Mothers at the End of the World

When I was seven months pregnant, I flew to Spitsbergen to see the end of the world. I packed my suitcase with thermal underwear, a new merino base layer, two fleeces and my partner’s ski pants. I couldn’t fit into my own.

I always wanted to go to the Arctic. I imagined myself swiftly following in the footsteps of my childhood heroes, who were fighting the white emptiness. Instead, I could barely pull on my shoes. I had to buy new ones. The old ones had laces. 

Anyway, going on a sled into an adventure wouldn’t be possible. October was supposed to be the beginning of winter, but the bay near Longyearbyen – the capital of Spitsbergen – had not yet frozen over. The snowmobiles were stuck in the mud. There was hardly any snow. Well, on my first night, a bit of snow had dusted the flat-topped hills. It looked like a desperate attempt to sprinkle some leftover sugar on a cake. I was sweating in thermal underwear, a merino shirt and men’s ski pants.

Over the past 30 years Spitsbergen and the entire Svalbard archipelago – home to the world’s northernmost restaurant, northernmost supermarket, northernmost hotel, northernmost Asian shop and northernmost gas station – have been warming seven times faster than the rest of the world.

Instead of a dog sled, I boarded a catamaran. I would have preferred a motorboat, but the travel agency politely told me that they don’t recommend motorboats for pregnant women. It rocks too much, they said. It wasn’t until later that I realized that what they really meant was: there are no toilets on a motorboat.

So, I boarded a hybrid-electric catamaran and sailed on an ink-coloured sea. Although each of the passengers has flown thousands of kilometres to get to the island (me – 2,898 km, with two stopovers), increasing our carbon footprint, once we’re here we’re sustainable tourists.

It was three degrees above zero, but it felt like minus ten. The only sound you could hear was the wind. The only things to see were clouds, sea and ice.

Doomsday Glacier

In 2019, American writer Elizabeth Rush also headed to the frozen land, only in the south. She spent seven weeks on the icebreaker Nathaniel R. Palmer.

The research expedition for 57 people was organized by an international group of scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. Glaciologists, oceanographers, palaeoclimatologists, marine ecologists, geophysicists and biochemists, together with three journalists, cooks, sailors, technicians, electricians and seamen, were the first people in the world to sail to explore the forefield of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Only recently has the Southern Ocean been warm enough to allow sailing right up to the glacier. Previously, the Amundsen Sea was covered with ice even in summer.

Thwaites gathered the most media frenzy of all the glaciers in the last years. It was even dubbed the Doomsday Glacier. Its front is 120 kilometres long and its surface area would cover half of Poland. It holds so much water that if it melted, sea levels around the world would rise by 65 centimetres.

In “The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth”, Rush focuses not only on the research that is helping to understand what is happening to the glacier, but also on the meticulous record of how 57 strangers are transformed into a temporary community. Through her writing we meet the scientists, we experience the boredom of the first weeks, and we throw ourselves into the work when Palmer finally reaches Thwaites.

The opportunity to join an expedition has come at a bad time for Rush. She and her husband had to stop trying to have a child – pregnant people are not invited to polar expeditions. Rush is afraid that such a break will ruin her chances of becoming a mother. But she also fears that she won’t become a mother after whatever she is going to witness during the expedition.

Her book is in fact a book about motherhood.

Lab meat

Can I feed my son avocados (good for his health!) since producing five of them uses 300 to 600 litres of water and their transport to Poland emits 1.7 kg of carbon dioxide?

How long can I let my son splash around in the tub? He could sit under a running shower for an hour, three times a day.  I’d like to convert that to litres of water, but I lack imagination. I know it’s too many.

Can I not feed him meat since I don’t eat meat myself? Can I make decisions about his future diet? What if in the future lab-grown meat is the cheapest and healthiest food on a global crisis-burdened earth and my son can’t digest it?

Could I have given birth to a child when someone had calculated that each new human being burdens the earth with an additional 59 tons of carbon dioxide during each year of their life?

Can I teach him the value of empathy when in the future ruthlessness might be more needed? 

Could I give birth to a child when all the worst-case scenarios predict that the world will become an increasingly scary place to live?

Sad patch of snow in the city park

As I approach the Nordenskiöldbreen glacier on a silent catamaran gliding across the dark-ink sea, I feel overwhelmed. It’s too windy outside to last more than a minute, so I stare out the window at the empty landscape. And I listen to the guide telling the story of Spitsbergen: whalers, trappers, miners, explorers. This place has always attracted people who wanted to take something for themselves.

