The rector of Unicamp, Paulo Cesar Montagner, said this Wednesday (1), that the decision to break the agreement with the Technion Institute of Technology, in Israel, was a call for peace in the Gaza Strip, where the conflict that began in October 2023 has already caused thousands of deaths and triggered a humanitarian crisis that affects more than two million people.
According to the rector, the decision endorsed by the members of the University Council (CONSU) – which forms the University's highest decision-making body – is the result of a long process of discussions that took place within various internal bodies of the academic community. "The Rector's Office, as the process requires, proceeded with the termination, as the community wanted," he argued. "It was a political stance, with the strong intention of upholding humanitarian principles," the rector added.
Montagner says the termination has nothing to do with the technical capacity of the Technion, which he considers one of the most important higher education institutions in the world. "We don't put politics before science or technology, but simply position ourselves by saying: we need to stop this. Institutions must definitively acknowledge that we can no longer stand by episodes like those seen during the conflict," the rector argues.
In the dispatch read at the Consu meeting last Tuesday (30), the rector reports that Unicamp has been closely and concernedly monitoring the international situation regarding the escalation of the Israeli government's actions against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. "The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that violations of human rights and the dignity of the Palestinian population have become an unacceptable constant."
For much of Tuesday, students camped out near the Rector's Office, in a vigil for the end of the technical cooperation agreement with the Israeli Institute.
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