# Shell vs memes at Erasmus University: what OccupyEUR achieved is quite extraordinary

The student protest at Erasmus University and the university administration's disproportionate response to it puts the tension between different ideas about the university's social role on display. Do we choose career ladders or eating soup together; corporate days or critical social engagement; corporate logos or memes?

Catherine Koekoek Jamie van der Klaauw


The "occupation" of one of the EUR buildings on Monday, Nov. 28, by OccupyEUR, a rare event in which students and staff organized a peaceful protest together against the university's affiliation with fossil fuels, proved to be short-lived. Where, for example, the Maagdenhuis occupation at UvA Amsterdam in 2015 could go on for weeks, and the occupation of a boardroom at TU Eindhoven lasted a week, in Rotterdam people acted on the city's officious motto: don't blather, but clean up ("niet lullen, maar poetsen"). That same day, the Executive Board ended the protest by having the police evacuate the building. Ten students who refused to leave were dragged away by the riot police using what the police call "appropriate force".

Employees of several faculties immediately spoke out in solidarity with the students in an open letter (by now already signed by some 600 university employees) and articles. Executive Board president Ed Brinksma initially described the activists in Erasmus Magazine as external groups (a classic administrative maneuver to generate sympathy for the "real," non-protesting students) whose actions would alienate people from their goals. He did not find this very socially cohesive and, partly because of this, reason for the deployment of regular and riot police (obviously a socially cohesive action, almost an invitation to dialogue shall we say). A few days later, the Executive Board apologized in veiled terms for the consequences of the eviction and issued a genuine invitation to dialogue. OccupyEUR was outspoken: the goal has always been conversation, but due to the Executive Board's actions earlier that week, Occupy would rather engage in conversation with a subsequent Executive Board after the current one resigns.

Since 2019, EUR's motto has been "Creating positive societal impact: the Erasmian way," but the Executive Board's response to the protest shows that their understanding of that societal impact is very far from that of the protesting students and staff. 

Evidently, the only kind of social engagement that matters to the Executive Board is further intensifying ties with those actors who are part of the problem - or, in Brinksma's words, "there is cooperation with parties, including, for example, Shell, in the area of transition. I don't see any reason to discourage that." The only activism tolerated is one by corporations. 

On Erasmus Magazine, researchers Jess Bier, Jiska Engelbert, Zouhair Hammana, Vatan Hüzeir, Irene van Oorschot, Willem Schinkel and Rogier van Reekum pointed out that impact in that context can be nothing but "complicity in planetary plunder." All fine words notwithstanding, there is no room within university strategy for activist engagement. Instead of recognizing that an occupation like this is part of what a university is supposed to stand for - critical social debate - the deployment of the police, they say, shows that EUR sees itself primarily as "a glorified kind of room rental service." The intended users of those rooms are then preferably corporate organizations like Shell - as the now infamous billboard of the Shell logo at the Forum Hall also shows.

Looking at the history of Rotterdam's university, the Executive Board's reaction is not entirely surprising. After all, this university is an outgrowth of a former higher trade school that, together with the medical center, wanted to establish a university by and for the city. It could, provided that a genuine academic dimension was then linked to those two vocational pillars - which took the form of a central interfaculty, now the Erasmus School of Philosophy (our direct employer). The academic conscience of the university was delegated to that central interfaculty. This ensured academic grounding and generated respect and recognition, but also brought an uneasy relationship. After all, one sometimes is troubled by such a conscience, which regularly organizes itself critically against the dominant discourse within the university.

Against the (neo)liberal notion of the academy as a hall rental, where a so-called service-oriented professional attitude is expected of scholars regardless of their possible sponsors, stands a tradition of activism as academic freedom par excellence. The critical conscience with which EUR has traditionally had such a troublesome relationship has long since ceased to be found only in the philosophy faculty, although there both staff and students play key roles in OccupyEUR. It is - unfortunately often in marginal roles - spread across several faculties. The open letter from employees of all disciplines in solidarity with OccupyEUR harkens back to that critical tradition of academic freedom as public thinking that can have an uncomfortable message, or be told in an uncomfortable way - for example, by occupying a building.

In the Executive Board's response to the protest, it soon became painfully clear that such a nagging conscience appears primarily as something repulsive, as an ugly stain on an otherwise perfect picture. The difference between the dominant and the critical view of the university, academic freedom and social impact, is therefore expressed in aesthetic terms. Anyone who has ever been to the EUR campus knows that it looks like an office with some coincidental lecture halls. 