I would like to write that what I see is spectacular. That it takes my breath away. But reality is cold and grey, and I need to pee again. The fjord is narrow, and between its brown arms lies a grey mass of ice – the glacier cliff is three kilometres wide. It does not look majestic. It resembles a small hill in a park when after a few days of winter, the thaw begins, and the snow looks miserable, wet and trampled by children’s sleds.

We sail around a piece of rock that the guide calls Retreat Isle. It looks more like a table than an island, maybe a small seal can fit on it. It appeared in this place in the 1960s.

Scientists have proven that the Nordenskiöldbreen glacier has been melting continuously since 1896. It used to be three and a half kilometres longer. It will soon become a patch of ice and snow that does not even reach the sea. 

Disintegration

“One day, we were cruising in clear seas in front of the glacier. The next day, we were surrounded by icebergs the size of aircraft carriers,” Jeff Goodell, the other journalist on board Palmer, wrote for Rolling Stone. The scientists had to stop their research. Within 48 hours, a 33-kilometer-long section of the Thwaites Ice Shelf—the part of the glacier that floats in the sea and stabilizes the rest of the ice from sliding—had broken apart, turning the Amundsen Sea into a maze of icebergs. And the water began to freeze. Palmer had to return north.

The research conducted in 2019 helped to understand that Thwaites is melting faster than expected. Not because the air is warming, but because the ocean is warming, and the water is melting the glacier from below. For now, only the shelf is melting, but scientists say it will disappear within a decade at the latest, maybe even as early as this year. Then the glacier itself will start to melt.

Thwaites acts like a cork. When it disappears, warm water will enter the West Antarctic ice sheet, which will also start to melt. And the entire ice sheet holds so much water that its release will raise the world’s sea level by three meters. It won’t happen in a year, but the erosion of Thwaites and the Antarctic ice sheet will affect our children and their children. We can say goodbye to the Old Town of Gdansk.

Elizabeth Rush—debating with herself whether to give birth or not—details Palmer’s findings. She adds, “Ever since my return, I’ve wondered if the prolific calving we witnessed was a fecund or a fatal act, a birthing ritual or death throes?” But she’s not naive. Her earlier Pulitzer-nominated book, “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore”, chronicled the changing American shore from Louisiana to Oregon to Rhode Island.

Rush knows the dangers of the climate crisis. She understands the dangers of part of Antarctica breaking apart. But a year after her return from Antarctica, she gives birth to a son, Nicolás.

Second body

I thought that for a whole week spent behind the polar circle, I would be constantly in awe. But instead of awe I feel uneasiness – and I can’t find the source of it. It’s not the sadness of the landscape without trees. It’s not the discomfort of a belly that makes me wobbly and heavy. It’s not the awareness of witnessing the melt. 

This strange feeling seeps into my body when I walk on the streets of Longyearbyen with its population of 1753 people (of which roughly 500 come from south-east Asia – hence the Thai shop with frozen lemongrass and kaffir limes) and a view of mines perched on tops of the mountains. One of them is still operating – providing coal for a local power plant and for steel for the automotive industry. The feeling makes itself comfortable when I sit down to a meal watching locals in their elegant outfits and slippers brought from home in a bag similar to one I used to take with me to school every day. 

I can’t name it. I’m trying to describe it and the closest I come to is I’m missing a home that I haven’t yet created.

It is on the day of the trip to Nordenskiöldbreen that I realize what is happening. I am standing at the barrier in too-tight pants and a too-tight jacket, wrapped in a wool scarf, and the wind is bringing tears to my eyes. Suddenly I understand that I have been here before.

I am here every time I get on a plane, take a shower, send emails or watch TV shows on my computer. My carbon emissions, a byproduct of my daily life, arrived here before me. Daisy Hildyard, in her book “The Second Body”, writes about this invisible body that each of us has, which – while we are taking a bath – wreaks havoc in the world.

“In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin – it is supposed to be inviolable […]. You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself – to be whole, to be one. Move away from this personality, self-expression, and you risk going out of your mind, being beside yourself, failing to be true to yourself, hearing other voices, or splitting your personality: it doesn’t sound good. […]. You need boundaries, you have to be either here or there. Don’t be all over the place.”

Hildyard notes that climate change is forcing us to reconceptualize our bodies. The truth is that ours have spread beyond the skin and across the globe: “even the patient who is anaesthetized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeons’ lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on earth.”

