UPDATE: The memo on collaborations was originally on the faculty council's public agenda. On Thursday, it was decided at the beginning of the meeting to discuss the document confidentially anyway. This would allow members to respond “more frankly”, according to now former chair Michael Capalbo.
Pro-Palestinian protesters – who in the spring, set up a tent camp in the garden of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, staged hunger protests and eventually occupied a building – have been asking Maastricht University to provide transparency with regards to ties to Israeli institutions for a while. FPN is now the first faculty at Maastricht to publicise those ties, after student council members Dominik Eberle Martinez and Alex Lemberg requested this in July during the last Faculty Council meeting of the academic year.
They were interested in the “symbolic and financial ties”, Lemberg, member of the University Council since September, emphasised during the meeting. “I think it would be undesirable for information about individual researchers to be made public.”
Research
In a memo that is on the agenda for the next Faculty Council meeting on Thursday, the FPN board writes that there is “extensive collaboration with Israeli researchers”. The psychologists do “what scholars always do when they sit together: engage in co-authoring papers, draft grant proposals and create exchange programs for students”.
There are currently two specific European research projects that involve both FPN and Israeli universities. As part of innovation programme Horizon 2020, the faculty is working together with Reichman University, a private university just north of Tel Aviv, and others to develop an AI machine that aims to improve communication on social media, by stopping cyber-bullying, for example. FPN is also working together with Bar-Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and others in a European Research Council project to promote voluntary compliance with rules – for instance covid regulations. Both projects receive European funding and are set to finish in 2025 and 2027 respectively.
Exchange programme
There has also been a student exchange programme with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI) since 2017, although there are no financial obligations here. Since the beginning of this program, a total of eight FPN students have studied at HUIJ for a semester, two online and six in Jerusalem, and in return one HUJI-student has come to Maastricht.
Pending the Human Rights Due Diligence Tool that is still under development, a document that will determine how the UM deals with partners in conflict areas, the exchange program is currently on hold.
Spokesman Koen Augustijn said by email that there will be no overview of collaborations at the university level for the time being. That would “conflict with the care with which we are preparing the Human Rights Due Diligence Tool”. Security considerations also play a role: the university fears that the names of researchers involved in these collaborations might be traceable.