The peaceful protest by students and pro-Ukraine activists against the conference ‘Russophilia, Russophobia, Truth’, organised by the ANPI and hosted by the University of Naples Federico II, has turned a university event into a political and cultural case that goes beyond Naples. But in the querelle there is one absence more eloquent than the others: that of the university as an institution.

Why does a major Italian public university deem it acceptable to put its space and symbolic dignity at the service of an event that, in fact, proposes an indulgent – when not openly justificationist – reading of Putinism, i.e. the invasion of Ukraine and the most serious attack on the European order since the post-war period?

Academic freedom is not a free pass. It does not coincide with granting lecture halls and institutional stamps without regard for context, balance of voices, cultural responsibility. A university is not a hotel lecture hall: it is an institution that selects, legitimises, orients public debate. That it hosts uncomfortable opinions is physiological; that it suspends judgement on facts is not.

In times of war – and of hybrid and informative warfare – the duty of a university becomes more stringent: to distinguish between analysis and propaganda, to defend the method against the disinformation that creeps in with increasing effectiveness. To equate fabricated narratives and well-founded reconstructions is not open-mindedness, but intellectual abdication. Relativism, when it concerns an armed aggression in progress, is not neutrality: it is a form of passive complicity.

The real stone summoner is Rector Matteo Lorito. So far, Lorito has not felt the need to explain anything. This is probably a choice. But the lack of a public word – on why the event was hosted without a credible cross-examination and why so many students perceived it as a propaganda smear – gives the university the image of a container that retreats just when reality demands clarity.

The problem is not the protest, and perhaps not even the conference. The problem is the institution that opened the door to that approach and today prefers not to take ownership of it. The problem is, quite simply, silence: a renunciation of the public role of the university, reduced to logistics, not leadership.

If the Federico II wishes to remain a garrison of critical thought – and not a laboratory of moral ambiguity – those who govern it must say so clearly. Because on war, freedom and imperial aggression there are no credible grey areas. And when the university renounces calling a spade a spade, it ends up protecting only those who already have a ready-made narrative.