The students that have been occupying Leuven University’s College De Valk since early last year were joined by around 30 of the university's teaching staff on Thursday evening. The professors and lecturers went to College De Valk to show their support for the students’ protest. Some of them remained with the student throughout Thursday night.
Teaching staff join student sit-in to call for Leuven University to end cooperation with Isreal
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The associate professor of social and cultural Anthropology Karel Arnaut told journalists "We are here primarily to support the students. What they are doing is admirable. The students are paying the price for the 76 years of the normalisation of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing. It is extremely difficult to oppose it. The university never uses the terms apartheid or ethnic cleansing, there is still a long way to go to change the discourse on this subject."
The students are calling for Leuven University to end all cooperation with Israeli universities. Recent comments by the university’s Vice-Chancellor Luc Sels in a press interview have not gone down well among the protesters. The protesting students’ spokesman Niels De Ridder told journalists that "It most certainly isn’t ‘easy’ to protest against an institution you have yet to get your degree from or at which you are a PhD student. The Vice-Chancellor saying that we would be better targeting government is simply unfair. Leuven University plays a leading role regarding other subjects but is remaining silent on this”.
Protest on Ladeuzeplein
At around 8:30pm on Thursday around a hundred activists staged a protest on the Ladeuzeplein. The chanted slogans such as "Free, free Palestine", "Shame on KUL, boycott Israel", "Shame on Luc Sels (the Vice-Chancellor ed.)" and "Israel is an apartheid state". They sat in a large circle and sang songs around the Totem Statue.