To what extent should scientists speak out politically? Where is the line between speaking out as a private individual, and speaking out in your role as a scientist?
Thursday 20 November 2025 | 12.30 - 13.15 hrs | Lecture Hall Complex, Radboud University.
door Liesbeth Jansen
Is it a good idea for a scientist to be politically active? Is there even a moral obligation? Or should scholars rather refrain from it because political activism and academic work are very different ballgames? These are the questions that inspired this meeting organized by Radboud Reflects and chaired by philosopher Cees Leijenhorst.
The first question was for Van den Brink: Philosophers seek for a truth you may never attain, and are trained to look at things from different angles. This seems miles apart from activism? Van den Brink: “I think it is possible to combine the two, although personally I have always found it difficult to go the activist mile because the activist language is so completely different from the academic one. But this of course depends on who you are; sometimes there is very much reason for academic activism.” Landsman reacted by saying that from his teenage years he has been inspired by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who at the age of 95 still led demonstrations against nuclear weapons. “My highlight as an activist was to speak during an extinction rebellion demonstration: I had a academic speech prepared but noticed after two sentences that this wouldn’t work - so I turned to slogans. When I looked back at it I found it wasn’t ‘not me’. My whole life is inspired by what I know about science. And I think that we when the world goes astray, we as scientists have a duty to act. Still, you can’t give an intellectual speech to 20.000 people. And you will become somebody else.”
Does a philosopher specialized in democracy have the obligation to rise against democratic backsliding? Van den Brink: “Yes, you do – but you can pick the genre: you can write books or academic articles or publish an opinion piece - and that’s still different from activism. Activism is a valuable genre but for me not easily reconcilable with the academic attitude.” Landsman has a different perspective, as he states that for him there is a continuum between the role of an academic and an activist. Academic work can also be very influential, he agrees, and you can influence society when things threaten to go wrong. “But I wouldn’t know where to draw the line between the one and the other.”
The moderator intervened by saying that the university board, in a recent case, concluded that the boundary had been reached. Landsman: “I guess this colleague would start at the same continuum. I don’t agree with the decision of the university board. They often use the code of conduct when actually there is another conflict underneath. It is questionable whether the code of conduct can be broken at all, but it’s clearly not the case here. Van de Brink: “The code of conduct is also about reciprocal expectations. One of the things why I find it difficult to unite activism and academic work is because values from the code of conduct are different depending on the role you look at it. This sometimes causes a fundamental conflict.”
If I have extreme opinions as a private person, what does that have to do with my work at university? Landsman doesn’t distinguish between them. To Van den Brink, freedom of expression is extremely important, but labor contract and expectations of an employee also play a role. There sometimes is a conflict between what the code of conduct expects and what freedom of speech allows us to do – and these conflicts need to be discussed. It is therefore practically not possible to say ‘this only concerns my personal opinion and has nothing to do with being an academic’, said Van den Brink.
Leijenhorst continued with a follow-up question: Isn’t there also a conflict underneath, namely between views of what a university is or should be? Van den Brink: “There is, and there should be, not in the least concerning the dominant opinions and expectations in society. But we also need to work on spaces in which discussing difficult matters can be done in an open way.” Landsman: “When it comes to the opinions of the colleague mentioned before, we may see his views as extreme, but they are totally mainstream in much of the decolonized part of the world.”
Should a university board judge on the content of expressions of employees? And if they do, is it damaging the image of the university? Landsman: “Freedom of speech extends as far as it does not infringe upon the freedom of others. The board shouldn’t diminish this, unless an opinion cannot be opposed – as is the case when a dictator expresses his opinion.”
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