Smelly business

The lecture hall smelled anything but fresh. There was a vague smell of rancid butter, which made it just a little more difficult for the students to concentrate on my already muddled lecture on the relativistic correction to Bohr’s atomic model. That was on Friday morning, four days after unknown individuals had left an oily substance (it later turned out to be butyric acid) at the entrance of the aula. I don’t want to think about how bad the stench must have been on that first day. As far as I’m concerned, employees who have continued to do their work in the aula for days in those conditions deserve a medal.

The action was never claimed and neither was there any message with it. The most obvious explanation is that it was activists who opposed the presence of harmful companies at the Delft Career Days (DCD). But it could also have been counter-protesters who wanted to put activists in a bad light. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with the DCD and it was rebellious architecture students wanting to make a statement against brutalist architecture; we will never know. Without a message and sender, we can only guess at the motivation, rendering the entire action hardly better than ordinary vandalism.

It is unlikely that the stench action would have been the work of Extinction Rebellion (XR): XR always takes responsibility for their actions and has in their core values that they never operate ‘below ground’. Also, XR activists themselves openly demonstrated against the DCD the next day with a noise protest.

Before you know it you get blamed for the stench action

I had planned to be at that noise protest as well, and to yell across campus with a megaphone how incomprehensible it is that in the midst of a climate crisis, we continue to invite immoral oil and gas companies to indoctrinate our students. Companies like ExxonMobil, which for decades spread doubt about climate science. Which still downplay the immense danger of climate change, but in the meantime sow panic about how supposedly the entire economy collapses as soon as we can buy a little less of their destructive products. And companies which shamelessly present themselves as part of the solution by fencing with technological fairy tales, anything to keep the tap open for just a little longer.

But then, with such a speech, before you know it you get blamed for the stench action. Try to explain through a megaphone that you had nothing to do with that and that you disapprove of the method, but that you do support the presumed message (which, again, was not included). In the end, I decided not to participate in the protest. Subtle argumentation about the dubious role of fossil fuel companies is anyhow wasted on DCD chairman Merel Vooijs. She concluded the case by telling Omroep Delft that “it is precisely these companies that can offer jobs to technical students”. Yes Merel, we get that.

In short, the stench action was not a success. Disruptive protest without a message and without a sender is ill-considered, irresponsible and indefensible. Almost as ill-considered, irresponsible and indefensible as inviting ExxonMobil to the Delft Career Days.