Senate majority for resignation
TU President Geraldine Rauch wants to remain in office
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After her digital applause for anti-Semitic posts, the Senate of the TU Berlin gave the university president an ultimatum. In an internal vote, the committee narrowly voted for her resignation. But it's just a mood picture. And so Rauch decides to remain in office.
The President of the Technical University of Berlin, Geraldine Rauch, wants to remain in office – although a narrow majority of the university's Academic Senate has voted for her resignation. “I have received many calls and statements asking me to stay. I am not resigning,” said the 41-year-old. According to the information provided by the committee, 13 members were in favor of resignation and 12 were against it. However, the vote is not binding. The Academic Senate has not submitted a motion to be voted out, said the mathematician.
The case reached the Bundestag in the morning. In the debate on internal security, CDU leader Friedrich Merz discussed the case. His team wrote on X: “If anti-Semitism is to have no place in Germany, then TU President Rauch must resign.” In parliament, however, he spoke of the “President of the Technical University of Berlin, Professor Geraldine Rauch, who has not yet resigned.” He called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz to exclude the 41-year-old from the Future Council in the Federal Chancellery of the Federal Republic of Germany by this weekend at the latest.
Rauch has been criticized for liking anti-Semitic posts on the X platform. In particular, there was a post with photos of demonstrators holding up a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a painted swastika.
After strong criticism from his own university and from Berlin's Science Senator Ina Czyborra, Rauch published a statement about it. In it she wrote that she wanted to “clearly distance herself” from the anti-Semitic content or authors of the tweets. She liked the post, especially because of the text, but didn't take a closer look at the picture. She is said to have placed further likes under comments in which users spoke of the genocide in the Gaza Strip or attributed war crimes to Israel. The author of the tweet states that the images show Turkish demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
