Together with many other academics in the Netherlands, I have been very busy in organizing a nation-wide demonstration next Thursday against the 1 billion budget cuts to higher education that our very-right-wing government has announced. (For background explanation, see this earlier post).

Today, I have a long opinion piece in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad analyzing the crisis in higher eduction. For our non-dutch speaking colleagues, and anyone with an interest in this matter, my colleague from the law department Bald de Vries edited an AI-based translation (to which I made a few further tweaks) – you can find it below the fold.

The weaker the university, the easier it is for the cabinet to implement authoritarian policies

First the official line. Eppo Bruins, Minister of Education, Culture and Science (a member of NSC), has admitted to finding the cuts ‘ugly’. But the cabinet has now decided to cut higher education and science by a billion, and he has to implement it, Bruins argues.

Anyone open to rational argument must conclude that these cuts are completely irresponsible, unnecessary, and not at all legitimate.

They are irresponsible because under the previous government [Rutte III], several independent bodies found that universities were not adequately funded. An independent report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded that universities were a billion euro short of performing their tasks. The Netherlands Court of Audit also issued a report in 2021 stating that universities can only perform their tasks thanks to structural unpaid overtime.

The last Rutte government, which included former Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (D66), therefore proceeded to make a much-needed investment. But apparently, the current Schoof government does not find it necessary to fund universities adequately, as it decides two years later to cut another billion.

The cuts are also economically irresponsible. Every euro the government invests in university research pays for itself four times over. Some 40 companies therefore signed a wake-up call letter against the cuts. Employer association forewoman Ingrid Thijssen also argued that the cuts are not necessary at all. Better to have a budget deficit than to destroy the innovative power of the economy.

But if the government does not want a budget deficit, it would make much more sense not to proceed with the dividend tax cut for foreign shareholders, or the box 2 tax cut [this amounts to a cut on taxation on income from wealth]. Together, these tax cuts account for a billion euros in lower taxes for wealthy people, which do not serve our economy and country.

Moreover, the cuts are not lawful because they amount to a breach of contract. Minister Dijkgraaf closed a 10-year administrative agreement with the sector of higher education in 2022, which was supposed to bring calm and stability to universities. That agreement is now being unilaterally terminated by the government, without substantiation and without consultation. Calm and stability have turned into great unrest and panic, and it is only a matter of time until we will lose excellent scholars and scientists to foreign universities.

If austerity is irresponsible, economically unwise, unnecessary for public finances, and a breach of contract, then we must ask the question: what is going on here anyway? How can we understand why the government is creating this battleground?

To answer that question, we need two insights. The first insight is that one of the functions of the university has always been to keep society on its toes. The critical function of the university is crucial for truth-telling, for technological and economic progress, and for understanding society.

Universities differ from corporate R&D-departments, or from scientific think-tanks related to political parties, in that they are not supposed to serve any master other than truth, in all its dimensions. Scientists and scholars provide the facts and interpret the relevant context to societal issues. Scientists and scholars think about what questions should be asked. When they observe that untruths are being told, they should criticise it. That is the value of the university. But to act on this value, universities must be funded in a way that enables them to fulfil that role.

The second insight is that history teaches us time and again that democratically elected politicians with authoritarian aspirations try to undermine public institutions because they are crucial for truth-telling and the protection of liberal fundamental rights. Academia, journalism, art, culture, the civil service and the judiciary are the first to be attacked as soon as authoritarian politicians gain power. Once these institutions are sufficiently weakened, and therefore the resistance to spreading falsehoods has diminished, authoritarian parties can further strengthen their grip on society by deploying propaganda.

In the past, a lot of authoritarian politicians grabbed power from within a democratic system. The American philosopher Jason Stanley, professor at Yale University, stresses in his book How Fascism Works that we should not think that authoritarian and fascist policies only take place under a fascist regime. Even in a (weakened) democracy, a government can work on and execute fascist policies, such as dehumanising certain population groups, ignoring facts, undermining rational public debate, and spreading all kinds of myths about the nature and history of the country in order to shape the future according to its own ideal.

And let the university be the very place where young people are trained to look critically and constructively at society and policy, and where facts are distinguished from fiction. These are not the kind of things authoritarian leaders appreciate. For authoritarian politicians, a university is an institution that should be tamed as much as possible. Authoritarian politicians want the university to be subservient and conform to their agenda. For authoritarian politicians, anti-intellectualism is therefore part of their strategy: the weaker the position of professions that think and analyse, the easier it becomes to roll out authoritarian policies.

