Today is international academic freedom day. Three weeks ago I ask the permission to organise in university a debate on freedom of expression. Many of my friends here are journalists and some of them work for NGOs that support and train local press – I thus thought to set up a public debate where academic freedom could have been discussed in the broader framework of freedom of expression. I did not receive any response to my request. I then wrote a longer and more detailed request, clarifying themes and practicalities of the organisation. To this request I received a one-line, annoyed answer: the permission is not granted. I wasn’t expecting a warm support from the administration, but the bitterness of the response made me think. I felt that this was yet another lost battle of this crazy year of confrontations and tensions – the thought disheartened me and made me feel powerless.
Two days after the permission for my seminar was denied – a young Kurdish journalist was kidnapped and found dead a few days later. Nobody knows why, but everybody knows that he has written more than one word too many criticising the main ruling family.
Understood in this perspective, it seems that my little seminar went to touch an open wound. It is strange how we always need evidence to understand what we already know – the problem is obviously larger and academic freedom in our university is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
Hmm, bad vibe; I don’t like this sort of feeling.
I then started thinking of what I could do and a conversation I had with K. a few days before came to mind: he asked me to promise that I would watch again soon the Richard Attenborough movie on Gandhi.
And there I found the answer! Maybe I can’t discuss freedom of expression, but peaceful resistance may take different shapes and there are many ways not to feel disempowered and not to keep your mouth shut. So I organised a screening of the movie on Gandhi with my students, who know that I have been denied the permission to organise the seminar. Yesterday morning, before the screening, I saw them grinning as they became aware that you perhaps lose open confrontations, but Gandhi teaches us that there is always a way not to bend to oppressive systems of power (however big they are!)