Each of us, especially those from the rich Global North, has a second body. I found mine scattered in the mud that reigns instead of snow on Spitsbergen and on an islet exposed by a retreating glacier whose front – where the melting and calving occurs -is grey and jagged.

I found mine, dancing in the North. 

Our great fault?

“What on earth is a carbon footprint?” This question appeared in 2005 on the spreads of major American newspapers. Below it is the answer: “Every person in the world has one. It’s the amount of carbon dioxide emitted due to our daily activities – from washing a load of laundry to driving a carload of kids to school.” And then in a small font you can read the address of a website with a calculator that will help you calculate how much harm you are doing to the Earth. Since then, the idea of a carbon footprint has become part of our everyday life, and calculators that help us calculate it – a tool for measuring individual guilt.

The carbon footprint question and link were not part of a journalistic piece, but an advertisement commissioned by oil company BP as part of its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign.

Almost two decades later, a database Carbon Majors – created by a world-renowned scientist – published a report in April 2024 which shows that as much as 80 percent of greenhouse gases emitted worldwide come from 57 companies. Some of them are state-owned (33 percent of global emissions), some private (also 33 percent). Among the latter, BP is in third place – just behind Shell and ExxonMobil.

The corporation whose $100 million per year advertising campaign has convinced us that it is our fault is responsible for one percent of global emissions. In Jonathan Watts’s piece covering the Carbon Majors report for The Guardian, Richard Heede, the founder of the database, says: “Don’t blame consumers who have been forced to be reliant on oil and gas due to government capture by oil and gas companies.”

When describing the BP campaign Rush rages. She understands that corporations influence – and manipulate – momentous life decisions such as becoming a mother. “Carbon calculators suggest all life should be viewed through the wrapped lens of an extractive economic system where taking is assumed, with no giving, tending, or mending in return”. She herself has spent a lot of time feeling ashamed about wanting to be a mother.

“The real choice we face,” Meehan Crist wrote in her seminal 2020 essay “Is it OK to have a child?” for the London Review of Books, “is not whether to eat meat or how many children to have, but how quickly to make profound and rapid structural changes, without which no personal choice will matter.” She adds that the decision to have children, which for many women, especially in the Global South, is still not a matter of choice, “is not the same as choosing not to have a car or to eat a plant-based diet. Having a child isn’t merely one consumer choice among many.”

Chimeric community

The transformation into a mother is a radical transformation. The size of the foot changes, the composition of the blood changes, even the neural pathways in the brain change. Foetal cells – called chimeric cells – make their way into the mother’s heart, lungs, liver and kidneys. The woman becomes a chimera, a combination of herself and her child. The ego disappears – at least for a while, at least in some areas. The single self grows, expands, encompasses more than one person. Sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes the whole world.

The transformation into a mother is a disappearance and expansion at the same time. Abundance despite scarcity. It is not pleasant. And yet it is.

Becoming a mother also means a new set of values. Crist wrote that “having a child has been a commitment to life, and a commitment to the possibilities of a human future on this warming planet.” Rush speaks of “an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it. […] to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of that change yourself.”

Rush sees change coming through the community. “[…] real climate resilience is something we have either together or not at all,” she writes. And she wonders how the fact that at the end of the world it was possible to create a community of people who are very different but united by a common goal can be transferred to the everyday life of other continents. She contrasts her selflessness, helpfulness and tolerance from the time of the cruise with the aggression that appeared in her at the beginning of the pandemic.

As if she wanted to show that if someone who snaps at the postman for coming too close was able to spend seven weeks building community with strangers with different views, then anything is possible.

And we too – with our weaknesses – can meet in a community that exists despite everything.

Universal Mothering

The image that stays with me from Rush’s book is of a glacier calving. The ice disintegrating – like a woman giving birth.

Motherhood in times of crisis makes us ask questions about responsibility towards future generations. But the radicalism of motherhood lies in everyday details: making breakfast despite being tired, watering the plants and cleaning the kitchen. In small acts of care for the community of humans and non-humans.

Instead of obsessing over how much emissions dinner will cause, can we count the acts of care that support the planet—and the interspecies community? Could we create calculators for fidgeting that changes the world?

In her famous book “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience and Institution”, Adriene Rich wrote: “The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival”.

Can people who mother – children, cats, dogs, turtles, ladybugs, the sick, the healthy, those close to them, those far away – change the world through mothering?

Don’t open, Sesame!