At no other university in the Netherlands will you see so many suit jackets and business wear. You won't likely encounter an activist poster or student work there, but you can expect to see a flyer with an invitation to the upcoming business days. Against the mirrored facades and commercial food court, a spontaneous and messy protest, where people make their own coffee and craft protest signs on the ground, almost seems like something dirty. Consequently, some students who walked by on their way to their lectures made dirty faces, one group of econometrics students thought it was "fucking awkward," others saw the protest as disrespectful to hard-working students.

Paradoxically, the aesthetic reflex to swiftly quash the protest, albeit harshly, for fear of reputational damage, was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to OccupyEUR (although of course it was an unpleasant experience for the arrested students). With the police action, in which some students even had to be picked up at the Capelle aan den IJssel police station, the occupation was both stifled and immortalized. They have become symbols of resistance to the neoliberal erosion of academic freedom.

Against the (neo)liberal notion of the academy as a hall rental, where a so-called service-oriented professional attitude is expected of scholars regardless of their possible sponsors, stands a tradition of activism as academic freedom par excellence. The critical conscience with which EUR has traditionally had such a troublesome relationship has long since ceased to be found only in the philosophy faculty, although there both staff and students play key roles in OccupyEUR. It is - unfortunately often in marginal roles - spread across several faculties. The open letter from employees of all disciplines in solidarity with OccupyEUR harkens back to that critical tradition of academic freedom as public thinking that can have an uncomfortable message, or be told in an uncomfortable way - for example, by occupying a building.

In the Executive Board's response to the protest, it soon became painfully clear that such a nagging conscience appears primarily as something repulsive, as an ugly stain on an otherwise perfect picture. The difference between the dominant and the critical view of the university, academic freedom and social impact, is therefore expressed in aesthetic terms. Anyone who has ever been to the EUR campus knows that it looks like an office with some coincidental lecture halls. 

At no other university in the Netherlands will you see so many suit jackets and business wear. You won't likely encounter an activist poster or student work there, but you can expect to see a flyer with an invitation to the upcoming business days. Against the mirrored facades and commercial food court, a spontaneous and messy protest, where people make their own coffee and craft protest signs on the ground, almost seems like something dirty. Consequently, some students who walked by on their way to their lectures made dirty faces, one group of econometrics students thought it was "fucking awkward," others saw the protest as disrespectful to hard-working students.

Paradoxically, the aesthetic reflex to swiftly quash the protest, albeit harshly, for fear of reputational damage, was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to OccupyEUR (although of course it was an unpleasant experience for the arrested students). With the police action, in which some students even had to be picked up at the Capelle aan den IJssel police station, the occupation was both stifled and immortalized. They have become symbols of resistance to the neoliberal erosion of academic freedom.

With their chaotic meme aesthetic, OccupyEUR undermines EUR's slick reputation: a photo showing a cop in riot gear pouring protesters' soup into a pit is used to make fun of university strategy; smiling board members are ridiculed. It thus breaks the context where close ties between the university and the business world are taken for granted, where fundamental issues such as academic freedom and accessibility are left to private enterprise, and where it is considered unproblematic for students to have to go into debt in order to get an education.


Depoliticization

It is precisely in the depoliticized context of the EUR that OccupyEUR's activism is special. Depoliticized does not mean that the university is not political: on the contrary, it is precisely under the guise of neutrality that the most ideological ideas are implemented. A form of politics that we have also seen for some time at the national level with Mark Rutte, longest-serving prime minister ever, as CEO of the Netherlands Inc. ("BV Nederland").  But to actively question that context, which has become an unnoticed backdrop, like the students and staff in this protest, is difficult and rare. Therefore, it is neither a strong argument that there were "only" sixty students, as Ed Brinksma did not fail to emphasize in his response to the protest. Besides the fact that there were many others supporting the protest besides the students actually present, OccupyEUR's main victory is that they were able to channel protest at all and break the implicit consensus on campus. 

By simply creating a different university in the here and now, with workshops, lectures and soup, OccupyEUR shows that their ideals are not just abstract demands that can be implemented in the future, but a guide for being together in the here and now. In doing so, they draw on an important alternative tradition of social academic engagement that takes place not in boardrooms but at kitchen tables and in the streets. And we desperately need that alternative university in this time of overlapping crises.

Autonomy!ab12