Organising and refusing neutrality: Academic silence, governance, and complicity in Gaza and the afterlife of apartheid

Academic neutrality, I argue, is not the absence of position but an institutional achievement – produced through governance practices, procedural logics, and appeals to academic freedom that organise what universities are willing to do. I distinguish between organised neutrality – institutional position – and organised silence – everyday practices through which that position is continually maintained. Drawing on Gobodo-Madikizela’s concepts of the afterlife of apartheid and empathic repair and on scholarship framing genocide as organised violence sustained by academic infrastructures, I examine how universities manage ethical demands through organised silence, including proceduralism, deferral and the displacement of ethical language into administrative language. The Stellenbosch University Senate’s rejection of a Gaza solidarity resolution anchors the analysis, revealing how ethical questions are displaced into administrative concerns – even as this displacement is contested by academics, students and public commentators. Situated within a global pattern, organised silence is a transnational infrastructure mobilised to manage rather than confront violence. The paper does not only diagnose. As an Acting Up intervention, it identifies where institutional silence is already being refused, and proposes a concrete programme of refusal grounded in empathic repair. Five practices are developed: curricular courage, ethical partnership review, protection and amplification of scholars under siege, public scholarship and Ubuntu as method – each a specific disruption of organised silence. The paper calls for solidarity networks, including a South African Academic Solidarity Network for Palestine. Organised neutrality is a choice. Organised solidarity is also a choice – and it is available now.