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UvA puts ISW lecturer Laurens Buijs on leave of absence
UvA has put interdisciplinary social science (ISW) lecturer Laurens Buijs on a leave of absence. The university calls Buijs’ remarks about other scientists “unacceptable” and threatening to the safety and safe working environment of scientists. Buijs, for his part, accuses the university of “victim-blaming.”
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Buijs is very active on social media and has claimed that several UvA employees were “life-threatening” and “extremist” in tweets, among other things. According to the UvA, Buijs sent similar messages with threatening, demanding, and accusatory content to colleagues via e-mail, Teams, and WhatsApp. The UvA says it addressed Buijs several times but to no avail. According to the university, the decision to place Buijs on leave of absence has nothing to do with freedom of speech: “[But] we do expect our employees to adhere to the normal rules of conduct, including not insulting, twisting facts, or threatening others.”
Buijs contends in a statement on his website that this is a misrepresentation. According to him, he previously got into all kinds of “ground battles” in which he simply defended himself due to “lack of protection from the UvA.” He claims to have suffered severe reputational damage after the UvA distanced itself from his statements about non-binary gender. Buijs calls the university’s decision “a malicious form of victim-blaming.”
Under fire
Buijs focuses on the philosophy of science and gender theory. He came under fire from a subgroup of Dutch academics in recent months after publishing an article on the Folia website taking a stand against what he saw as the woke culture at social sciences, particularly the ISW program. Buijs indicated that he had taken advantage of the whistleblower regulation to expose these developments. He was also critical in his article of the term “non-binary,” which he said was a pseudoscientific fallacy and “empty hype.”
A storm of criticism broke out, prompting the UvA to establish an independent external committee that is currently investigating the existence or non-existence of “wokeness” in the social sciences department, specifically ISW. A group of 15 Dutch, British, and Flemish scholars then formed another support committee for Buijs.
The decision to place Buijs on leave of absence does not interfere with the investigation into wokeness in the social sciences, according to the UvA: Buijs’ whistleblower report claiming that teaching and research in the social sciences is threatened by a radicalized group of students and staff is being taken “extremely seriously,” according to the university. The external committee’s investigative report is expected before summer.
