Nearly 300 academics have contacted a French university after it declared itself a safe space for those looking to flee Donald Trump’s America. Aix-Marseille University on the Mediterranean coast responded to the president’s pursuit of American universities he deems to be anti-Semitic by launching a ‘Safe Place for Science’ programme.
Described as a ‘scientific asylum’, the French university will offer three years of funding for up to 20 researchers. So far 298 academics have applied, including staff from Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Johns Hopkins University. Liberation, a left-wing French newspaper, says that some of the applicants have described ‘sometimes chilling accounts from American researchers about the fate reserved for them by the Trump administration’.
As chilling, one wonders, as the persecution of some Jewish students at Columbia last year? They were physically and verbally abused as the university ‘devolved into a cesspool of antisemitic hate” following Hamas’ murderous attack on Israel. There were similar attacks at Yale, John Hopkins and Stanford, where a committee reported last year that antisemitism is ‘widespread and pernicious’.
One hopes that the American academics looking for an environment more conducive to their work are familiar with France and particularly Marseille.
Its university has a fine reputation, which is more than one can say for the city. Only last week the Sun described Marseille as ‘Europe’s most dangerous city’ on account of the violent drug cartels which are based in the port.
Forty-nine people were murdered in Marseille in drug-relating killings in 2023, including innocent passers-by who were caught in the crossfire. That prompted some of the city’s magistrates in 2024 to dub Marseille ‘Narco-ville’, warning that ‘the rule of law and republican stability are at stake’.
Security has not improved. Last week the conservative politician (and 2027 presidential candidate) Nicolas Dupont-Aignan told a television interviewer that Emmanuel Macron ‘should worry less about Ukraine and more about Marseille’.
The number of American academics who are keen to take up the offer of Aix-Marseille University has given former president Francois Hollande an idea. Now a Socialist MP, Hollande last week tabled a bill that would provide subsidiary protection for researchers suffering attacks on their academic freedom. In effect he wants to create a ‘scientific refugee status’, writing in a newspaper column: ‘Just like the expression of divergent opinions, their work, which is a source of innovation and knowledge, has become a risk for the propaganda of regimes.’
Is France in a position to lecture any country about academic freedom or indeed any sort of freedom of expression? It is arguably the most censorious nation in the West.
It is a place where journalists are fired for having private conversations with right-wing politicians; where TV stations are closed down for being too provocative; where the country’s most popular politician is banned from contesting the 2027 presidential election and where academics with wrong opinions are cancelled. Among the most prominent intellectuals to be silenced are Florence Bergeaud-Blacker, who lives under a threat of death after writing about the Muslim Brotherhood, and Gilles Kepel.
Kepel has been writing about Islam in France for four decades and has advised presidents on the subject; that didn’t stop him having to leave Sciences Po Paris last year. ‘I wasn’t woke’, he said, and ‘those who are not in line [woke] no longer have the opportunity to express themselves.’
Sciences Po is one of several universities in France which has faced accusations of anti-Semitism. The atmosphere became so toxic last year that the university had its funding temporarily suspended by the Paris regional authority. The French Senate launched an investigation into the ‘worrying’ climate of anti-Semitism in higher education, and reported that 67 such acts were logged between October 2023 and May 2024. In February this year the Senate adopted a bill aimed to combat the rising scourge of anti-Semitism in higher education.
Instead of creating a ‘Safe Place’ for American academics in France perhaps the priority should be creating a safe place for Jewish students.
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