Adam Levy 00:04
Hello, I’m Adam Levy, and this is Off Limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers. In this episode: activism.
Much of our research relates to the real world, and to addressing real-world problems. And this ambition to make the world better is the motivation for many who enter academia.
For some, that doesn’t start and end with their research. It can extend to activism, often a thorny topic within academia.
Victoria Burns 00:40
I struggle almost with whether to call myself an activist or an advocate. There’s almost, I would say, a bit of a negative connotation with activism.
Adam Levy 00:51
That’s Victoria Burns, of the University of Calgary in Canada. We’ll meet her again later in this series, when we discuss substance dependence and recovery.
And this tension between academia and activism can be keenly felt across disciplines and causes. This is something that Theo Newbold has encountered. Theo was doing a PhD in plant pathology at Pennsylvania State University,
Theo Newbold 01:18
….and I was attending Oregon State in 2020 during the protests in Portland, Oregon, and across the country, in response to the murder of George Floyd and other Black People at the hands of American police. I was actively engaged in those activities in Portland.
There was definitely a lot of fear around how people in power would perceive those activities and whether that would hamper my ability to continue in my programme. Specifically, other professors in the department thought that I was wasting my time, should have been focused on research.
So it’s possible that that work or involvement will come back to bite me, as they say, later on in my career.
But I am like a white, effeminate-presenting person, right? If I was a person of colour, or a person of colour and male, or any of the any of the other sort of categories that often people view you as being dangerous, then that activism and that work I did likely wouldn’t be perceived the same way.
Adam Levy 02:28
Activism on and beyond the campus has made headlines time and time again, and over more than two years following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 2023, protests have sprung up against Israel’s subsequent actions in Gaza and treatment of the Palestinian population.
In Germany, a country with an especially complex relationship with Israel, these protests have been discussed widely in politics and in the Press alike. And so I spoke with Uli Beisel, a human geography professor at the Free University Berlin.
After signing a petition early found herself in the middle of a media and political firestorm. We started off by discussing the form of activism at the Free University in the weeks and months following October 7,
Uli Beisel 03:22
After some months, there were the first protests on the campus of the Free University against the Israeli intervention warfare in Gaza.
And in the end, the university, the heads of the university called the police to have the lecture hall evicted.
And ever since then the tensions rose. And people were waiting for the first campus camp, protest camp, to happen in Germany as well. And that’s what then happened in May 2024.
And of course, the situation in Germany, due to its historic situation with the Holocaust, and therefore its special relationship to Israel, makes this particularly contentious.
And the protests were very quickly discussed very controversially in the media. There was a lot of, sort of tension already, and clarity about how the constitutionally-enshrined right for protest and freedom of speech would play out on campus.
Adam Levy 04:35
And now, I guess that’s where the petition that you signed came in. Now, from my understanding, this petition wasn’t really about taking any kind of side in terms of this debate, which is very fiercely-held in Germany, around Israel. Can you explain what the petition actually was calling for?
Uli Beisel 04:56
So the petition was calling for respect for freedom of speech and the right to assemble for peaceful protest in the public sphere.
It did have a short remark that, with the impeding military action in Russia, in May 2024, that protests would be understandable, or something like that.
So there was a small hint that tried to explain, sort of, that there is a situation on the ground that might sort of invite protest, right?
Adam Levy 05:33
Now when you signed this petition, did you expect that it would get more wide attention?
Uli Beisel 05:41
No, so that petition was also very hastily drawn up. But I signed it on the same afternoon of when the university decided to evict the protest camp after a very, very short time.
And the petition was drawn up in the afternoon and already circulated and that same day. And I mean, it was also an open letter, right, that was addressed to our university management and just published on the internet. So we didn’t, it wasn’t like actively put in the newspapers or anything like that, right?
So no. In short, no one expected that it would sort of lead to all the events that unfolded afterwards.
Adam Levy 06:24
Yeah, let’s get on to the events that followed. I suppose most notably that this was reported on in the very popular newspaper in Germany, Bild, and reported on in quite inflammatory terms, I think it’s fair to say.
To translate it, it’s talking about the university perpetrators and how there’s Israel-hate at Berlin’s universities, and the teaching staff is supporting the student mob. And alongside that, they’re pictures of several of the signatories of the petition, including yourself.
Can you describe just what it felt like for you when, when you saw this coverage for the first time?
Uli Beisel 07:03
Yeah, so the Bild Zeitung is a tabloid press, right? And it wasn’t a big surprise that they would report in the way they did. That’s their style of covering.
