At this very moment, you can watch a live stream of the occupation of the Central Building of the University of Amsterdam. This is in fact the second building that students have been occupying: in the last ten days, they occupied another historical university building, the Bungehuis, which will be turned into a posh hotel. That building was occupied for 10 days, but was forcefully evacuated yesterday; 46 people have been arrested.
The demands of the students can be found (if and when their website is not down) at this website. Basically they want to have a more democratically run university – with a university board that is elected by both staff and students (right now, Dutch Faculty and students have only very weak and indirect democratic power.) In addition, they are protesting what you could call the increasingly utilitarian or economistic approach to higher education and science policy. I can’t give you all the details in this post, but the story is familiar, and sounds quite similar to what has been happening in the UK (my hunch is that the Netherlands is following the UK’s path, with a few years time lag).
The members of the University of Amsterdam’s Board spoke to the occupiers about an hour ago – and it was quite surreal to be able to watch this form of direct action/civil disobedience at the same time from that close yet from far away (I am simply at home in another town). Yet the board of the university has filed a legal complaint, and the latest news would be that the Maagdenhuis-building could be evacuated in the next hour. In which case, you may be able to see it on the live stream. Who knows.
Amsterdam being Amsterdam, most of the discussions are held in English, so you can simply follow this real-life political drama right now. For your information, it’s 11.30 pm when I’m posting this and the occupation started at about 8 pm.
{ 34 comments }
Anderson 02.25.15 at 10:26 pm
“Amsterdam being Amsterdam, most of the discussions are held in English”
Seriously, why is that? To get more attention outside the country?
Ingrid Robeyns 02.25.15 at 10:30 pm
because we have many English-language programs and scholars at Dutch Universities. I guess about half of my teaching in the country has been in English, half in Dutch. And 90% of my research in English.
Anderson 02.25.15 at 10:34 pm
Ah, got it. Thanks!
Ingrid Robeyns 02.26.15 at 7:28 am
Update: the Maagdenhuis is not evacuated yet. The question now is if and how the students will get their demands on the political agenda. In my view, many of these demands are ultimately reducible to causes in national Higher Education and Science policies (such as the change of the law in the 1980s that made the governance structure of the universities non-democratic, or the steady decrease in funding which via various mechanisms has affected the quality of the teaching (in addition to, I would add, the ultimate quality of the research, but (a) I have no evidence for this, and (b) thats not something the students are interested in).
Probably a good way to understand these student protest is to see them as politicizing this conversation, which until now was mainly conducted by polite, extremely self disciplined and often (over-)diplomatic scholars who saw these changes happening. There are probably lessons to be drawn here about the effectiveness of different forms of activism, as well as about the potential complimentarities of different forms of activism.
Vasilis Vassalos 02.26.15 at 8:03 am
“Basically they want to have a more democratically run university – with a university board that is elected by both staff and students (right now, Dutch Faculty and students have only very weak and indirect democratic power.)”
If this off-topic please feel free to tell me and/or ignore, but I really would like you (and anyone else who’s interested) to expand on what you would consider democratic or undemocratic about the running of the university and whether being democratic according to your definition is a good thing or not for running a university.
To lay out my biases: State-run Greek universities (the only kind allowed by the Greek constitution) since the 1980’s have been run by faculty and students (and to a lesser extent staff), through elections of all positions of authority: Rector, Department Head, Dean (whenever/wherever the post exists/existed), etc. (There was no external Governing Board or other such). The students voted with a ~40% weight of the total vote for all these positions. The Faculty Senate had broad authority and was comprised of members either selected by the faculty directly or ex officio (such as Department Heads). This has been, by most accounts, a horrible way to run universities: all Greek universities are poorly run, running the gamut from simply incompetent to criminal to horrible. To be fair, University heads are not the only reason, as the Ministry of Education has the power of the purse and various other powers that it exercises to variously hamstring or derail University initiatives or to impose new, unenforceable or damaging regulations. But still, University “leadership” as selected through the Greek model is very problematic.
I don’t want to go into the possible cultural and institutional reasons this model has been such a failure but I am intrigued by its implicit mention by the OP and its possible association with democracy, presumably giving it a positive sign.
