University budget cuts protest scrapped: Fear of violence from pro-Palestinian groups
A national protest against university budget cuts planned for Thursday was cancelled for safety reasons, the organizers and the municipality of Utrecht confirmed on Wednesday. City leaders “recently received concrete information from outside the city, which shows that a pro-Palestine organisation intends to hijack the demonstration,” Utrecht Mayor Sharon Dijksma wrote in a letter to City Council.
“The information also shows that the use of violence is not being spurned,” the mayor continued. In combination with the head of the area police chief and lead prosecutor, the city contacted the organizers of the protest rally to encourage them to cancel or reschedule the demonstration on their own accord “because the safety of demonstrations can not be sufficiently guaranteed.”
Dijksma emphasized that the city has had positive conversations with the protest organizers for weeks, and said the municipal leaders “deeply regret” they had to inform them about serious safety concerns. “Precisely because the right to demonstrate is a great asset that everyone in our city should be able to use to make their opinion heard. We also saw this last weekend at a successful pro-Palestine demonstration in the city. We therefore regret that it is not possible for a large group of well-intentioned people to demonstrate.”
The protest was expected to draw thousands of attendees. “We find it terrible that all those students, teachers and employees who wanted to take action tomorrow are now unable to make their voices heard,” said labor unions AOb and FNV in a statement. They helped organize the demonstration with labor union CNV and seven other education interest groups, and said they were “surprised by these recent developments.”
The protest was meant to address significant national budget cuts to research and applied sciences universities, including plans by the Cabinet to tighten the screws on higher education by forcing them to further limit or eliminate courses of study taught in English. The far-right and right-wing parties that make up the national governing coalition want to cut about a billion euros from the higher education budget.
The rally was a way “to take action because of the dramatic consequences this government policy will have on higher education. Due to the proposed cuts, the quality of education will suffer a major and inevitable blow,” the labor unions stated.
The budget for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will be debated on November 25. The protest organizers are still working on an alternative method to draw attention to the issue.
“I am very concerned that in a time when it is of great value to be able to express your opinion and to differ from it, there are people who deprive others of this freedom under threat of violence,” Dijksma stated.
