Anonymous organizers had aggressively advertised conference since autumn without booking rooms / “Science needs openness and transparency”
The event announced for this week entitled “Talking about (the Silencing of) Palestine. On its Epistemological and Political Challenges” will not take place at Goethe University Frankfurt. The applicant researcher withdrew the previously submitted incomplete room reservation request. The University’s Executive Board rejects the organizers’ claims that they sought a dialogue with the university.
The proposed event in Frankfurt, advertised as a scientific conference, had been aggressively promoted on the internet since autumn 2024 without offering any further details in any imprint or identifying the organizers, who remained anonymous. Despite this promotion, the organizers failed to get into contact with the offices responsible for allocating rooms at the university. It was only on Friday, December 20, at 12:35 p.m., just a few hours before the long-communicated and scheduled start of the holiday-related closure, and just three weeks ahead of the proposed conference announced for January 16 and 17, 2025, that a Goethe University researcher submitted a room request. This was processed immediately after the end of the Christmas break on January 6. Given the proposed event’s nature as being open to the non-university public, too, the applicant was informed on January 7 that she should contact university subsidiary CampuService, the unit responsible for marketing rooms to third parties. She was also informed of the organizational lead times required for events of this size. In response, the applicant academic withdrew her room request in a telephone conversation with CampuService held on January 8.
“Science needs openness and transparency. To date, the organizers have failed to establish any contact with the university management – the room reservation by our researcher aside,” explains Goethe University President Prof. Enrico Schleiff. “Goethe University researchers planning a conference of this size know how and with what lead time they have to book rooms, especially during the lecture period. The request was handled like any other room request, swiftly and in accordance with the university-wide regulations.”
Goethe University is committed to the freedom of research and teaching; this naturally includes the dialog between different approaches and theories, even if they are controversial. The academic debate on Hamas‘ terror against Israel, its roots and effects, the war in the region and perspectives for its future, as well as questions related to epistemology, is of course welcome and desired at Goethe University Frankfurt and also takes place within the framework of research and teaching. That being the case, it is difficult to hold an insightful debate if organizers are not open, if they do not distinguish clearly between activism and academic work and if their ranks include the “Students for Palestine”, whose protest actions have seen repeated displays and/or chants of anti-Semitic symbols and slogans, and who refuse to designate the Hamas‘ terrorist attack on Israel as such.
As part of a protest camp following Pentecost 2024, the Students for Palestine had demanded a meeting with the university’s Executive Board, which, while making it clear that it is not part of its responsibilities to discuss the content of the Middle East conflict, expressed its willingness to talk provided the group clarifies the topics it wants to talk about and names at least one representative, not least since there can be no dialog with anonymous actors. Another precondition for any discussion is naming Hamas‘ terror as such. The corresponding letter from the Executive Board to the group dated May 26, 2024 has not received any reply.
