Students studying psych? That is weird. Forgive me if I'm being ignorant about the college, but do they teach anything other than psych and nuclear technology? Error in translation maybe? Still weird.

Posted by: nyone at January 3, 2008 8:19 PM

A Huizinga moment.

Posted by: Hugh at January 3, 2008 8:34 PM

Maybe Europe has learned a lesson from AQKahn?

Posted by: CLL1709 at January 3, 2008 8:51 PM

For the Dutch it is a case of once bitten , twice shy. After A.Q. Khan worked in a dutch nuclear lab and stole enriching plans they won't trust another Islamic again in such a sensitive field.

Posted by: purplemarbles at January 3, 2008 10:24 PM

This is great news, that at least one Western nation was able to take direct steps specifically against Islam and the threat of Islamic violence.

Posted by: special_guest at January 4, 2008 1:38 AM

Hugh, is that "The Sweetest Sounds" of Ilse Huizinga, or the sweet sound of 2000 Olympic Judo gold medal winner Mark Huizinga's opponent hitting the mat?

Posted by: special_guest at January 4, 2008 1:49 AM

"The university's decision is the direct result of a 2006 UN resolution calling on member states to prevent Iran from gaining access to nuclear knowledge."

....so sad none of the other UN members are doing anything to enforce the resolution....

....Muslims generally laugh at UN resolutions....maybe now a few eyebrows are raising...on both sides of the fence.....

Posted by: exsgtbrown at January 4, 2008 6:40 AM

It's about time someone gets smart enough to make use of all those rules the UN keeps coming up with.
Now if someone would make good use of the Hate speech against religion.
Say what the Muslims say about the Jews?

Posted by: Aunt Bea at January 4, 2008 7:03 AM

Is it my imagination or are the Dutch starting to wake up?

Posted by: tanstaafl at January 4, 2008 11:59 AM

If the same university forbids Israeli students and scholars, there will be no protest of discrimination from the Left.

Posted by: CTYankee at January 4, 2008 12:29 PM

Rather too late. I seem to remember the Dutch allowed the "Father of the Pakistani Bomb" take away everything he needed when he was working for them.

Posted by: Fred at January 4, 2008 1:18 PM

Kudos to the Dutch. Keep up the good work!

Posted by: US_infidel at January 4, 2008 1:18 PM

"a Huizinga moment"
-- my posting above

"...is that "The Sweetest Sounds" of Ilse Huizinga, or the sweet sound of 2000 Olympic Judo gold medal winner Mark Huizinga's opponent hitting the mat?"
-- from a poster above, asking about my posting

The Huizinga in question is neither the winsome singer nor the winning wrestler, but rather Johan Huizinga, the celebrated Dutch historian (his only rival 20th century rival was Pieter Geyl). When a delegation of Nazis arrived at the University of Leiden in 1933, a delegation that included the future war criminal Johannes von Leer (already a great admirer of Islam, and after the war, given a high post in Egyptian security by Nasser, a convert to Islam) intent on spreading Hitlerian propaganda for the new German government, Huizinga denounced them, would have nothing to do with them, blocked them. This enraged the Germans, and German historians proceeded dutifully to denounce Huizinga and express regret that they had ever published his works. That was the original "Huizinga moment."

Huizinga’s best-known works (outside specialist works on Dutch history) are The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), which dealt with Burgundy in the 14th and 15th centuries, Erasmus (1924), a biography of the Dutch scholar, and Homo Ludens (1938), about the play-element in Western culture.

Here is something more that I have lifted from an article on Huizinga:

"When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms and was in accord with the solemnity of marriage, death - by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events - a journey, labor, a visit - were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings, and conventions." (from The Autumn of the Middle Ages)

Johan Huizinga was born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth. Huizinga attended the municipal Gymnasium and entered in 1891 the university, earning his degree in Indo-Germanic languages in 1895. Huizinga then studied comparative linguistics at the University of Leipzig, and after returning from Germany he earned in 1897 his Ph.D. Huizinga's dissertation dealt with the clown figure in Sanskrit drama. His early interest was history, but at the gymnasium his teachers had been so poor, that he changed into linguistics. During the following years he taught history at a secondary school in Harlem and lectured in 1903-05 on ancient history at the University of Amsterdam. In 1905 he became professor of history at Groningen. After the death of his first wife, Mary Vincentia Schorer (1877-1914), he moved from Groningen to Leiden, where he was appointed in 1915 professor of general history at the university.

From 1916 to 1932 Huizinga was an editor of the periodical De Gids. He traveled in the United States in 1926, but he had already published a study on the national characteristics of the country, Mensch en menigte in America (1918). The journey produced Amerika Levend en Denkend (1926). In 1938 Huizinga became vice-president of the International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation with the League of Nations. Alarmed by the rise of fascism and cultural crisis Huizinga wrote In de schaduwen van morgen (1935), which his son Jacob Herman Huizinga translated into English under the title In the Shadow of Tomorrow.

