University of Amsterdam’ s Professors want Ramadan as Visiting Professor

This article is an English translation of a Dutch article published in ” Het Parool”

AMSTERDAM – Four professors of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) want islamologist Tariq Ramadan to be appointed as visiting professor at the UvA. They write that in this week’s university magazine Folia.

‘It would grace the University of Amsterdam if Tariq Ramadan would be welcomed here. Thus we would make clear that the UvA does not join the smear campaign against Muslims who feel that Islam is of importance for them outside the private sphere as well’, write academics Paul Aarts, Michiel Leezenberg, Annelies Moors and Ruud Peters.

Ramadan was told two weeks ago that he is no longer welcome as advisor on integration at the municipality of Rotterdam and as visiting professor citizenship and identity at the Erasmus University. Both the Court of Mayor and Aldermen and the Governing Body of the university think that his activities for the TV station Press TV which is financed by the Iranian government are incompatible with his functions in the Maas City (nick name for Rotterdam).

The four UvA-academics think that Tariq Ramadan’s discharge as visiting professor at the Erasmus University raises ‘questions of principle’. ‘The most important question is what influence the financer of the chair has on the functioning of the professor holding the chair. It is good university custom that the financer is put at a distance. Academics must be independent and must be able to take controversial positions in the public debate.’

SOURCE : Het Parool, 31 August 2009