On my last day in Svalbard, I took a taxi to go outside of the city. You can’t leave Longyearbyen’s borders on your own without a gun. The drive is short, and after five minutes the taxi leaves me uphill in the mud, next to a strange building looking like a blade stuck into the mountain. The tall concrete walls are topped by a glass facade. When the sun reflects off it, it sparkles like the Northern Lights.

It’s a real fortress and I won’t enter it today. Nor any other day. All I can do is stand in the mud and look at the double steel doors, behind which lie 642 million seeds protected by permafrost.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built sixteen years ago with one aim in mind: to protect the world’s genetic biodiversity. It’s believed to be the most secure place on Earth: its three chambers can hold up to 2,5 billion seeds and they are placed in permafrost, so even if the electrical cooling system switches off, the seeds are going to be protected at a stable temperature: -6 degrees. 

In 2017, the corridor leading to the vault was flooded with water – it leaked from the outside, from the ground that was supposed to never thaw.

We built a uterus inside of the ground, a uterus that awaits with life. Are we able to protect it?

I feel my son’s leg somewhere close to my liver. I call for a taxi. I want to go home.

Can a new world grow from a puddle? Again?

Editor: Juliusz Kurkiewicz

The Immense Waste – UCLouvain and Women

Autumn 1928. The great feminist author Virginia Woolf is working on two lectures at the University of Cambridge. Theme: women and fiction. This will give rise to the seminal essay “A Room of One’s Own”. To prepare for her lectures, she walks and thinks on the grounds of the English university. A supervisor shows up and makes her leave the grounds that are reserved for male academics only. “In the name of protecting the grounds whose upkeep they passed on to each other for three hundred years, they had scared my little fish away” she writes. This was the nickname she gave to her thought process, which started out as insignificant, but led to research and then result – literary, academic, and scientific.

Caroline Nieberding and Bertanne Visser are Virginia Woolfs. Why do female researchers flee science faculties, academia, and UCLouvain in particular? The two biologists denounce sexism. They demanded “their own laboratories” to work properly and publish results. They cite the names of supervisors (professors, executives) who have been protecting the grounds passed on by their predecessors for 600 years (1). 

The Virginia Woolfs of UCLouvain have been coming and going for decades. The earliest testimony we have is that of Hélène Verougstraete. This Professor Emeritus in art history, employed by UCLouvain from 1973 to 2009, believes she was harassed by a number of colleagues, without ever receiving the support of the rectorate, despite her warnings. Discrimination begins at the very start of an academic career, she points out. “When I asked to bring my course load down to the same level as my colleagues, I was told to give up the course in my specialization rather than other courses. Afterwards, I sensed that rumors were circulating in the corridors, but if I didn’t know what they were, I couldn’t defend myself.” Women leave permanently “traumatized and destabilized” by this sexist spiral that is part of the university machine (2). 

“I sensed that rumors were circulating in the corridors, but if I didn’t know what they were, I couldn’t defend myself.”
– Professor Hélène Verougstraete, more than 20 years before Caroline Nieberding.

Another professor, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes the same process she underwent in the law faculty between 2000 and 2010. Why? “I did not fit into their mold”, she sums up. They are far from alone in this respect. Several times, Hélène Verougstraete wanted to leave the academic world. Only the comfort of living close to her workplace and good relations with her direct colleagues made her stay. When she discovered Caroline Nieberding’s file in 2022, she was struck by the similarity of their backgrounds: what she calls the “profound misogyny” at UCLouvain. “Caroline Nieberding was going through the same thing I was back then”. 

INDIVIDUALISM AND PASSIVITY

In 2021, a witness (university researcher) interviewed by Médor observes an “unhealthy atmosphere” at the Earth and Life Institute (ELI), one of UCLouvain’s largest research institutes (429 members and affiliates), and particularly the ELI-B (for Biodiversity) research cluster. At the time, Caroline Nieberding was a professor in terrestrial ecology, and Bertanne Visser carried out her research under contract with the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS). They are known as the “two witches”. Caroline Nieberding would “kidnap children in a van”. These stories, even as a joke, were related by doctoral students, as well as by administrative and technical staff. As a result, the views of the two biologists’ teams is very negative. 

