The advisory committee responsible for reviewing Radboud University's international partnerships has officially been launched. It will still take months before the committee produces a recommendation concerning collaborations with Israeli universities. So says Lutgarde Buydens, who is acting as chair of the committee.

With a month’s delay, the International Partnerships Advisory Committee has officially been launched, as Radboud University announced today in a press release.

The establishment of the committee was a promise made by the Executive Board to the pro-Palestinian protesters who spent weeks last spring camping out in tents next to the Maria Montessori building.

‘If our expertise turns out to be insufficient, we will seek help from inside or outside the university’

The Executive Board has appointed Lutgarde Buydens, the former Dean of the Faculty of Science, who retired in June 2022, to head the committee. ‘I had to think about it for a while, because this is not an easy job,’ says Buydens. ‘But it is absolutely clear to me that the advice we will be issuing really matters to the university.’

The other members of the committee are Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law Paul Bovend’Eert, Associate Professor of Philosophy Cees Leijenhorst, and Associate Professor of Professional Ethics Jos Kole. ‘Together, we form the base,’ says Buydens. ‘If our expertise turns out to be insufficient, we will seek help from inside or outside the university.’

Tempering expectations

Buydens does want to temper expectations: although the initial focus is on partnerships with institutions in conflict zones, the committee will not immediately issue advice on whether or not to break with Israeli universities.

‘We first need to develop a yardstick for assessing international collaborations,’ says Buydens. ‘This is not so much about whether you can partner with other universities, because that is a fundamental right of researchers. What we want to focus on specifically is the question of when not to cooperate. That is what we want to develop tools for.’

The committee will not be doing this work ‘from the heights of its ivory tower’, says Buydens. A participation process will be launched in the coming period to invite students and staff to share their ideas and insights. Radboud Reflects has been asked to organise this process.

Sustainable solution

Last summer, talks took place between the Nijmegen university administration and fellow administrators from Hebrew and Tel Aviv University. Nevertheless, Buydens says it is impossible to reach a sound decision right now on whether or not to terminate the partnerships, as the protesters are demanding. For this, we first need the aforementioned benchmark – a yardstick against which all partnerships can be measured. ‘We want to offer a sustainable solution. New conflicts may arise in the future. We want to get this right.’

Buydens hopes and expects to issue the first recommendations, including a recommendation on the Israeli partnerships, next spring. She does not yet know what this kind of advice to the Executive Board will look like exactly. Nor does she know whether the recommendations will be shared publicly with the university community. That is up to the Executive Board, and the spokesperson was as yet unable to provide an answer to this question.

‘We’re not going to wag our finger in that typical Dutch way’

What Buydens can say is that the goal is not to have other universities assent with Radboud University’s ideals. The recommendations that Buydens will be drafting with her colleagues are for this university. ‘Can we remain true to ourselves and still maintain certain partnerships? We are not going to wag our finger in that typical Dutch way and say that everyone has to subscribe to our values.’

The advisory committee will start by assessing Radboud University partnerships at the institution level. This will be followed by partnerships at institute level and externally funded collaborations at faculty level. The committee will not interfere with collaborations between individual researchers.