Academic Suicides
The side effects of public intellectuals joining politics
Intellectual integrity can be defined as acknowledging the need to be true to one’s own thinking and to hold oneself to the same standards one expects others to meet.
We demand it of our public intellectuals: the academics, writers and critics to whose independent thinking we count on to make sense of the world’s ambiguities and of whom we also expect to deliver their verdicts with fearlessness and moral consistency.
In illiberal societies such voices are revered by the oppressed and feared by the oppressors. In our own liberal societies, they challenge our schizophrenic collective conduct, bring clarity to the blurriness of our times and expose the inconsistencies of those who govern over us.
Even before Trump’s poisonous attacks on universities began to drive a lot of intellectuals out of their ‘safe houses’, the capacity of academics to live up to their role had suffered from the commercialization of education and the corporatization of their institutions. For years, even in the freer more radical British intellectual scene, academics were being pushed to conform to the whims of the new finance-dependent education order. In some instances, intellectuals end up sitting comfortably within the system they had tasked themselves to judge or disrupt; some ride the social media circus having become celebrities that manufacture intellectual content as commodity. Genuine, dedicated intellectuals are threatened with extinction.
More painfully, there are now those who transition from the lecture hall to the political circus, from ivory tower scribblers to robotic teleprompter readers. Some academics are lured into appointed public office as experts taking on ministerial positions. The decision to take the plunge is no doubt tough; to be fair some jump in with a genuine belief that they could inject integrity into the political process. Professor Michael Ignatieff’s experiment in Canada as recounted in his book Fire and Ashes is a must read for public intellectuals aspiring to transition.
An academic’s eternal tension between their theory and their practice is ultimately tested during crises. Nothing has tested their -or indeed our own individual - intellectual integrity as deeply as the genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Last month at the European Union’s Council of Ministers the Dutch foreign minister submitted a motion for “a review to establish whether Israel had violated its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement” an agreement that is “based on respect for human rights and democratic principles”. A belated but welcome shift in the EU’s weak reaction so far, given that the review was first proposed by Spain and Ireland as far back as February 2024.
At the Council, Cyprus was represented by its foreign minister, Constantinos Kombos, a public intellectual, a founding member of the University of Cyprus’ Department of Law and until his ministerial appointment in 2023 an Associate Professor in Public Law there.
Mr Kombos, who has since then built a reputation as a quiet and effective minister, argued against the Dutch proposal, objecting to exploring whether Israel may have violated the EU’s red lines. He did say that Cyprus considered the humanitarian situation in Gaza to be tragic and unacceptable and that Israel must allow the flow of aid. But he rejected the motion in terms of the procedure and the benefit which would arise. His concern wasn’t the content, he said, but whether this move would lead to anything useful, especially without EU experts on the ground in Gaza1.
In the struggle to increase pressure on Israel and as time was running out for starving Palestinians, the Cypriot objection on the basis of technicalities stunk of hypocrisy. It was foolish, but in the end, also irrelevant, as the motion was supported by 17 of the 27 members, with 9 against and one abstention.
Cyprus’ pitiful position was not unexpected as it had been preceded by a more blinding display of moral bankruptcy when the Cypriot president and Mr Kombos visited Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem last month. Their visit ignored the weight of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister who is held responsible for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for crimes against humanity. In his public statements2, standing next to Netanyahu, the Cypriot president mentioned the situation in Gaza zero times.
Around this time of the year, during the University of Cyprus’ spring semester Mr Kombos’ Department of Law runs an obligatory six-credit course for second-year law students. In week 8 and 9 of Module 205, students are taught about the role and significance of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court - the one that indicted Mr Netanyahu.
The Cypriot minister’s academic self-destruction is of course a personal choice and would have been of little public concern if it had not also exposed the slow public death of Cyprus’ integrity as a country; a small and often ignored occupied state that has constructed its national narrative on the idea of justice and has for decades pleaded desperately for the respect of international law.
International politics always generate contradictions and politicians always rush to deny them. Public intellectuals, however, are obliged to expose those contradictions. More so when the sanctity of international law is at stake. Public intellectuals who opt to become politicians or ministers are not absolved of that burden of duty.
Great read! I was not expecting the angle. Politics is a messy business, especially where one needs to be able to manoeuvre and negotiate a dynamic environment. It would be interesting to see if any of the public intellectuals that were "brave" (or naive choose as you like) enough to enter the political arena, had any change of mind afterwards in terms of the theoretical positions they held in the past.