Caroline Nieberding arrives at UCLouvain in 2008. Owing to her research career at the Universities of Liège and Leiden, she was awarded a professorship at the tender age of 28 years old. In 2016, Bertanne Visser, Dutch and trained in Leiden and Amsterdam, joined Caroline Nieberding’s team for her postdoctoral studies. She soon discovered that male researchers in the ELI-B cluster denigrate Caroline Nieberding in meetings, make her research funding and publications their own and have shorter working hours. Bertanne Visser, who began experiencing the same things, helps her colleague to open her eyes.   

The internal commission of inquiry confirms the physical violence of N.S. One day, this biology professor pulled a female technician by her collar in the middle of the corridor. 

To denounce what she’s going through, Caroline Nieberding starts with the basics: write to the vice rector of staff policy (VRPP), Didier Lambert, who has been a member of the rectoral council since 2010. In a letter dated February 28, 2020, she describes the “general climate of non-recognition, even denigration” of her work. She cites four male colleagues at her institute. One biologist, a full professor, is cited for verbal aggression, surprise shouting matches and derogatory emails. Another full professor, also a biologist, for a hand on the buttocks. An extraordinary emeritus professor, engineer, for taking photos of her in a meeting without her consent. Finally, N. S., a professor like herself, for recurring remarks about her looks, disparaging emails, and barging into her office. Shouldn’t UCLouvain, their employer, as well as hers, react, wouldn’t you think? 

A consultant from FABI (Training, Support, and Well-being) is responsible for identifying problems among members of the ELI-B cluster. She lists: Opportunism, individualism, ordinary sexism. An internal commission of inquiry commissioned to investigate the issue delivers its findings in March 2021. It acknowledged Caroline Nieberding’s “suffering” and the passive attitude and denial of the authorities and colleagues, but believes that the facts of sexism and harassment are not proven, while acknowledging that it is difficult to prove such facts. However, the commission of inquiry’s report confirms several of the behaviors denounced by Caroline Nieberding, including physical violence by professor N.S. towards a female technician who was pulled by the collar in the middle of the corridor (3). This incident was corroborated by a witness. The commission writes that this professor has “a strong personality who often expresses himself vehemently to assert his ideas and disagreements, bordering on the aggressive”. In the investigation report, another male colleague reported by Caroline Nieberding is described by a former doctoral student as belonging “to the ‘very old school’ […], who imagined, like the others, that Caroline, being so young […], would somehow stay in her place”.  

None of these men are facing any disciplinary proceedings to establish the facts in depth. Neither then nor later. On the other hand, the academic authorities, and in this case the vice rector for science and technology Michel Devillers, chose to move the protagonists: the men cited by the commission of inquiry were assigned to a new cluster (ELI-X), while Caroline Nieberding and Bertanne Visser are placed “under the supervision” (4) of the President of the ELI Institute. But they have recently secured funding (5) and their teams are expanding… As a result, they prefer to have laboratory spaces of their own and greater autonomy in the management of budget and space (Virginia Woolf suggested nothing else in 1928). 

Credit @ Laura Ottone

The idea did not go down well with the men at the Institute. In June 2021, when the Institute meets (6), “they came with their presentation, but nobody handed them a microphone. We couldn’t hear them. I asked for one to be given to them, but male colleagues were cutting them off.”, says climatologist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, leader of the IPCC, professor at the ELI Institute (7), and the main male figure to publicly support the two biologists. ‘Months later, we received the meeting’s minutes. Their presentation was missing. I suggested amendments, which were accepted through a very unusual voting procedure. But once again, the amendments were not included in the rectified minutes. This may seem anecdotal. In fact, it illustrates how a power struggle works. Two feminists ask for a safe workplace? The answer is no. Worse still, the Institute’s board appointed N. S. as president of the meetings. He also became director of the new ELI-X (renamed ELI-V) and the School of Biology. The teams of Caroline Nieberding and Bertanne Visser find themselves under the authority of a man whose behavior is recognized as problematic.

EXPEDITED DISMISSAL

The first time we interview Caroline Nieberding and Bertanne Visser, we almost forget to ask them about their scientific research. Caroline Nieberding and her team study butterflies that change color with the seasons and are good models for understanding how climate change is leading to species’ extinction. Bertanne Visser focuses on particularly charming wasps – “nature’s mass murderers” she laughs – that never put on weight, no matter how much sugar they ingest. “On a daily basis, we read, think a lot, and write, which is super important, because publications are the currency of science” continues Bertanne Visser. “A large part of our work also involves obtaining funding to build our labs. It’s all about finding new ways of studying insect adaptation. Caroline is very good at this. She really has the ability to push the boundaries of our research field.”  