There are many ways to ascribe the word democratic to a management structure. Also, there are many objectives for choosing a management structure. The main objective for an organization, as opposed to a society, is that the organization must satisfy the needs for which it was chartered. In the case of the (state-run) university, the mandate is provided by (democratic) society, in whose name the university operates. So, I find it problematic to imply that the leadership that society (through its representatives in the elected government or though Citizen Society organizations or what have you) puts in the head of the university is somehow undemocratic, and what is democratic is to have that leadership be decided exclusively or primarily by only a small subset of stakeholders of the university enterprise, namely current students, professors and staff. Even if we grant such a definition of democratic, I question whether that mode of organization has any benefits for achieving the university’s goals and ultimately for the democratic polity that chartered it (and pays for it). I can expand on reasons why it doesn’t.
Of course, not giving any voice to some stakeholders (e.g. current students) is also problematic. But selecting a Rector by vote, for example, which could be deemed by some definition very democratic, is a predictable disaster.
Ben 02.26.15 at 9:43 am
Who pays for the university? Who pays for tuition? Who pays for research?
Serious question.
reason 02.26.15 at 9:49 am
This sort of thing happened when I was going to university, and I’m nearing retirement age. Will 2018 end up being an echo of 1968?
reason 02.26.15 at 9:51 am
Ben @6
It is a pretty stupid and irrelevant question actually. You may be asking it seriously, but
1. Students are not slaves (and nor are employees for that matter)
2. Funding comes from a variety of sources lots of which students will eventually contribute to (for future generations).
Ben 02.26.15 at 10:10 am
reason @8, normally asking questions is only considered stupid if you already know the answer. And, if you think the question of “who pays” is irrelevant to the question of “who controls” your notions are strange indeed.
1) students are not slaves: What does that have to do with anything? I was asking if they are customers.
2) The funding rules can be changed between now and “eventually” which implies that incentives may not be well aligned. In any case the detail matters greatly of what exactly the “variety of sources” are.
Zamfir 02.26.15 at 12:14 pm
Student pay 1900 euro tuition each year (with some variations), other money comes mostly from the government through various mechanisms. Some fairly fixed, some based on student numbers, some through NSF-style research grants. Universities have some leeway to direct money towards departments, so money based on large student numbers in one place might be partially used to pay for small fields elsewhere. If I am not mistaken, part of the current protests derive from such small fields as the UvA is diverting money more towards studies with larger student numbers. Or at least, is not cutting those as hard.
Universities derive some money from research in cooperation with companies etc, but this is not a dominant income stream with a few exceptions. Medical departments have their own (large) income streams, in association with local academic hospitals. I don’t think donations count for much, but there might be exceptions there as well.
In the first years, students receive a government stipend based on their parents’ income. This can cover the tuition plus some living expenses on one end, but tapers off for higher parental incomes. Many students will receive no stipend in 2015. That’s a change: until this year, there was a basic stipend for all students. The stipend becomes a loan if the student does not graduate.
All students can borrow from the government. The minimum repayment schedule is based on income. If that income stays (very) low for 35 years, the remainder of the debt is cancelled. This used to be 15 years, so the stipend/loan program is squeezed here as well. I think Ingrid refers to this trend when she says the Netherlands are following the UK with a lag. People expect tuition increases in the future.
Ingrid Robeyns 02.26.15 at 2:04 pm
Thanks Zamfir!
one additional issue is that student numbers have gone up considerably over the last decades, especially in the social sciences and humanities, without an proportionate increase in university funding. And I’ve heard from one Dutch Rector Magnificus recently that for various reasons the natural sciences in the humanities have much more funding and many more sources to tap money from than the humanities and social sciences.
There was an elaborate new “Vision” on science policy published by the government in November, and the government acknowledges that Dutch universities deliver very high quality given the amount of money they get. The government also acknowledges that public funding is (a) lower than in other comparable countries, (b) will not increase, and (c) that those other countries will increase their investment in the sciences/university budgets in the years to come. And what conclusion does the Dutch Governemnt draw from this? Not that they will return to the previous higher levels of funding, but rather that we will have to get the money somewhere else, that is, from companies. Well, companies may be interested in funding research for a plant-based alternative to meat, but they will not study research on climate justice or on virtue ethics. This is part of the increased instrumental and economistic (some prefer the word ‘neoliberal’) approach to Higher education and science policies that the students are objecting to.
reason 02.26.15 at 3:05 pm
Ben
“who has a say”, and “who controls” are surely quite different things. If the payer was singular, then what his(/her) decision to continue funding would be a strong constraint, but would still not necessarily imply control.
