Academic freedom has been shredded at Trinity College Dublin
Dr Jane Mahony denounces the cowardly indifference of Trinity College Dublin to academic freedom and to its own consultative processes.
On 5 June the board of Trinity College Dublin voted to cut all academic and commercial ties with ‘the State of Israel, Israeli universities and companies headquartered in Israel’. The board had the previous day received the report of a taskforce set up under an agreement to end a five-day long pro-Palestinian student encampment on campus in May 2024. The remit of the Taskforce on Academic and Institutional International Links and Related Matters was wide.
As well as disrupting access to campus, a blockade of the Book of Kells during the student encampment cost college an estimated €350,000 (£300,000) in lost visitor revenue at the beginning of the important summer tourism season. For the features editor of Trinity News, TCD’s student newspaper, ‘the loss of revenue was key… students welcomed a deal that went further than other universities.’
And indeed, Trinity’s boycott of Israel goes beyond measures announced by other universities, such as the University of Geneva. Its effect is a full prohibition on faculty from any and all research collaborations with Israeli participation. Goods and services produced by Israeli companies are banned. The length of the boycott is uncertain: it will be ‘enacted for the duration of the ongoing violations of international and humanitarian law’ which ‘will be kept under review by the Board.’ It is not clear what competence the board has in respect of such legal matters.
While some colleagues agree with the boycott, others are dismayed that the report has not yet been published, so most of the faculty have been unable to scrutinise it or understand how the board came to its decision. In a clear breach of procedure, the board voted to accept the taskforce recommendations before referring the report for further consideration to relevant college committees in line with the terms of the resolution statement under which the taskforce was established. Moreover, while the taskforce reviewed ties with several countries, the board singled out Israel alone for boycott – the only Jewish state on earth, home to half the population of the world’s Jews – while maintaining ties with other countries with well-documented human rights and international law violations. The charge of institutional antisemitism and racism is unavoidable.
In my view, the principle of academic freedom has been shredded by the board’s decision. Academic freedom is not compatible with an institutional ban on co-operation with colleagues in Israeli universities and research units. It is collective punishment and takes no account of the fact that many Israeli academics are eloquent critics of their government’s actions and policies. Academic freedom should confer on colleagues the choice to personally cut ties with colleagues in Israel or any other country they choose, but that freedom is no longer available to Trinity academics who wish to continue working with colleagues in Israel.
As Israel is an associate country to the European Union’s research and innovation funding programmes, Trinity academics are prohibited from applying for EU funding for research projects which include Israeli colleagues. As an illustration, one such current project is working on a novel off-the-shelf delivery system for mRNA-based nanomedicines to improve diagnostic and therapeutic options for cancer and cardiovascular disease. Researchers from Trinity and the University of Tel Aviv are collaborating on this project together with colleagues from the Netherlands, Canada, France, Hungary, Sweden, Spain, Norway, and Belgium.
Trinity researchers are also working on the AIMS-2-Trials whose objective is to improve outcomes for people with autistic spectrum disorders via a global clinical trial. Researchers from Trinity and the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva are two of sixty-three European and US participants including hospitals, universities, patient groups, pharma companies and not-for-profit organisations.
While these projects will continue, Trinity academics are now locked out of all such research consortia henceforth. Years of academic endeavour will now go to waste and millions of euros of funding will be lost.
So many questions remain unanswered as the board continues to stall colleagues looking for clarification on the implications of the boycott. Can Trinity’s decades long partnerships with the tech firm Intel continue when it is Ireland’s biggest importer of Israeli goods? Are Trinity’s teaching hospitals St James’s and Tallaght now prohibited from accessing sector-leading Israeli medical products and pharmaceuticals? Can Trinity’s partnerships with American universities and companies continue given US anti-boycott legislation?
What about colleagues who edit journals? Can they invite submissions from Israeli colleagues, or must they reject any received? Can Trinity academics join institutional advisory boards on which Israeli colleagues already sit?
All we have been told is that the Provost and college leadership will need to ‘take forward a number of actions’ to implement the board’s decision. Confusion reigns and Trinity seems determined to continue down a course that is impossible to sustain without the most serious consequences for academic freedom and endeavour.
Trinity College Dublin has, in my view, abandoned the key principles of academic freedom and institutional neutrality which should underpin the actions of a serious university. In 1967 the University of Chicago led the way on this fundamental issue when campus riots roiled America during the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa. The faculty debated how a university should respond to burning political and social issues of the day. When passions are running high, what should a university say or do when activists demand it choose sides and take action?
Chicago’s conclusion, expressed in the Kalven Report, was straightforward: the university must remain neutral in order to meet its long-term core mission of the ‘discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge’. This did not mean ignoring difficult issues. Faculty and students must have full freedom of criticism, dissent and open inquiry, but the university itself ‘is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.’
Trinity’s board would do well to read the Kalven Report. In the meantime, I have called on the board to at the very least suspend its boycott decision pending the taskforce report’s referral to the appropriate college committees and proper scrutiny by academic colleagues. Better still I hope that Trinity academics will support abandoning the ill-conceived boycott of Israel and uphold the principles of academic freedom and institutional neutrality.
About Jane
Jane Mahony is a historian of publishing. She is currently engaged on a joint Trinity College Dublin/Royal Irish Academy project to conduct a feasibility study and pilot for the establishment of a digital publishing platform for diamond open access journals and monographs (October 2022-July 2025).
Image Credit: Rene Cortin (22 July 2023). The Library of Trinity College Dublin serves Trinity College. It is a legal deposit or “copyright library”, under which, publishers in Ireland must deposit a copy of all their publications, without charge. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