“As soon as I walked into his office, Vincent Blondel told me straight out: “You are damaging the reputation of UCLouvain.”
– Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, climatologist

When they ask in 2021 for formal intervention from the occupational health services (managed at UCLouvain by the CESI), they are, above all, trying to work properly in an unsafe working environment. For Bertanne Visser, this requires the use of a mass spectrometer obtained for her team in 2020. The costs of this “nugget”: €87,000 (€65,000 purchase + running costs, public money). The researcher suggests that the machine should be placed temporarily in Gembloux (ULiège), as the staff there are already well trained to use it. UCLouvain opposes this, but Bertanne Visser confirms the placement at Gembloux. Things then move quickly: the University dismissed her for “serious misconduct”. This is despite the CESI’s ongoing internal procedure, which is supposed to protect the employees from reprisals. “Despite the regulations, I was not heard by rector Vincent Blondel. Neither before nor during the dismissal procedure” denounces Bertanne Visser. In the meantime, UCLouvain attributed the machine to another professor, claiming (falsely)(8) in an email to ULiège that this professor was co-promoter on the project of Bertanne Visser. 

According to our information, former rector Vincent Blondel, now a regional deputy and senator for the political party Les Engagés, proposed that the FNRS terminate the contract of Bertanne Visser. The FNRS board of administration refused, deeming the measure disproportionate (9). Following the expedited dismissal, ULiège welcomed Bertanne Visser to Gembloux, financing a new machine in the process and thus saving a woman’s scientific career (10). An exception in this case. 

RETALIATION

Caroline Nieberding now must work without Bertanne Visser, but she has the support of Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, to whom more and more cases of harassment are revealed at UCLouvain. After taking several confidential steps, notably to the president of the University board of administration Jean Hilgers, the climatologist turns to the media at the beginning of 2022. He spoke first to the Flemish press to share some particularly disturbing testimonies about the prevailing sexism. Then, in April of the same year on RTL: “Heads must roll at UCLouvain.” “It took this outburst for me to finally be heard by Vincent Blondel.” notes the climatologist. As soon as I entered his office, he told me straight out: “You’re damaging the reputation of UCLouvain”. “I find this ironic, given that a few weeks earlier, the President of the Federal Republic of Austria, on a state visit to Belgium, preferred to meet me privately at the provincial palace in Wavre rather than at UCLouvain, because the university was associated with sexual harassment scandals.”

During this time, rector Vincent Blondel takes a different media approach: victimization. “For God’s sake, file a complaint!” he implored students and employees that were victims of sexism and gender-based violence in Le Soir in February 2022. He also said that: “The idea that I might be covering up facts is distressing.” These words have left their mark. “It is contrary to all feminist principles,” comments a syndicalist. Vincent Blondel, who victimizes himself by the fact that he couldn’t care less about the victim’s experiences.      

The former rector does not respond

Solicited by email and approached by Médor at the entrance to the Parliament of the Walloon-Brussels Federation, where he has a seat since the June 9 2024 elections, Vincent Blondel refused to comment on the academic mess described here. The former rector is a member of the parliamentary commission dedicated to higher education, which will be holding hearings over the next five years about sexist and sexual violence at universities. Olivier Malay, former president of the scientific staff of UCLouvain, representing non-academic researchers (doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, etc…) believes that one of the major problems of Vincent Blondel’s tenure was his “non-management of gender issues”. “He didn’t want to cause a scandal or upset the research institutes”, he says. “For a long time, they preferred to relocate a victim rather than the aggressor”.  

As the summer of 2022 approaches, tensions are running high at the ELI Institute: internal complaints arise. Without explanation, vice rector Didier Lambert (Doctor of Pharmacy, VRPP since 2019) chose to act on only one complaint: that of another biologist, also a professor, who denounced… Caroline Nieberding. What has she done now? She notified him in writing that she no longer wished to teach alongside him in light of the sexist comments he made to her in the past – “this characterizes what is legally defined as sexual harassment”, she wrote. For this biologist, the statement was false and defamatory despite the fact that it was an email addressed to him alone. He asked her to retract her statement. She did not. He wrote to Didier Lambert. Immediately, the vice rector started disciplinary proceedings against Caroline Nieberding. 