The announced cuts can easily be explainable when we recognize that the [current Dutch] Schoof government is a coalition in which anti-intellectualist parties set the tone. BBB and PVV love to create their own fact-free reality. And in doing so, scientists get in the way. Those who want to continue the current agribusiness because it yields the most short-term financial gains only find scientists’ findings on the nitrogen crisis, biodiversity loss, and climate change annoying. Nor does the PVV value social critique by scholars and scientists. Because in doing so, those scholars and scientists puncture the myths that the far-right spreads about the Netherlands’ past.

Moreover, scholars from the social sciences and the humanities sound the alarm bell about the weakening of democracy and the rule of law, and ask legal and moral questions about extreme-right policies.

For anti-intellectualist parties, it is essential that universities weaken. If they want to tighten their grip on the country, it has to be part of their long-term strategy.

What role do the other two coalition parties, VVD and NSC, play in this account? In theory, the VVD is a classical-liberal party, so it should agitate with full force against anything that erodes liberal democracy. But apparently, within the VVD, the neoliberals, who are willing to sacrifice liberal principles for tax breaks and economic policies that benefit the wealthiest part of their constituency, are pulling the strings. The question is therefore how strong the real liberals within the VVD are, and whether they will be able to protect the institutions crucial to liberal democracy from the coalition partners’ anti-intellectualist agenda.

What about NSC then? In its election manifesto, NSC promised to curb neoliberal policies, but this austerity is a neoliberal measure par excellence. And despite NSC’s emphasis on good governance, this party did appear willing to provide a minister who will unilaterally cancel the administrative agreement with higher education, without a glance. We can only hope that NSC politicians read Jason Stanley’s book and come to the conclusion that they should not want these policies on their conscience.

In his book On Tyranny, the American historian Timothy Snyder gave twenty recommendations on what we can do today if an authoritarian leader is elected. Lesson two is about universities, trade unions, the media, the rule of law and other institutions of free society. The lesson is: ‘Defend institutions’. This is what we should certainly expect from VVD and NSC politicians: that they conclude that their own values are being undermined with these austerity measures. And then do what is in their power to stop these cuts.

Students and scholars expect university administrators to fight the announced cuts by any morally permissible means. But in several places in the Netherlands, we see administrators who, while saying that the cuts will be disastrous, are already publicly presenting plans on how they will implement them. In doing so, they publicly accept the cuts, and hence legitimize them.

Some degree programmes had been facing financial problems for years due to the funding model, financial choices by administrators, and limited student enrollment. Deans have been working out a future-proof model for some time. But the changes now before us are of a very different order. At the University of Leiden, several programmes are being merged or scrapped, including the unique African studies programme. At Utrecht University, the undergraduate programmes in Italian, German, French, Celtic, religious studies, and Islam and Arabic are being scrapped. Even before the cuts are approved by the Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament, university administrators are already implementing them.

Our administrators should sit down with Eppo Bruins to explore what the government can do to ensure that these programmes do not disappear, instead of accepting the cuts.

Universities have become increasingly hierarchical in recent decades. In a number of faculties, professors and lecturers have virtually no say in what happens to programmes and disciplines. The thin layer of democratic varnish in university governance cannot withstand this crisis. Officially, there is co-determination, but in many places this is nothing more than a sham. It is like weakened democracy, where attempts are also being made to govern with emergency laws and without sound justification.

We need university administrators who refuse to go along with the submissiveness that the government in The Hague is trying to enforce. We need politicians who are willing to look at this issue rationally, and recognise that the planned cuts are irresponsible, unnecessary, and not legitimate. And above all, the Netherlands needs political parties that understand the bigger picture, and then decide that it is better to retract while still possible than to err completely.

We stand on the shoulders of the greatness and bravery that came before us.  It’s our turn to stand up and demand not only our civil rights as citizens, but our humanity and our dignity in the face of a political party and a president elect bent on dragging us into the the cruelty and bigotry of the past. 

Those who have gone before us stood up to oppression and did not fear consequences that included arrest and trial on spurious charges and conviction for crimes they did not commit and even time in jail. They demanded respect and rights that had been denied to them. 

