As universities across the country open the academic year in festive fashion on Monday afternoon, “dark clouds” are also gathering, notes Caspar van den Berg, president of Universities Netherlands (UNL), the umbrella association for national academic institutions.
On Monday morning, Van den Berg will be one of the speakers at the “alternative opening of the academic year” in Utrecht, organised by eleven trade unions and organisations from the academic world, under the motto “Cabinet tears down higher education”.
About the author
George van Hal is scientific editor of from Volkskrant.
Later that day, he will be in the audience at one of the royal openings at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Eppo Bruins, will also appear. “We will certainly discuss his plans there,” he says.
These are the three challenges that the university world will face in the next academic year.
1. Major cuts
Approximately one billion euros. This is what the new cabinet has announced as cuts in education and research, through a colourful collection of points in the main lines agreement. “And all those cuts interact with each other,” says Van den Berg. “Nobody knows what consequences that will have.”
How exactly the cuts will be distributed will only become clear on Budget Day on 17 September. There are certain to be significant blows. ‘The Minister has signed off on this financial annex. What remains for him is how exactly to implement it,’ says Van den Berg. ‘Whether he does it very abruptly or gradually, for example. We have expressed our concerns to him. We hope he will limit the damage.’
Annelien Bredenoord, chairwoman of the executive board of Erasmus University, is also concerned. ‘The previous cabinet invested more than a billion euros. This was a much-needed repair of the financial deficits that had built up over the past fifteen years. Not only did we get that money, but it was all divided into specific funds with strict conditions. We have set up committees, hired researchers, made plans and now that everything is done, the new cabinet says: and now we stop again. This is disastrous for the foundation of the universities, for the morale of our employees and for the future of our research.’
Van den Berg fears that at least five thousand jobs will be lost in total. ‘These cuts affect the future of our young people, the economic prosperity of the Netherlands and the international standing of our science. We have also informed the Ministry of this.’
2. Limit the influx of international students and cut back on English-language education
The organisational structure of education is also under pressure. This is partly due to the ‘Balanced Internationalisation Act’ proposed by the previous government, which advocates reducing English-language education at the undergraduate level and limiting the influx of international students.
“We are not blind to the pressure that increasing numbers of international students are putting on our university education,” says Van den Berg. The number of students from outside the border has risen sharply in recent years, to around 15 percent. This figure is higher than in most other countries, the Rathenau Institute wrote in an analysis earlier this year.
The law, which is still to be voted on in the House of Representatives, aims, among other things, to introduce a so-called “foreign language teaching test”, which sets strict conditions for training in a language other than Dutch. “We expect that some courses will not meet the strict conditions and will have to be discontinued,” says Van den Berg.
The current Cabinet has already outlined this measure in the financial annex to the general agreement: the introduction of the law should bring in around 293 million euros. ‘It is then said that the training courses will be checked very carefully and with regard to their content, but in the meantime the result has already been determined: savings of hundreds of millions. This is, of course, uneven,’ says Van den Berg.
Bredenoord points out that these measures and cuts reinforce each other. ‘For example, this law will further reduce training courses. And what most people don’t know: it is Dutch students who benefit most from international education. This is also evident from independent research.’
You see, top scientists are hesitant to come to the Netherlands. “What can be torn down in a year will soon take a generation to rebuild.”
3. Polarization and threat of student protests
The increased polarisation in society is also spreading to the academic world, from student protests that even led to police intervention at the University of Amsterdam to student associations that have close ties to far-right clubs.
Administrators are therefore grappling with the question of how to maintain universities as places where open debate and exchange of ideas take place.
According to Bredenoord, it is a good thing that society is going to university more often. But it also poses difficult moral dilemmas. How can political events, emotions surrounding international conflicts and ideological contradictions be combined with the academic freedom that we always put first?
Bredenoord, who is also a professor of ethics, is also pleased about this: “It is really ethics in practice. We are now investigating what all this means, for example for our relations with institutions in countries that violate human rights, with which we simply no longer want to cooperate.”
