Democratic erosion

Well, great. I had been a columnist for barely a week when it turned out that TU Delft does not shy away from reporting columnists to the police if the content of a column is not to their liking. This happened to my predecessor Bob van Vliet, a climate activist like me, as part of a covenant that TU Delft has had with the police for over 10 years. He received partial apologies, but the covenant remains in full force nonetheless.

For those who now wonder ‘Oh dear, I don’t have any covenant with the police, what should I do?’, no worries. Even without a covenant you can still simply call the police when in danger, you don’t need a covenant at all. Only if you are planning to do legally questionable things, such as sharing personal data of troublesome students and employees without telling them, can it be useful to be able to innocently say that ‘in the interest of safety’ this was agreed upon in a covenant.

If the police don’t by now have a folder somewhere with ‘Sander Otte’ on it, they are not exactly the sharpest investigative minds

By the way, I’m not too worried about my own name being reported. For a few years now the police regularly drag me off the motorway, and I write openly about it on LinkedIn. Nothing that is not allowed, of course, but if the police are interested in registering peaceful climate activists and they don’t by now have a folder somewhere with ‘Sander Otte’ on it, they are not exactly the sharpest investigative minds.

But the situation is of course completely different for students and employees on temporary contracts or in positions that can be relatively easily refilled. Imagine for a moment how intimidating it is when TU Delft, the institution on which you are completely dependent for your career, gives your name to the police as soon as you are even thinking of joining a demonstration. Would anyone then still dare speak up? And it is often young people in vulnerable positions who have the most reason to take to the streets.

Democratic freedom is under pressure worldwide. Even the Jetten administration (the current government, Eds.) is making plans to restrict the right to demonstrate (in Dutch), against the urgent advice of both Amnesty International and the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights. Three parties, each with the ‘D’ of ‘Democracy’ in their name, are jointly undercutting the basis of our democracy. And then I’m not even mentioning the rise (in Dutch) of that other party with ‘Democracy’ in its name (the Forum for Democracy, Eds.).

In times of democratic erosion, universities should not bend, but resist. TU Delft wants to compete with top American universities. Then also show the backbone that Harvard had when it openly opposed (in Dutch) the autocratic Trump administration. And don’t voluntarily, even before you are forced to do so, pave the way for the introduction of a police state. Executive Board, show courage and retract the police covenant. And if you really need to do research first (which is of course completely unnecessary), then at the very least suspend the covenant while the investigation is ongoing.