The proverbial ‘stick to beat’ is to use – mainly by people higher up in management – an unjust argument to cause or prohibit an action. Often such arguments are used to cover up own mismanagement, to please higher management, or to disguise underlying reasons.
Recently I have been trying to get an Indian postdoc, currently working in Israel, to my group in order to continue a years-long collaboration between the Israeli group and mine. Alas my faculty is creating a large fuss about issuing a guest registration for this postdoc. The argument that is being used is ‘knowledge safety’. To my great surprise and unease, I was even asked to supply the CV of the postdoc to the faculty to make a decision.
Knowledge safety is the term used to prohibit sensitive scientific and technological information – think of information useful for nuclear power and for military applications, but recently also chip technology – to reach states that may make use of this knowledge against international law. Example countries are Iran, North-Korea and China. This generally does not mean that all collaborations and exchanges are prohibited but that extra scrutiny and care is appropriate. Obviously, knowledge safety is of national and international concern, and therefore not something an individual university can decide on its own.
Does knowledge safety apply to my situation of getting a person of Indian nationality to continue an existing collaboration with a befriended colleague of an Israeli university? Does knowledge safety have anything useful to say about an Indian national’s CV and this person’s motives to serve any military purpose? My opinion is twice no.
If knowledge safety applies to Israeli universities, the ministry of education should indicate this; for Iran and China, for example, such lists of ‘dangerous’ universities exist. To my knowledge, this does not hold for Israel nor for individuals of Indian nationality. My gut feeling is that our faculty and our board are simply sensitive to the political turmoil created by pro-Palestinian protesters at the Dutch universities, and now use ‘knowledge safety’ as a stick to make decisions or simply to frustrate existing collaborations.
I can declare my opinion about the political situation in Israel and with the Palestinians, but that is not the point. Also the university should not take a stand in this political issue, is my opinion. Science is neutral and science connects people. Of course, we should be as careful as we can with the misuse of knowledge, but that is, again, primarily a government’s decision. Universities should maintain an open dialogue and welcome diversity of opinions (which is something different from ‘diversity’ per se) and also keep stimulating international exchange as much as possible. When we stop talking, arms will take over.
For now, our university, board and faculty, should stop putting manpower in the unjust frustration of hiring and exchange processes, and just comply with what the government enforces and for the rest trust on the judgment of individual scientists and live up to what a university should stand for: the propagation of science and of reason.
Jurriaan Huskens
Professor of Supramolecular Chemistry & Nanofabrication, faculty of Science & Technology
