French Minister for Higher Education and Research Frédérique Vidal today defended her probe into the influence of postcolonial studies and “Islamo-leftism” in the country’s universities.
Vidal received plenty of criticism from universities and left-wing parties after she first announced the inquiry on Wednesday into “Islamo-leftism” — a catch-all word used to pejoratively describe left-wing anti-racist activism — which some see as imported from American campuses and consider damaging for French social cohesion.
“It is an inquiry, but in the sociological sense of the term, therefore a research work or a scientific study,” she told Le Journal du Dimanche in an interview published late Saturday.
Vidal said the inquiry is not about pointing the finger at some professors. “The challenge is all about balancing between the work of scientists and those who use that work to carry an ideology and nurture activism,” she said.
A group of 600 university professors on Saturday called for Vidal’s resignation, who said her inquiry is about “defaming a profession” and compared France to Poland and Hungary in its attitude to universities.
Vidal acknowledged that the inquiry poses some challenges. “Islamo-leftism has no scientific definition,” she said, “but it corresponds to a feeling of our fellow citizens, first of all, and to a certain number of facts, too,” she said. She cited professors not feeling free to read a text about radical Islam from Charb — a cartoonist who was killed during the attack on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015 — as an example of the phenomenon.
“These are attacks on academic freedom and freedom of expression in general,” Vidal said, adding that “we can’t let that go, even if it’s very much a minority.”
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