph shows, country by country, the extent to which academic freedom has changed in 2024 compared to 2014. In some countries above the line, academic freedom has increased, but in a shocking number of countries, it has decreased significantly, including countries to which we like to compare ourselves.
Belgium, fortunately, remains near the top. Even here, however, we sense that some policymakers sometimes prefer to dismiss critical voices rather than allowing them to be heard and, if necessary, contradicted.
We need to let universities play their role as machines of democracy. It is also important for our society that we maintain strong universities, where freedom and critical debate remain possible. That means we must treat them with care.
Last year, I compared interdisciplinary research to the edge of a forest, which cannot ensure high diversity unless it is effectively on the border between a true forest and a true grassland. For a comparison this year, I will go underwater and compare the university to a coral reef. It consists of countless tiny sea anemone-like creatures that together, often in symbiosis with algae – united, thus – form the basis of a hugely diverse ecosystem. The corals emit calcium and die off, but new individuals continue to grow on them, allowing the reef to grow slowly, eventually even forming entire islands. The diversity provides for immense productivity; it is not for nothing that coral reefs are often referred to as the nursery of marine life. When they are threatened, however – for example, by climate change or seawater pollution – corals die off. Although the reef appears to remain, and although it continues to appear solid, nothing new grows, and everything slowly crumbles away.
To political policymakers, I implore: give universities enough oxygen; do not turn them into dead coral islands, slowly disappearing under the waves.
Flemish universities are strong, they are open, they are critical. Let us keep it that way and, in doing so, let us contribute to a better, democratic society. United.
I wish you a fine academic year with much understanding for each other.