We stand on the shoulders of the Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee who marched silently carrying signs reading “I am a man” as they faced down armed National Guard troops.

We stand on the shoulders of Rosa Parks, who refused to be made to sit in the back of a public bus she had paid money to ride.

We stand on the shoulders of the gay and trans people in New York City who stood up to police beatings and arrests and said, we are not going to take it anymore.

We stand on the shoulders of Vietnam veterans who threw their medals over a fence around the Capitol and said, we will not fight your illegal wars anymore.

We stand on the shoulders of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers who stood up and said we will not pick your fruits and vegetables for plantation wages.

We stand on the shoulders of women who demanded the rights to equal pay for equal work and the right to control their own bodies.

It is not our job to save America from itself.  We tried that with our votes.  This country will have to save itself in other ways.  Politics is not, as the saying goes, the art of the possible.  Most of all, politics is not the only mechanism by which democracy works. 

Democracy is in the notes strummed on a guitar, in the feet pounding the pavement on a picket line, in the face of a teacher helping children learn to read and write, in a brushstroke of paint on canvas, in the electrical charges across a transistor enabling communication, in the clang and bang and whirr of a newspaper press, in the cry of a newborn gasping a first breath, in the hush of a hospital corridor where the sick are healed, in the heat of a stove where soup boils to feed the hungry.

Look around you.  Democracy is everywhere.  It didn’t go away on Tuesday, the 5^th of November in 2024.  It’s in the text you just answered from a friend, in the eulogy read for a loved one who has died, in the sweet nothings whispered between lovers, in a question asked by a student in a seminar, in the silence of the desert or the mountains at night, in the stars above us and the dirt beneath our feet.

We must not fall into the trap of feeling that we are special because we strove with our votes for goodness and have been crushed by our losses at the polls.  When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, she did not even have the right to vote.  When the gay people at the Stonewall were arrested, loving someone of the same sex was illegal in most states, and they could not vote their way out of jail. 

I remember Moratorium Day at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1969.  There was a tiny protest outside the gates of the post – a few women, wives and girlfriends of soldiers, one with an infant in a stroller, all of them trying to stop their soldiers from being consumed by a war in Vietnam that everyone, including, we now know, the generals and the President of the United States knew could not be won. 

I remember their hand-drawn signs and the phalanx of military police behind them on the other side of the entrance to Fort Benning and the police facing them on the Columbus, Georgia side of the post gate.  I remember most of all their faces, frightened and amazed at what they were doing and the ruckus it had caused, but defiant as they shouted “Stop the war!  Bring them home!”

Democrats tried and failed to end that war in 1972 with their votes for George McGovern and lost.  Remember the magnitude of that loss?  Richard Nixon carried 49 of 50 states and won the popular vote by 18 million votes. 

What those protesters at Fort Benning wanted didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. In 1973, the soldiers were brought home, and two years after that, the war ended because we lost it and pulled out of Vietnam militarily for good.  It was unrestrained power and idiocy that started the war in Vietnam.  It wasn’t the power of the vote in our democracy that ended that war.  It was hundreds of thousands of protesters just like those at Fort Benning who did it.

There are four long years before we can use our votes again to elect a new president, and two years before we can use them to make a difference in the House and Senate.   In the meantime, we are going to need our own Birmingham bus boycotts, our own Stonewall riots, our own sanitation strikes, our own college class walk-outs, our own marches on Washington.  We will need courage, we will need pride, we will need defiance, and we will need bodies.  We have done all this before.  We can save ourselves, and we can save the lives of others, by the force of our ideas and the righteousness of our cause.  All we need to do is to want it badly enough.

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American Exceptionalism may be defined as the perception or belief that Americans live in a unique society that is exceptional, unusual, or extraordinary.

It usually carries a positive connotation that suggests the moral, ethical, intellectual, and economic superiority of America as a whole.

Obviously, we need a new definition if we are to consider the reaction of some Americans as well as other nations to our recent presidential election result. Two points to consider.

First, we need to reconsider the oft-repeated phrase “this is not who we are.” It depends on what you mean by “we.” If the “we” means “me” or, more probably, “us,” then that’s fine if the “us” is you and your like-minded cohorts.

But if “us” refers to the US, then maybe a rethink is in order. A majority of Americans just elected a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist to our highest office. That’s new and different. Some would say, exceptional.