But as you said, it picked out, I think, 13 or 14 academics who had signed from these over 1000. And we still have no idea how who ended up on that cover and the list, so to speak, and why.
But of course, one can speculate about why that happened.
I was sent a screenshot of that coverage, I think, in the evening of the day it had appeared. And, yeah, I don’t know.
I mean, it was at first a sort of was a bit disbelief, right, with this terrible heading of the yeah, Universitäten Täter
Adam Levy 08:01
…which means university perpetrators.
Uli Beisel 08:06
Indeed. And also with a clear insinuation that we are actively supporting Israel hate by siding with nothing really, aside from the right to protest.
And yeah, so it was, it was also a moment where you didn’t really know how that would then continue, right?
Like, I didn’t know, will I be safe on campus? What? What does that mean now? What will the students think? That was, of course, incredibly unsure to know how this will all be discussed, also by colleagues and so on. So, yeah, so it was a moment of insecurity, in a way, right?
About what this might now mean, also in terms of the public opinion.
Adam Levy 08:56
And in the coming days and weeks, did that come to fruition in any shape? Was there any discomfort with students, your other academics, or did any members of the public reach out to you in any way?
Uli Beisel 09:09
So yes, there were a few hate mails along the lines of ”Someone like you shouldn’t teach at a university in Germany.” And I decided to address it head on with my students.
In the next teaching sessions we started with that. We talked about it, and talked about what this meant, and also what this positioning from my side meant.
I also, aside from the hate mail, got a lot of solidarity mail, and actually in particular, solidarity messages from the students who, some of them had been part of the protest and also experienced police violence on that day and felt incredibly left alone by our university management. Also got some. some solidarity emails from colleagues. But also a lot, a lot of silence. I think that is, that was the most surprising.
I still, until this day, don’t know if the colleagues in my faculty, how much they know. Most just didn’t say anything, and that, I thought, was quite curious.
Adam Levy 10:27
And was there any response from the university administration itself?
Uli Beisel 10:31
Yes, there actually was, from our faculty. We informed them. A colleague and I wrote to them because we weren’t sure if they would maybe also get media requests or so, and so we wanted them to definitely know about it.
And the university offered legal advice and also issued a statement that they valued our opinion.
Adam Levy 10:57
So that was the response of your institution. But this also caused quite a political stir too, right?
Uli Beisel 11:04
Actually, our, at the time minister of education spoke out quite fiercely that that she was horrified that we had given that statement in the open letter.
The ministry performed a review to see if funding could be taken away from us, actual active funding. And lists were compiled of the names of us, over 1000 people who had signed that petition, and they were counter-checked to: are we, at the moment, funding that person?
The legal department within the ministry of education put a stop to that. And I think this still has repercussions how people feel they can speak out or not today.
So I was also in in a situation of very clear privilege. I’m a civil servant, so my job is actually very secure.
But there’s also many early career colleagues who supported and put their name to that petition. And for them it was much less clear what this means for further applications for jobs. I think that is something that is also not quickly undone, like the damage of things like that continues on for years
Adam Levy 12:32
Now, while the details of this story are very specific to your university, to Germany, even, this is a pattern we’re seeing time and time again, I suppose, particularly in relation to Israel.
Why do you think that is this quite common clash when academia and activism try and mix?
Uli Beisel 12:53
I think it’s got a lot to do with the perception that because science is meant, or is understood to be objective, there shouldn’t be any leading or arguments connected to that, so to speak, right?
So the facts are supposed to speak for themselves. But if experts express an informed opinion based on their research, that’s much more contested and often, I guess, misrepresented as activism as such, right?
Facts as such are also not objective, and so, and empirical evidence points in certain directions that also have normative implications, right?
And to then, as an academic, express those, is not merely an opinion, but it’s actually an empirically-informed statement or argument that’s made, right?
So there’s a conflation happening there that sort of suggests, ”Oh, that person is just expressing a personal or political opinion, and therefore is an activist.”
Whereas what is happening usually is that we draw on, be that our own empirical evidence, or we draw on established academic discourse right? There, that accusation of ”this is just activism,” because It’s a societally politically relevant statement, is just a misinterpretation, to my mind.
The why is, of course, it makes it quite ironic. It’s politically-vested interests, right, that want to, that want to discredit and use that label of, ”Oh, this is just activism,” while they also engage in a form of activism or lobbying, right?
Adam Levy 15:03
What would you like to see from academic institutions in the future to foster somehow a healthier relationship between academia and activism?
Uli Beisel 15:17
Well, I mean, I think we need to be extremely clear in explaining what actually research means and what it means to also report on our research results.
