Universities are no longer seen solely as knowledge institutions but also as social actors with broad responsibilities. Consequently, the university is increasingly expected to assess whether external collaborations are justifiable and desirable, or if they carry unacceptable moral and legal risks. Specifically, the university is called upon to do its own human rights assessment to minimize its risk of becoming complicit in human rights violations. Where many universities in Europe could in the recent past rely on their national government or the EU to show the way, a lack of agreement and indecision requires us to determine and act upon our responsibilities with respect to these developments.

The university is a strange creature, defined on the one hand by academic freedom and academic integrity, while on the other, embedded in an often difficult-to-navigate (semi)-corporate governance system with various idiosyncrasies developed over time. The challenge is thus twofold. 1/ How to assess external collaboration in a way that fortifies academic freedom and integrity, or minimally not to undermine these?  2/ How to design a procedure for making these assessments with an existing governance structure and to determine who makes what judgment or decision when and with what force and authority?

Like most universities in Belgium and the Netherlands, TU Delft is implementing a human rights assessment for external collaboration as part of a larger framework for evaluating potentially sensitive collaborations that includes legal, knowledge security, and environmental justice perspectives. Our goal is to implement a bottom-up, deliberative approach to engage with risks and moral challenges as early as possible in the process of establishing a collaboration, and to meet the relevant decision-makers and stakeholders at a point where they can properly exercise their responsibilities.

The assessment framework uses existing mechanisms to inform researchers, teachers, support staff, and deans about their responsibilities, to consider various risks and policies when starting a new collaboration.  This way, responsible parties (researchers, deans, and all in-between) can at an early stage reach clarity on the permissibility and desirability of a collaboration. The self-assessment can raise red flags when it comes to adherence to existing policy. In unclear cases or in light of moral doubt, a case can be escalated to the permanent moral deliberation chamber that is currently being implemented at TU Delft.

Moral deliberation is a form of structured moral dialogue in which participants, under supervision, examine morally challenging dilemmas. The process carefully identifies different arguments, makes moral considerations explicit so that the group jointly arrives at a well-considered judgment, advice, or decision. Moral deliberation helps organisations make complex decisions where moral, legal, and social considerations come together with the expressed goal of doing justice to everyone’s rights, interests, and wishes. It also allows for a deliberative and transparent process.

The strength of this approach is that it is not just leaning on the individual judgments of experts, or a top-down proclamation, but on a collective, broadly supported consideration within a relevant group of professionals. Such a bottom-up approach allows for wider support within an organisation and provides the opportunity for shared, moral learning as an individual as well as organisation.  This leads to less moral stress and more responsible decision-making within the confines of and supportive of academic freedom and integrity.

TU Delft has had good experiences with moral deliberation through several pilot moral deliberation chambers (a series of moral deliberations on one theme) on issues of knowledge security and cooperation with external parties. Each of these resulted in clear policy recommendations that are currently or about to be implemented. These pilot projects gave us the contours of assessment criteria to be adopted by the framework as well as experience needed to build and implement the permanent moral deliberation chamber to assess the hard cases.

A specific challenge for the TU Delft, as a technical university, is that we do not have a large humanities and law department. Any human rights expertise has to be sourced externally on an ad hoc basis. Yet, by sourcing the members of the chamber from our large university community, we bring in many of the relevant perspectives in a way that safeguards concerns about academic freedom and integrity and reinforces the communal responsibilities, values, and goals of the university.