Universities should rethink bans on working with academics in Israel and Russia as growing isolationism is increasingly holding back scientific progress, a university president has argued.

Highlighting a growing list of countries with whom universities have cut ties, Sibrandes Poppema, president of Malaysia’s Sunway University, told delegates at ����Vlog’s World Academic Summit in Cape Town that he worried this trend is increasingly affecting research.

“It’s wrong for universities to stop collaborating with other universities…[It is] wrong to stop collaborating with Israel and wrong to have stopped collaborating with Russia,” said Poppema, who previously led the University of Groningen in the Netherlands for a decade up to 2018 before taking over at the privately owned university near Kuala Lumpur in 2021.

“That’s not what universities should be doing,” said Poppema, explaining that the mission of universities is to “collaborate with each other, and give also opportunities to young people from those countries to actually meet…Otherwise we’re not going to achieve a better world.”

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“It’s getting worse and worse because there is now a very long list for American universities not to collaborate [which also includes] Chinese universities…and it does not make sense,” continued Poppema.

Poppema’s comments come amid growing tension between the US and China over research into “dual use” technology in universities that the White House claims represent a national security threat. Similar concerns over China have also been expressed in the UK and Europe.

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Declining collaboration with China was now starting to be seen in global publication rates, said Poppema. “The number of publications has gone up dramatically [in recent years], but the percentage of [Chinese] publications that are international collaborations is now just 16 per cent. So it has gone down to low levels and now it’s gone down further,” he said.

“These are all things that are very wrong, and all of them are politically motivated. As universities, we have to fight against this,” added Poppema.

Several universities across Europe have also withdrawn from partnerships with Israeli universities amid concerns over the death toll in Gaza following the 7 October massacre, while sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remain widespread.

Poppema made his remarks on the same day as Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences urged universities to cut research ties with Russia after a drone strike on its Kyiv headquarters killed at least two people.

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Bjørn Thomassen, acting pro rector at Roskilde University in Denmark, said universities should actively reconsider their collaborations when geopolitics shift.

“Sometimes collaborations just die out and sometimes, in a particular moment, collaborations do not make sense when the desired outcomes and shared values are not there – that’s OK too,” said Thomassen.

Minna Suutari, vice-president for research and development at LAB University of Applied Sciences in Finland, said geopolitics had profoundly affected the institution’s research strategy, although Finland had been able to lean into European Union sources of funding.

“When Russia started the brutal war in Ukraine, we totally stopped overnight all the collaboration we have been doing with Russian universities, and there were European funding programmes committed to [facilitating] that,” she told the summit, which is being hosted by the University of Cape Town in association with the University of Bristol.

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“If we didn’t have other strategies [to find other institutions] with whom to collaborate, that would have caused us quite a lot of problems…in continuing with those things that we had been doing research on and creating value in our societies,” she said.

“Geopolitical adaptation these days means that you have to have a rather vast portfolio” of collaborations, Suutari added.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com