Second, we should realize that, as a nation, we look like Rubes. A Rube is defined as “an awkward unsophisticated person or a naive or inexperienced person.” Short for Reuben, Rube refers to an uneducated and gullible country bumpkin. Rubes accept lies as fact and are even capable of concocting their own facts. You may not count yourself among them, but our overseas friends, enemies, and allies can and most certainly do.

As a people and as a society, America is exceptional. Just not the way we think it is. As a nation with 340 million viewpoints, this is exactly who we are.

Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit that the rhetoric from the sensibles is less crude and laced with sweeteners about “compassion”.

The underlying problem is nationalism and the organization of the world into nation states, a form of organization that fosters and promotes nationalist sentiment and attachment and downplays transnational concern and solidarity, which is “all very well” but shouldn’t come “at our expense”. This has been the problem since well before 1914, but was particularly in evidence then as the greatest movement of international solidarity that had ever been built largely collapsed in favour of supporting “our boys” against theirs. It was there in the 1930s, not only in the rise of particularly agressive nationalisms but in the failure of normal sensible states to come to the assistance of those threatened by it, such as Jews fleeing across borders. All very well, but not at our expense. And it is, rather obviously, in evidence now as countries struggle with people moving and with climate change. All very well, but not at our expense.

It took the catastrophe of global war and genocide to get people to step back a little from national selfishness and to build the rather feeble and compromised global and transnational institutions that we have such as the United Nations, the Refugee Convention and the European Union. And now those are very much under threat from nationalism, and from the fear that accepting constraints on the pursuit of national self-interest might cost “us” something. Hence Brexit. Hence Trump. But also, sadly, hence a large chunk of the self-described liberals and the social democratic left.

Social democrats are nationalists too. They promote solidarity, sure, but they promote it primarily among co-citizens. They want to reduce inequality and they want to use the state to do that, but the inequality is among fellow-citizens and the state is a national state. So they drape themselves in national flags and enunciate slogans like “British jobs for British workers” in an effort to ingratiate themselves with “the British people”. After all, they want to get elected and to get elected you have to pander to, well, the electorate. Sure, theirs is a new, shiny, multiracial and multiethnic conception of the nation and there’s a lot of work goes into promoting inclusive patriotism. But the patriotism is inclusive only of the people with the right passport and not of the others who fall on the wrong side of racialized nationality laws that were actually designed to keep people of the wrong origin out. Minorities who are admitted to the nation know full well that such admission might be reversed one day. Those of immigrant origin get berated for their “failure to integrate” for the benefit of a nativist audience who are just never going to be satisfied that those people over there who don’t look like us, who eat funny food and who worship the wrong religion can ever be part of “us”. So it goes, and toleration and inclusion are all very well, but shouldnt be at our expense.

Donald Trump campaigns on a slogan of mass deportation and is met by wild enthusiasm from the MAGA faithful. The British government, the Labour one, also talks of increased deportations of people who “aren’t entitled to be here” and the need to “secure our borders” and blames unauthorized migration on “criminal gangs” (“bad people” in Trump-speak). The German government, faced with nativist electoral competition, has moved from Merkel’s “wir schaffen das” to sending people back to Afghanistan and Syria. The European Union itself has been subverted by the exclusionary impulse. And all these governments talk about sending the unwanted somewhere else and pay dictators in nearby countries to stop them coming, even if everyone knows that means torture, rape and murder in practice. And for those who get past the gatekeeper states, there’s the prospect of drowning in the sea or heat-death in the desert. But “we” don’t see that, and human rights are all very well, but not at our expense.

Well, what is to be done, you say? And to be honest, I’m not full of clever solutions right now. The organization of the world, after all, promotes national identification which inevitably has an ethnocultural flaour even when we pretend otherwise and all the incentives to politicians are to pander in ways that reinforce this. After all, they want to get elected, and (sotto voce to the uncomfortable faithful at the back), the other guys would be far worse than us. So maybe we’re stuck with mass death outside our gated nations to be succeeded by mass death for all as we don’t want climate co-operation at our expense. But in the meantime, we can defend the international institutions we have and we can resist migration cruelty and climate suicide in the familiar ways of solidarity with victims, protest, civil disobedience etc. The odds seem against us now, the arc of history may not bend towards justice, but what else can we do?