In 1937 Huizinga married Auguste Schölvinck, 37 years his junior. After the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, the University of Leiden was closed. In 1941 Huizinga gave a speech in which he criticized German influence on Dutch science and he was arrested by the Nazis. Huizinga was released in 1942 but not allowed to return to Leiden. Huizinga died in detention at De Steeg in Gerderland, near Arnheim, on February 1, 1945, just a few months before the end of the war.
In his inaugural lecture at Groningen Huizinga had supported the view, that historical knowledge is essentially aesthetic, intuitive, and subjective. This approach was fully developed in Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (The Autumn of the Middle Ages), a nostalgic views of the the past world, which he wrote for both the wide public and specialists. Dutch historians received the work coolly but abroad it became a success and was soon translated into English and other languages. The study was inspired by an exhibition of early Netherlandic painting, which Huizinga saw in 1902 in Bruges. It aroused his life-long interest in the Middle Ages. The Autumn of the Middle Ages, written in poetic style, portrays vividly the age through contradictions - after witch hunts were finished in the city of Arras, people celebrated it by arranging a competition in moral tales (folies moralisées), and at the same time when religious thinking and fanaticism dominated everyday life, church services and the clergy were mocked. Monks cursed and prostitutes made deals inside church buildings. On the other hand, the poetic concept of love was an essential part of chivalry. "In no other epoch did the ideal of civilisation amalgamate to such a degree with that of love," Huizinga wrote.

Homo Ludens examined the role of play in law, war, science, poetry, philosophy, and art. Huizinga saw the instinct for play as the central element in human culture - all human activities are playing: "Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play." Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century was a collection of essays. In 'My Path to History,' which was first published in Dutch in 1947, Huizinga described his his early fascination with history, his studies and the genesis of The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Although the title of the book paralleled processes in nature, fruition and decline with culture, Huizinga did not believe that history follows certain cyclic pattern exemplified in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918-1922), or could be understood through Darwinist concepts. He emphasized intuitive understanding, regarding history essentially as a form of mental activity in which a culture views its past. For the modern technological world Huizinga had a strong dislike, and he claimed that educated people in the times of Macaulay (1800-59) and Ranke (1795-1886) understood history better than his contemporaries.”

So that is what I call “the Huizinga moment.”

I don’t mean to compare the mental make-up of Geert Wilders with that of Johan Huizinga. But the way in which Huizinga so implacably stood up to the Nazis at Leiden in 1933, and then much later, in 1941, with German soldiers strutting through Occuped Netherlands, dared to attack them, come to mind when one considers the enormous risks that Geert Wilders is now taking, as he warns about the meaning, and menace of Islam, just as, before him, in the Netherlands, did Pim Fortuyn, and Theo van Gogh, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The first two were murdered; Ayaan Hirsi Ali now lives in Washington.

Posted by: Hugh at January 4, 2008 3:48 PM

I recall Huizinga's book being titled The Waning of the Middle Ages.

Probably the best history book I've ever read...

Posted by: jsla at January 4, 2008 5:09 PM

"Iranians who want to study psychology would also be rejected." Hmm. I wonder what that's all about.

Robert, I think it is most likely, simply to wash the University's hands of responsibility.

After all,

A spokesperson says students are free to wander around the campus, and 24/7 surveillance would be impossible.

Perhaps if we give them the benefit of a considerable doubt, it could be for the sake of absolute certainty that the Iranians have no access to physics course materials. But these are academic types, so ...

But I can easily visualize a university president or dean saying, "To hell with the lot of them. Let them educate themselves. I wash my hands of it."

Posted by: joeblough at January 4, 2008 6:51 PM

"The Waning of the Middle Ages" is another title that was used for the same book I identified above as "The Autumn of the Middle Ages."

He, was, incidentally, a correspondent with the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, author of, inter alia, "Mohammad and Charlemagne." In those pro-seminars for first year graduate students in history, where side by side with good stuff junk is also force-fed the young (in that "introduction-to-all-the-different-approaches-and-schools" gallimaufry that is fed students by faculty members incapable of saying such-and-such an ingredient in this particular stew simply won't do), the ghost of Pirenne may still be seen in the "Pirenne thesis" (and the answers to it, beginning with that of Robert Lopez). It might be better to include some of the Pirenne-Huizinga correspondence; there's a single sentence it it, I'm not sure by whom or how it now goes -- that might do a lot of good.

Posted by: Hugh at January 4, 2008 6:56 PM

Found it by googling:

Pirenne, in one of the last letters he ever wrote to Huizinga (1931): 'Il y a, en somme, plusieurs vérités pour une même chose : c’est un peu, comme en peinture, une question d’éclairage. L’essentiel est de faire réfléchir.'"

Translation:

There are, in sum, several realities about the same thing: it's somewhat akin to the situation in painting, a question of lighting. The essential thing is to ensure reflection." (the pun on "reflechir" has been preserved)

Posted by: Hugh at January 4, 2008 7:04 PM