A new year is a good time to do things differently. No longer just ‘talking the talk’ but taking responsibility for issues like fossil cooperation and Gaza on the basis of arguments and research. However, TU Delft just goes on as usual, concludes columnist Bob van Vliet.
(Photo: Sam Rentmeester)
The fossil fuel industry is once again welcome at the Delft Career Days this year. According to the board of the annual job market, this is in line with the outcome of the consultations on collaboration with the fossil fuel industry among students and staff last year. In other words: the majority says it’s OK, therefore it’s OK.
Now, I am all for a more democratic university, but something is going wrong here.
The terms of the Career Days require the oil pumpers to give a presentation that paints ‘an honest picture’ of their company, ‘without greenwashing’. But you cannot credibly admit a company under such terms when it has shown to do the exact opposite time after time. It makes you complicit in that greenwashing.
Nevertheless, I can’t really blame the organisers for their toothless appeals to ‘a culture of open discussion’ and their justification that all they are doing is ‘to meet the demand from students’. After all, this is how they learn to do things here. It is exactly how TU Delft as a whole deals with these sorts of issues. That is, not by developing a coherent and well-argued position or setting clear rules, but by continuously ‘entering into conversation’ without much critical analysis of the opinions put forward by individuals and majorities.
Even the most substantive of the initiatives concerning partnerships with the fossil fuel industry – the Moral Deliberation Chamber – appears to come down to a form of polling. In the report we read that in three of the five cases that they examined, the majority of the members rejected the collaboration. But why? Where was the boundary, specifically? What were the arguments for and against which not everyone agreed on, apparently? And what kinds of partnerships were this, in the first place? We learn none of this. The advice comes down to not much more than a collection of abstract principles and the recommendation to continue talking.
It was a management process. Not a serious attempt at collective thinking.
What were the arguments for and against which not everyone agreed on, apparently?
And then there is Gaza. Reports are piling up from one organisation after another that conclude: ‘genocide’. In Tilburg, the University was brave enough to appoint a committee to go beyond abstract principles and open dialogue, and draw specific policy conclusions based on old-fashioned research and argumentation. The outcome was clear: suspend collaboration with Israeli universities, or make yourself complicit in oppression and genocide.
What is TU Delft doing? Nothing. Silence. Some remarks were made about holding a moral deliberation on this topic as well, but that does not seem to be happening anymore. Let alone a serious examination such as the University of Tilburg commissioned.
Why this stubborn refusal? I truly don’t get it. Is it a lack of interest? Ineptitude? Fear? Denial? A lack of moral courage and ethics? Or is it a classic case of banality, and is the habit of keeping the organization running smoothly and comfortably allowed to take precedence over the responsibility to take responsibility?
Business as usual. On all fronts. Let’s take the new year as an occasion to finally break with that, shall we?
Bob van Vliet is a lecturer at the faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Architecture and the Built Environment and is specialised in design education.
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B.vanVliet@tudelft.nl
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