Ghent University rector Petra De Sutter told students and faculty at the opening of the 2025 academic year that universities must protect free inquiry and debate. “In times of increasing polarization, the university has a duty to foster adversarial debate,” he said last September. “At a time when an individual’s feelings about climate change or vaccination seem to carry as much weight as years of research, it is all the more urgent that young people learn how to ask critical questions,” he said. “Doubt means that we dare to question convictions…” He then said, “’Dogma is the enemy of progress.’ You might know it. It was Einstein who said this during his speech at the Sorbonne in 1929.”
Today, eleven months later, De Sutter has suspended the researcher who exposed the plagiarism of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who died last week in an apparent suicide. In a statement, De Sutter said, “the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”
