Before the summer, a tent camp appeared between the Library and the Aula. I heard colleagues (not from Studium Generale) sigh that the campus is not an “action camp.”
After all, a university is supposed to be a place for education and research, not political struggle. But is that really true? To begin with: research is often politically charged. The recent decisions by universities to suspend collaboration with Israeli institutions show that policy increasingly reflects this. One might wonder whether it would have happened at all without the student protests.
But beyond the question of neutrality or complicity, the tent camps reveal something deeper. Protest is about presence. People come together, sleep in tents, sing, and in doing so, show that behind the neutral description of the university as a “place for education and research,” real people are at work. People connected to the world around them, drawing strength from that connection to speak against perceived injustice—but who are also profoundly vulnerable. We are dependent beings: on care, institutions, and solidarity.
That vulnerability is visible in demonstrations and camps, which often generate friction and sometimes provoke aggression. The protesting (and vulnerable) body in public space is experienced as a disruption, sometimes even as a threat. In Delft, the tensions remained relatively contained (thanks to all the involved parties!), but in Amsterdam, in May, the riot police (ME) acted forcefully against students on the UvA campus (and according to many official sources, disproportionate: read and hear (in Dutch) the reconstruction of The investigative journalists of VPRO Argos https://argos.vpro.nl/artikelen/barricades-op-de-campus-een-reconstructie-van-de-studentenprotesten). Why does protest provoke such anger? This is a pressing question in a time of public political violence.
As the philosopher Judith Butler reminds us, the vulnerable body in public space challenges our illusion of omnipotence. It also connects to bodies elsewhere that are far more exposed, piercing the reassuring neutrality of words like “education and research,” which often hide institutional power. It makes us feel naked, exposed. By making vulnerability visible, protest teaches us something fundamental about public space: it is not empty or neutral, but a space where people connect, affect one another, and take responsibility for shared vulnerabilities.
This is not a carte blanche to set up a tent camp anywhere. Safety remains a core value, and universities must navigate how protest and security coexist. Yet a protest on the campus can be a living experiment, a lesson in citizenship, even a form of education. Not a lecture hall, but a square. Not a curriculum, but a community forming in situ, with all the friction that entails. Discomfort is not the enemy of the university. On the contrary, it reminds us that public space is something we must learn to inhabit—to practice being together, listening, and taking responsibility.
It is precisely in protest, in that physical presence and visible vulnerability, that the heart of the university project may lie: learning to navigate our own dependence and fragility, and that of others. Beyond all political content (that’s not what this piece is about), the tent camps remind us that knowledge and power are never separate from the bodies that carry them. By acknowledging vulnerability, we learn what it truly means to inhabit public space and to live together in a shared, contingent world.