Sabine Saurugger (left) & Klaus Kinzler: Islamophobia row

A university leader has called for “calm and rationality” as French academics fear being caught in the crossfire of increasingly bitter culture wars in the run-up to the country’s presidential election.

Sabine Saurugger, director of Sciences Po Grenoble, hit the headlines in January after suspending Klaus Kinzler, an associate professor of German, who had made repeated criticisms of the institution in national media. Dr. Kinzler had received death threats and been accused by students of fascism after claiming during preparations for an anti-racism event that Islamophobia wasn’t comparable to other forms of discrimination.

Prof. Saurugger told Times Higher Education that the “temporary” suspension of Dr. Kinzler was based only on his description of Sciences Po Grenoble as a “political re-education camp” and of colleagues at the grand ecole as teachers who “indoctrinate their students”. “His repeated statements have caused prejudice to the institution, its personnel and particularly its students. Expression is free, but as an employee, denigrating with such violence and unfairly the institution you work in, causes strong prejudice,” says Prof. Saurugger, whose institution, while modelled on Paris’ Sciences Po, is administratively a subsidiary of Universite Grenoble Alpes.

However, in response to Dr. Kinzler’s suspension, the president of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, announced on December 20 that he had suspended “all funding and all cooperation” with the university over its “unacceptable ideological and communitarian drift”.

Prof. Saurugger says the regional funding is worth about €500,000 (Rs.5 crore) a year, covering activities such as lifelong learning and exchange programmes. The funding freeze was cheered by right-wing candidates in the upcoming presidential poll, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, with the latter saying it was the right response to the “infiltration of our grandes ecoles by Islamo-leftism”.

The freeze came after a year of accusations, including from the French government, that the country’s universities have created an intellectual breeding ground for terrorism by viewing society critically through the lenses of ethnicity, religion and gender — rather than the republican ideal of equality. Scholars focusing on areas such as racism, Islamophobia and French colonialism have come under intense attack since the beheading of Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher who showed his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in October 2020.

“For an individual politician to cancel funding to a university based on the unfounded allegations of a disgruntled employee is a significant and worrying development. It is a political act and a violation of the principle of academic freedom,” says Simon Dawes, a media lecturer at Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

Former students of Dr. Kinzler have published an open letter in the Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper calling for his reinstatement, criticising student protesters and demanding Sciences Po Grenoble be reformed to better protect political balance among staff and students.