Tunisian University to the check of intolerance | EUROtoday

On Apr 23, 2025

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ULong dwell controversy is at the moment shaking the Faculty of Letters from Manouba to Tunis across the historian Habib Kazdaghli, a acknowledged specialist within the historical past of minorities in Tunisia, specifically the Jewish neighborhood. A marketing campaign orchestrated by college students from numerous ideological currents began following the rumor of a tutorial tribute envisaged on his journey. This venture, proposed by some lecturers from the Department of History, wouldn’t even have been communicated to the individual involved.

Faced with the coed mobilization and the unfounded accusations introduced in opposition to Kazdaghli, the school’s scientific council met in emergency on April 15, 2025. The press launch from this assembly took word of the coed strike and reaffirms a number of positions: refusal of any institutional recognition to any individual referred to in related accusations, dedication to analyze and sanction any member concerned in details, Students, elevated vigilance on using institutional logos, and recall that, in line with them, these rules should not incompatible with the protection of educational freedoms.

A press launch that’s controversial

This press launch is extra like a political declaration than a tutorial reflection. By erecting the rejection of sure director behaviors, he established a local weather of ideological suspicion inside the college, to the detriment of freedom of analysis, worldwide scientific dialogue and the very foundations of the college establishment. The textual content explicitly designates Habib Kazdaghli as a goal of a symbolic exclusion, denying any intention to honor it or to honor any individual focused by related accusations of “normalization” with Israel. This strategy is predicated on rumors and suspicions, with out contradictory process or respect for the basic rights of protection, thus compromising the presumption of innocence and the skilled honor of a colleague. Such logic opens the door to arbitrariness and stigma.

In addition, the press launch pronounces the implementation of inside surveys and sanctions in opposition to any suspected member, whereas threatening unauthorized use of the Faculty logos for actions deemed “suspect”. This local weather of generalized management and suspicion is incompatible with the spirit of openness and confidence which ought to reign in any tutorial establishment.

If the dedication to a global trigger is a reputable selection, it’s instrumentalized right here to justify exclusion and harm to tutorial freedom. The amalgamation between militant dedication and rejection of any scientific dialogue with sure colleagues, or perceived as such, results in the isolation of Tunisian analysis and the closure of the college on itself, in contradiction with worldwide requirements and the values of scientific universalism.

The Council affirms that its rules don’t contradict tutorial freedom or respect for the instructing employees. However, all the press launch demonstrates the alternative: it’s a manifest restriction of educational freedom, an assault on collegiality and a submission of the college to ideological and militant pressures. University freedoms can’t be conditioned by political or identification standards.

By encouraging lecturers and researchers to chorus from taking part in seminars deemed suspicious, the scientific council condemns the Tunisian college neighborhood in isolation, marginalization and the lack of credibility on the worldwide scene. This closure is against the dynamics of scientific cooperation, nevertheless important to the event of analysis and innovation in Tunisia.

Threatened tutorial freedoms and scientific isolation

This drift is all of the extra worrying because the college establishment, imagined to defend tutorial freedom and the integrity of its members, offers up right here to the stress of militant teams, sacrificing considered one of its most outstanding representatives on the altar of an instrumental ideological studying.

The case illustrates the rising confusion between political dedication and tutorial exclusion, which serves as a pretext for the stigmatization of intellectuals invested in worldwide scientific dialogue. The case of Kazdaghli, whose profession is dedicated to the protection of Tunisian plurality and to the examine of minorities, highlights the human price and institutional of this local weather: the college, removed from being an area of free debate, turns into the theater of settlement of ideological accounts.

A dedication for plurality at the moment weakened

It must also be remembered that Habib Kazdaghli has directed and contributed to the creation of the Tunisia Heritage Laboratory (additionally known as “Laboratory Regions and Heritage Resources in Tunisia: interdisciplinary approaches”) on the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities of Manouba, based in 1999. This laboratory goals to review and promote the patrimonial assets of the areas, Associations, by being notably within the materials and intangible traces of the previous, in addition to in heritage usually marginalized by official historical past. Kazdaghli additionally based a laboratory for learning minorities, devoted to the examine of Italians, Greeks, Jews and different communities in Tunisia, testifying to his dedication to cultural plurality and the reminiscence of minorities within the historical past of the nation.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

Today, this final laboratory is threatened. It would appear that to place Tunisia into historic perspective and its deep ties to the minorities which have shaped this nation, disturbs the very best level. Does Tunisia wish to curl up on itself, ghettoize, neglect the generations which have made this nation shine? And does the University of Tunis wish to take part on this simulacrum? It would definitely be a severe fault.

Signator:
Pascal Bruckner, thinker
Djemila Benhabib, writer, political scientist and author, founding father of the Laïcité Yallah Belgium collective
Marc Fellous, professor emeritus at Denis Diderot University
Marc Knobel, historian, essayist
Joël Kotek, historian, professor emeritus on the Free University of Brussels
Iannis Roder, trainer, essayist

https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/l-universite-tunisienne-a-l-epreuve-de-l-intolerance-23-04-2025-2588060_24.php