Culture, education, justice, information, science… Syndeac, the national union of arts and culture companies, is holding a series of debates in 2025 to highlight the role and importance of public services in society. A series of events in which Libération is a partner. The next debate, “Information, science and conspiracy,” November 24 in Nancy.
Attacks targeting scientific institutions, their actors, and research results are increasing worldwide. Climate science and social science are key targets, as are all disciplines seeking to create a fairer, more sustainable and clearer society. We think of authoritarian regimes, certain abuses that occurred in the United States… But we also have to realize that these dynamics are now playing out in Europe and France.
This historic moment, as alarming as it is at times, requires a collective start: uniting all energies to reaffirm the importance of science as the foundation of society and a pillar of democracy.
In France, universities fulfill the mission entrusted by the State: to train current and future citizens, to generate and disseminate knowledge resulting from research, to contribute to innovation and economic development, to irrigate society through scientific and technical culture. However, in an increasingly polarized political and media landscape, where simplification often takes precedence over rigor, higher education and research are increasingly weakened.
Universities are also defined (and perhaps most importantly) by their exercise of academic freedom. This ensures that everyone has the opportunity to teach, research, publish and debate, free from political, economic or religious pressure.
Academic freedom is not an abstraction or a privilege: it is a condition for the vitality of research, the quality of training, and, more broadly, the health of democracy. When the world is threatened – by ignorance, caricature, or the systematic questioning of knowledge – it is not just the university community that is targeted, but society as a whole. Recent controversies demonstrate this: without academic freedom, there can be no independent science, no reliable knowledge to fuel debate, no enlightened citizenship.
Science is not meant to be fun: it questions, sometimes disturbs, but always sheds greater light.
In this struggle, open science occupies a decisive position. By making data, publications and methods more accessible, everyone can verify, understand, debate and reuse research results. Transparency, sharing and reproducibility are the best medicines against misinformation and manipulation.
Open science strengthens society’s trust in knowledge and ensures that knowledge remains a common property, never monopolized by a few.
The emergence of artificial intelligence further emphasizes the importance of maintaining these principles. Fragmentation of sources, the spread of dazzling fake news, confusion between opinion, belief and knowledge: all mechanisms that fuel conspiracies and populism, undermine trust in institutions and can even influence the electoral process. Therefore we must mobilize all aspects: education, teacher training, research, scientific culture, open science.
Faced with rising conspiracies and distrust of science, universities have not only become sites of contagion; it is the space where we learn to reason, doubt, verify, compare ideas. They practice the scientific method as well as knowledge itself.
We fully fulfill our role as defenders of reason and freedom. Every year, we welcome researchers who can no longer practice freely in their countries. Universities remain open and inclusive places, where ideas, people and culture circulate.
This is our responsibility: to protect those who bring science to life, and to provide students with the skills, critical thinking, and ability to imagine the future on which the vitality of our democracy depends.
