Asked this Wednesday on LCI, the Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, regretted the decision of the management of Science Po Grenoble to suspend for four months a professor accused of Islamophobia, for “defamatory remarks”.
“I think there is a formal error in the fact of having suspended him,” said Jean-Michel Blanquer, saying to himself “certain that the priority is not to sanction this gentleman”. Asked about the decision of the president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, to suspend the funding of the community in response to the Institute of Political Studies, Jean-Michel Blanquer replied: “I think we must of course react ”. “Perhaps it is not always spectacular measures that must be taken,” he added, however.
Vehement emails
The controversy has agitated academia and politics since the suspension Monday of Klaus Kinzler, professor of German at the IEP in Grenoble. In interviews, the teacher described the IEP as an institute of “political re-education”, accusing a “hard core” of colleagues, followers of “woke” theories, of indoctrinating students, and the leadership of the IEP to let it go.
Originally, at the end of 2020, Klaus Kinzler and a fellow historian had exchanged vehement emails about a day of debates entitled “racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” by challenging this formulation and criticizing Islam.