And there is also a difference between expressing an opinion and expressing a conclusion that has come from a systematic engagement with a topic. It’s not just part of our work or part of, sort of, the free time private engagement that people might choose to do or not.
Then the second point is that we need actual support structures that pertain to legal support, unfortunately, that pertain to defamation lawsuits that are necessary as a result. And there needs to be sort of a structure of solidarity built around that.
And I do see the institutions as in a duty to establish those and support those if they want to save science, so to speak, right?
Adam Levy 16:27
So that’s very much how universities should better engage and support their staff. But what about the students themselves, who we started off by speaking about, who were taking part in these more obviously activist activities?
Uli Beisel 16:43
The universities are also very much have a duty to support students in their right to education, right? And that means also their right to publicly express their opinions. And in many cases, it’s just like with academic staff, very informed opinions, right?
It’s not activism that comes out of the blue. And it’s very much connected also to the subjects that students study, right, be it as part of when they are active in scientists for future, for environmental issues or, well, what is often called pro-Palestinian movement, but also a movement for human rights activism more broadly, maybe, right. And that is often connected to the expertise that students are building and are learning about in universities.
And I think we failed massively in protecting our students from these repercussions. And in particular, international students in Berlin have seen a huge backlash in that regard.
And we have, with regard to pro-Palestinian activism and protest actions, there’s over 10,000 court cases only in Berlin for the general public, and many, many of those are students who are affected. They are charges of trespassing in their own university.
And so if they have court cases against them. There is the possibility now to de-register students. And I think it’s quite extraordinary that we have so many cases against students that are brought by their own universities against them for engaging in protest.
And I do wonder what that, what that does with curiosity, for students and for learning, exactly this sort of critical thinking that we actually really, really desperately need if we’re going to think about what, just futures in the face of the climate crisis, for instance, can mean, if you think about this globally.
And so I think we need to think very carefully about what kind of institution the university wants to be and wants to become, and how that is actually connected with what we teach and how we teach.
Adam Levy 19:18
That was Uli Beisel. Nature asked the Free University Berlin about campus demonstrations. A spokesperson referred us to the latest policy, published in October last year.
It says ”we must engage in controversial debates with clashing opinions, and be willing to do so, both inside our university community and in broader context with the general public and other areas of society.”
But it stipulates that unannounced and unauthorized political gatherings are not permitted saying there is a need to keep the peace at the university, ensure its proper operation and protect university staff and students.
Now, as Uli mentioned, students have been profoundly impacted, and that’s not unique to Germany.
Later in the series, we’ll discuss religious faith in academia, and for that conversation I spoke with Maisha Islam about what it means to be a Muslim academic. She noted the particular challenges that Muslim students face when protesting Israel’s actions.
Maisha Islam 20:21
We’ve seen numerous accounts from universities where pro-Palestinian activism has been demonized.
It’s been actively sought out to be suppressed.
And whilst pro-Palestinian support is not limited to racially minoritized and Muslim students, but racially minoritized and Muslim students are the ones who are being disproportionately impacted. And we are never seen to be worthy of you know, groups that are in need of being protected, whose rights need to be upheld. You know, the right to freedom of expression, for example.
Adam Levy 20:55
As Uli alluded to earlier, some researchers turn to activism, not as something besides their work, but directly because of it. And that’s the case for my next interviewee, climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Peter Kalmus 21:14
And I’m speaking on my own behalf. Unfortunately.
Adam Levy 21:18
In 2022 Peter was charged with misdemeanor trespassing for climate protest at Chase Bank, charges which were later dropped.
Footage of the protest quickly went viral. But this wasn’t the beginning or end of Peter’s relationship with protest. For years, he’s grappled with how to make the most meaningful impact to combat climate change within academia and within activism.
Peter Kalmus 21:45
I’ve been a climate scientist since 2012. I think I really started getting involved in activism in 2006 and that was halfway through my PhD in physics, actually at Columbia in New York City.
Adam Levy 21:59
And what prompted this? Was there a specific spark to get you into activism?
Peter Kalmus 22:06
The main thing, I think, was, I’ve got two sons, and my older son was born in 2006. And that was like a kick in the pants to like, make me think more broadly about the world and what the world was going to be like when he was grown up.
And I started to get much more concerned about climate change. In 2006 Inconvenient Truth came out, and I started reading papers. And the more I learned, the more I realized it was a serious problem, and there’s just the way I’m wired. I couldn’t look away from it, so I started looking for ways to create change.
Adam Levy 22:43
And lots of academics might have that experience, but might then think, ”Okay, well, the way I’m going to create change is by putting my head down and really doing research in this area.”
