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 remain wedded to a neutral position, and a large share of the student body and teaching corps who are mobilizing for Palestine.

In practice, the pretense of academic neutrality is foreclosing discussion and inquiry into the deep causes of the October 7 Hamas-led attack and the colonial nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Beyond the school’s foot-dragging in coming out in opposition to the war, members of the EHESS community decry an implicit bias in the school’s presentation of the conflict in the leadership’s internally distributed statements, and in a series of public forums hosted this winter. This is symptomatic, others suggest, of a culture of intellectual blindness toward racism and colonialism. In the clearest disavowal of the “pluralism” and “dialogue” otherwise held up as the model for campus tensions, students and teachers who’ve spoken out against the Israeli state’s actions have been signaled for disciplinary actions — with six members of the student body even facing investigation for possible criminal charges of “apology for terrorism.”