It’s often billed as France’s premier school for the social sciences — the type of place where you get critical, no-limits inquiry into any question you can think of. And if that debate cuts against the grain of the prevailing intellectual climate outside of the academy, so be it.
But students and educators at Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) have also fallen victim to the attack on academic freedom, as France’s centers of higher education cave to the pressure to silence demonstrations of solidarity with Palestine. Since October, the EHESS has been the scene of a growing divide between administrators and ranking research directors who claim that universities should…