In concrete terms, her job is threatened. She turned to the Labor Court of Walloon Brabant to request suspension of the disciplinary proceedings. Her lawyer, Violaine Alonso, emphasized the unequal treatment she had received over the past two and a half years: “Over the past two and a half years, Caroline Nieberding has been writing to her superiors, including the vice rector, because her situation is getting worse and worse. But when a male colleague wrote through the same channel, the reaction was immediate.” In her complaint to the court “en referee”, Violaine Alonso asked the Walloon Brabant judge to rule on “moral harassment” and violence in the workplace towards Caroline Nieberding, as well as on the behavior of UCLouvain, which has a duty to ensure the well-being of its employees and to prevent harassment in the workplace. 

On October 7, 2022, the Walloon Brabant court ruled in favor of Caroline Nieberding. Violence in the workplace was accepted, but not harassment. The judgement ordered the cancellation of the disciplinary proceedings. It also pointed out that the ELI Institute did not implement psychosocial risk analysis, and that staff had not been trained to manage it properly. UCLouvain must do more to protect Caroline Nieberding in the workplace, demands the court. 

SEVEN MONTHS OF DISCREDITATION

Relief. A sense of justice. Breathing. Believe it. But no. Not at all. On the spot, UCLouvain announces that it will appeal against the verdict. However, inside voices are urging the opposite: acknowledge the suffering, apologize, make amends. But the image of the institution appears essential in the eyes of its leaders.    

While awaiting the appeal decision, an anti-feminist portrait of Caroline Nieberding is widespread in Louvain-la-Neuve – and it has not disappeared since. “There’s been a lot of talk about her not being a ‘good victim’. The image of a dragon, an annoying woman, problematic at work, recounts a member of the scientific staff. This is the logical continuation of the strategy of discrediting her that began at the labour court in September.” In Wavre, UCLouvain’s lawyer Carine Doutrelepont, spent 90 minutes describing her as a complicated woman, an opportunist who took the path of harassment “to achieve what she had otherwise failed to do”. Her word could, therefore, have no value. 

“If Caroline Nieberding doesn’t come back to work soon, her career is pretty much over  […]. The university knows that very well”
– Lawyer Violaine Alonso 

Credit @ Laura Ottone

As the 2022-2023 academic year is dedicated to respect and fight “against all forms of harassment and gender violence” (11), a few weeks after the 7 October court ruling, biology students were sent a Google form. It was badly written and ill-intentioned: “What do you think of the repercussions of Nieberding’s case with her work at UCLouvain (professor, promoter)?”. The questionnaire was created by students, but according to extracts from written conversations that we could read, it was created at the request of Pascal Lambrechts, Dean of the Faculty of Science. Numerous voices took offense to this survey and emphasized Caroline Nieberding’s qualities. The Tulkens Committee, which at the time was evaluating the measures in place to combat harassment and gender-based violence at UCLouvain – we will come back to this later -, writes to the rectorate and to the University Board of Administration to denounce this “serious misconduct”, which could be interpreted “as a measure of reprisal or retaliation […], which is formally and expressly prohibited by the Belgian Code of Wellbeing at Work”. 

Then, in March 2023, the atmosphere within ELI became even more charged. Two climate-controlled machines used for rearing insects, paid for with public money (12) and used by Caroline Nieberding’s laboratory, were damaged. The biologist called for an internal investigation, which was carried out, but no complaint was lodged. The damage to the equipment remains unexplained. It prevented any research from being carried out in the field. In April 2023, all hell broke loose: UCLouvain obtained a reversal of the judgment against it at first instance. The judge ruled that “the analysis of the case file […] does not lead to the conclusion or presumption that Professor Nieberding was the victim of moral harassment or violence in the workplace by UCLouvain”. The institution saves its reputation by crushing a professor. On sick leave, she has not returned to work for a year and a half. “If Caroline Nieberding doesn’t come back to work soon, her career is pretty much over”, worries Violaine Alonso, her lawyer. “Not publishing is catastrophic for her. The university is well aware of this. And yet there is no movement within the new rectorate to remedy this, to say: ‘We’re losing a professor, let’s do something about it’.” The lawyer and her client feel that they are trying to identify avenues for negotiation, but the two parties do not agree – and meanwhile, the university is advertising for a position that is eerily similar to that of the biologist. 