And of course, you have done that. But why did activism feel like an important part of that for you?
Peter Kalmus 22:58
That’s a good question. I mean, just doing the science and just writing papers isn’t nearly enough, right?
At that time, I was, you know, I started out as an astrophysicist. But climate change is very different than, like, studying neutron stars on the other side of the galaxy, right?
So the social contract is that scientists are supposed to do the research and figure out what’s happening and what those implications are for humanity, and write the papers.
And then policymakers are supposed to have advisors who understand, listening to the scientists, who are reading the papers, understand what we’re saying, and then they make wise decisions to avert the coming disaster, right?
Well, they’re, they’re not making those wise decisions. In fact, they’re making the precise opposite decisions from what climate scientists are recommending, right?
So they’re all now still trying to expand fossil fuels. As a scientist who sees that everything is at stake, what is the scientist supposed to do in that situation, right?
Just keep writing papers and hoping that, you know, one more paper is suddenly going to wake up these world leaders? No, what I did instead was I started to ask, like, ”Why? Why are these world leaders being so foolish?”
The only thing I’ve able, been able to come up with is to make a grassroots movement that’s essentially stronger than the power structure of the fossil fuel industry.
Adam Levy 24:31
The way you describe it there, it sounds kind of like the decision was inevitable for you. Was it a difficult decision for you to make to get involved in activism? Did you feel like you had to do some soul searching?
Peter Kalmus 24:44
To try to go back into 2006 headspace, it was a very, very different world. So it felt like already late in the game in 2006, in terms of global heating.
But also it was remarkable how almost nobody was talking about climate change. Back then, in 2006, when I would talk to a random friend about climate change, they would look at me like I was crazy.
So it was a very kind of natural decision.
You know, at that time at Columbia University, I was like, ”Okay, well, it should be a no brainer to switch, to have the university switch to clean electricity from wind.”
So I tried to organize a campaign to get Columbia to make that switch. And so we, I think we got maybe one meeting with an administrator, and it went nowhere.
So that was a wake-up call, like, I’m like, ”This is really hard actually, to get people to care about climate change.”
Adam Levy 25:38
Well, it’s now been, I mean, almost two decades since those events you described. So I mean, that was your start in activism. Can you outline just a couple of the other forms of activism you’ve been involved in since then?
Peter Kalmus 25:51
After that experience, I tried various other things. Around 2010 I was a postdoc at Caltech living in Altadena, which earlier this year burned down in a quite extraordinary way.
And not knowing what to do as an activist I got really curious about how my own life kind of interacted with emissions. So I kind of did this accounting of where my own emissions and the missions of my family were coming from, trying to reduce my own emissions as much as I could.
I was, I really liked it, so I wrote a book about it. My whole strategy was, or my theory of change, was, like, we have to get normal people to care about this so that we can push for systemic change at the national level, like through policy. And none of that was working.
Adam Levy 26:41
So how did you decide to try and communicate that in a way that would get through to people?
Peter Kalmus 26:47
Civil disobedience.
So I really at that time, it’s 2022, coming out of COVID. I was finally ready myself to take some risks, to risk my job and to risk arrest.
And it was, I remember, it was quite hard to make that decision, to take those risks. You know, I felt like I’d essentially tried everything that I could at that point.
I thought it was strange that climate scientists who know better than anyone how absolutely devastating this is going to be for humanity. And part of my theory of change was, and still is, that if climate scientists are acting calm, then your average person, right, has so many things on her mind.
She’s going to take the temperature of that scientist’s emotional state, and that scientist does not seem afraid.
So I think, I thought it was really the emotional connection that was missing. And I was feeling personally, like, this is ”I want to stand on the roofs and scream to everyone and what a big deal this is. So I need to communicate that to people.”
And I’m not going to be able to do that by writing another scientific paper. I’m going to try civil disobedience. So I’m going to risk that. I’m going to, like, put that on the table,
Adam Levy 28:04
And what were those risks that you ended up taking?
Peter Kalmus 28:08
So we decided on a tame action to highlight how fossil fuel expansion is funded by the world’s biggest banks.
There were two other scientists and one engineer. And the four of us simply chained our wrists to the front door of the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles. That’s it.
And I gave like, a short speech, like, right after I attached, I had all this adrenaline, so I just spoke from my heart and said what I felt about, you know, the planet being destroyed, and how that would impact all of us, including my sons.
We were arrested by, I think, almost 100 LA police in full riot gear. It was, the response was extraordinary. Anyway, my little talk, because it was, you know, just from my heart, it went viral, and it did reach a lot of people.
So I realized that probably, out of everything I’ve done, civil disobedience was the best form of communication for reaching people.