Waste or premeditated liquidation? According to two eyewitness accounts, the President of the ELI Institute, Marnik Vanclooster, announced in 2021 that Caroline Nieberding’s career at UCLouvain was over. She was already gradually being ejected from the university. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele also sees reprisals being taken against him for his role as whistleblower. He particularly cites the lack of any real support from the rectorate for his application for the presidency of the IPCC in 2023, despite the fact that UCLouvain had benefited from the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize received by the climate scientists’ group in 2007, when he was a member of its executive board. Recently, he was “forced to move to another institute within UCLouvain to continue his work for the IPCC”.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele: sidelined from the Louvain-la-Neuve campus, even though his position is funded by the Walloon government. Bertanne Visser: rescued at the last minute by Uliège. Caroline Nieberding: devastated and disgusted. 

The Nieberding and Visser ‘files’ are not isolated cases. An ongoing investigation by the Walloon Brabant labor auditor’s office has been dealing with about ten individual complaints.

Since spring 2022, the Walloon Brabant labor auditor’s office has been worried about the way in which UCLouvain handles complaints it receives from staff – both women and men. An investigation based on ten individual complaints (13) should be completed by the end of 2024 or early 2025. If the charges are sufficient, the case will be referred to the magistrates’ court or the criminal court. UCLouvain refuses to comment about this investigation by the labor auditor’s office, for which the rectoral authorities have been auditioned by the police. The university (14) also refuses to position itself about the cases of Bertanne Visser and Caroline Nieberding. “UCLouvain will refrain from any comment on individual cases to respect the people involved”, is the systemic answer we get from the institution, since “some of these cases are currently at court”. Bertanne Visser is awaiting a judgement in first instance for her potentially abusive firing. Caroline Nieberding will be at the cassation court in 2025. 

Today, while women are in the majority as students (55%), they disappear at the doctoral level. At the full professor level, UCLouvain has only 18% women. The institution has not yet produced any studies to analyze the correlation between this free fall of women throughout their career and sexist and sexual violence in the university environment, which is finally being acknowledged and expressed. But one thing is certain: “Universities are losing a great deal of potential because of sexism. Training female researchers is very expensive. It’s a scientific, academic waste, and therefore the societal waste is immense”, warns Françoise Tulkens, one of the many witnesses interviewed for this article, Professor Emeritus at UCLouvain and former judge at the European Court of Human Rights. 

144 RECOMMENDATIONS AND FEW CERTAINTIES

 In 2022, Rector Vincent Blondel commissioned this well-known figure to chair a commission of experts to evaluate the measures in place to combat harassment and gender-based violence at UCLouvain. This ‘Tulkens’ committee made 144 very specific recommendations to the rectorate of UCLouvain to eliminate gender-based violence from this six hundred years old Catholic university. The 144 points follow the logic of the ‘3Ps’ of the Istanbul Convention: prevention, protection, prosecution. In practical terms, this means building an environment conducive to the emergence of whistleblowers, protecting whistleblowers and amend disciplinary regulations to punish those responsible.

But what is UCLouvain doing with this report? In early November 2024, we asked Marthe Nyssens (pro-rector of transition and society, PhD in social economics), Florence Stinglhamber (vice-rector for Personnel Policy, PhD in Psychology) and Sébastien Van Drooghenbroeck (pro-rector of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, PhD in law). All three indicated that a new disciplinary regulation dedicated to gender-based and sexual violence should be in place by September 2025. This will be two years after the report that suggested it. 

The current rectorate has announced an extension of the statute of limitations for internal complaints. Today, the much-criticized rule limits it to six months. “As for the Together platform, which is used to report incidents of harassment or sexual and gender-based violence, it has been reformed (15). We recorded 49 reports, which led to 6 formal complaints, 2 warnings and 1 dismissal”, says Marthe Nyssens. 

Last, Florence Stinglhamber assures us that she deals correctly with every complaint that arrives in her mailbox from an employee looking for support. Does she work differently than her predecessor, Didier Lambert? She doesn’t know. In fact, she answers “no” when asked if her work is controlled. Trust, then. A nice word. On the other hand, despite its insistence on ‘the suffering of victims of sexual and gender-based violence’, UCLouvain has nothing to say about the academic careers already damaged by the prevailing sexism. No proposal for reparation.

While awaiting the outcome of her action, Caroline Nieberding says she only wants one thing: to be able to carry out her work “under the same conditions” as her colleagues, “without humiliations”. Will the institution help her to put her ‘little fish’ back in the water, and get her research back on track?

Testimonies and responses

To help us continue investigating power struggles, gender-based and sexual violence (SGBV) and the “micro”-aggressions that hinder academic careers, at UCLouvain and elsewhere: [email protected]

Anonymity guaranteed.

References:

Further Credits: Laura Ottone, visual author