And so then I tried to, and I’ve been trying since then, to get more scientists to try civil disobedience.
I still believe that if a few thousand climate scientists, say, like half the world’s climate scientists were doing civil disobedience, it would be a huge deal. And it would help wake an extraordinary amount of people up.
So I think things are shifting where I’m not sure that civil disobedience and the grassroots movement is going to still have the same impact that it once had when, you know, our governments were somewhat more democratic. But I think it’s, I think we have to keep trying.
Adam Levy 29:47
You mentioned that when you kind of made this decision to incorporate civil disobedience into your activism, you were scared about the potential negative consequences on your career.
Has that in any way materialized? Have there been negative impacts?
Peter Kalmus 30:02
Oh, absolutely, yeah. You know, I would say the majority of my colleagues probably approve quietly of the civil disobedience, but quite a few of them don’t.
So, you know, I was applying for a professor job, and someone on the committee, you know, didn’t like the activism I was doing.
So that kind of thing does happen. And, you know, I was under an ethics review from NASA JPL for about a year, and that really was stressful and actually caused me to have health problems, and really kind of slowed down my career in a lot of ways.
I had a colleague, we were doing an action at the AGU.
Adam Levy 30:44
(And the AGU is the American Geophysical Union.)
Peter Kalmus 30:48
Yep. And it ended up getting her fired, actually.
And that was actually the action that caused this, like, almost years long ethics review for me. That was super stressful.
I think if this was much more normalized, if, like far more, climate scientists were doing actions like this in a careful and respectful way, then maybe the discomfort would be less.
It’s frustrating to me that academic institutions and laboratories that really should know better, their scientists certainly know how what a dangerous situation humanity is in right now, and yet the institutions themselves want to kind of tap down, you know, that sort of activism.
It’s a shame. I think at some point everyone, including leaders of institutions, have to say, you know, ”What’s more important, my job, or the entire planet?”
Adam Levy 31:39
When you say that some of your peers who don’t approve. How is that disapproval voiced? What kind of comments do you receive?
Peter Kalmus 31:47
The support is less quiet than the disapproval. I think the disapproval happens within committees that you know, I don’t really see that kind of visibly, like the actual impacts.
But the support, for example, there was after the AGU action, there was a petition from AGU members expressing disapproval of how the AGU treated us, and the support there was overwhelming.
Adam Levy 32:11
Do you feel there has actually been a positive influence on other academics in terms of inspiring them to take political action in these kinds of ways?
Peter Kalmus 32:22
You know, I think it’s, it’s a problem when we do face disciplinary action, right? Because that tends to discourage other academics from doing the same thing.
I think there are far more climate scientists and other academics now who are starting to risk whether it’s just through speaking out, which is also super important, or taking greater risks, like actual civil disobedience.
Adam Levy 32:46
Now, of course, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but there’s some people who argue that it undermines the message to make a stand in this kind of way, and the way academics should make themselves heard is much more in the kind of calm and collected, and quote/unquote impartial way. How do you feel about this kind of response to activism, or to activism in general?
Peter Kalmus 33:10
I just don’t think that’s how human brains work. I think we’re very attuned to the emotional states of the people around us, far more than we are attuned to scientific facts in general.
So scientists are sort of exceptional in that sense, right? Scientists more than other people, like, we tend to look at facts and evidence and then kind of change things accordingly, right?
But the emotional attunement is actually far more powerful in the basic human sense. We are emotional animals.
Adam Levy 33:44
That emotion really comes through when you discuss these topics. What does it mean to you on a personal level to work so actively on climate change?
Peter Kalmus 33:54
Yeah, no, we I mean, what are we here to do? I think we’re here to try to make a better world for everyone. I firmly believe that.
And you know, to get to the end of my life and to not have been part of that struggle and done everything I can to make things better in all kinds of ways, would, I would feel very sad if I hadn’t been part of that.
And conversely, like being part of this struggle, I think, is in some ways really joyful and really meaningful, and I definitely not want to sit on the sidelines.
Adam Levy 34:31
That was Peter Kalmus, our last interviewee of today’s episode.
We reached out to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory regarding their ethics review of Peter’s actions, but we didn’t hear back by time of recording.
Stay tuned for next week’s conversation, where we’ll discuss what it means to have a body that doesn’t fit the expectations of academia.
Speaker 34:54
I truly wonder if I have a body that will allow me to succeed in this sort of system that we have.
Adam Levy 35:02
Until then, this has been Off limits: Academia’s Taboos, a podcast from Nature Careers. Thanks for listening. I’m Adam Levy.