Ben 02.26.15 at 4:13 pm
@reason #12, you are addressing me, but making statements I can make no sense of. They are surely not “quite different things” they are obviously overlapping and related things. What are you actually trying to say?
My point is that paying
a) allows the payer a limited exercise of control via the threat not to pay/purchase, (assuming he has a viable alternative),
b) gives the payer an at least arguable moral right to exercise at least some control (why should people pay for things they disapprove of), and
c) if the payer is the student/beneficiary, reduces the need for him to exercise control or have influence by giving him the option to get whatever it is he wants elsewhere (if it exists, or indeed even can exist).
These all cut in different directions, depending on the nature of the funding and who pays vs. who makes the decision to buy (grant, voucher, loan, BoM&D) whether e.g. tuition funding can be used outside the Netherlands, and so on.
It also matters of course whether control will be exercised well (are the people concerned idiots or not) or e.g. they may be bored students on worthless courses they haven’t had to pay for, jockeying for status and effectively having a party and trying to get laid (activists).
Rare to find medical students at these things I understand.
hix 02.26.15 at 5:07 pm
Its also rare to find students of the program im attending at these things. What they share with med students? Similar grades at school, similar ambigious and authoritarian Profs they are scared off if they would participate. Other than that, nothing really, many worthless courses, not too much workload, bad career prospects. But they keep hopeing for McKinsey anyway if they shut up and make nice with the right wing Profs :-).
cassander 02.26.15 at 5:13 pm
@Vasilis Vassalos
Do you feel the greek universities are worse run than other large, public institutions in greece? How do they compare, for example, to the institutions of lower education? I share your skepticism that more elections are an unalloyed good, but feel that we need some basis for comparison. There are many ways to make a university governance more participatory and more pluralistic that do not involve students and faculty electing their own deans. My alma mater (admittedly a college of about 1200 undergrads with a quaker tradition) employed many of them.
TM 02.26.15 at 5:41 pm
Hooray for those students. I wish we had any of their elan.
re 5: Universities are large institutions with a huge impact on the lives of its members. To say that democracy is satisfied if the University leadership is appointed by a democratically elected national government is like saying that it’s ok to appoint the mayors of large cities (. I recognize that the analogy is imperfect but and the details of university governance structures are hotly contested but student demands for meaningful co-governance are clearly legitimate. Furthermore, the University has traditionally been regarded as autonomous of government (that autonomy has considerably eroded in recent decades). How do you balance that autonomy with the need to be responsible to society? Student activists have traditionally been the ones to demand a socially responsible University, for example in Germany in the 1960s and 70s protesting authoritarian structures and faculty members with Nazi backgrounds.
In the US, we have the curious situation where democratic governance is completely absent from Universities (public universities are run by trustees, usually bankers and lawyers who happen to be friends of the governor) and students are in many ways better treated than in Europe. Universities invest a lot in entertaining their students, as well as counseling them and policing them. And students don’t protest. Maybe that’s proof of the model’s success but I think it’s the opposite – students are deprived of what I think of as the indispensable university experience.
TM 02.26.15 at 5:43 pm
PS. Did I mention how much US students pay in tuition?
Shelley 02.26.15 at 5:52 pm
It’s nice to hear of college students anywhere being politically active in a peaceful way.
The enemy is apathy.
Watson Ladd 02.26.15 at 6:03 pm
TM, students at a university are there to learn. They don’t know what’s good for them: that’s what the faculty does know. The fact that in the US schools feel responsible for all sorts of other things beyond education is a mistake.
The German students also protested in the 30’s for a socially responsible university, against professors with certain backgrounds. In the 60’s they also protested Adorno. Universities are not sites for political indoctrination in accord with the fashions of the day.
cassander 02.26.15 at 6:07 pm
On a more philosophical note, the university in question is almost entirely paid for by the Dutch government, correct? The Netherlands is a democracy, why do the students and faculty assume that they have a right decide for themselves how to operate a university paid for by Dutch society as a whole? We do not give police, lawyers, and criminals extra votes on how the justice system works or let healthcare workers and patients vote separately on medical policies. I’ll grant that it is traditional that universities are treated differently, but why are we honoring the moral claims a literal feudal relic?
TM 02.26.15 at 6:42 pm
“In the 60’s they also protested Adorno.”
You may disagree with the students protesting Adorno but do you really think the University would be a better place if students didn’t care about politics?
cassander: “The Netherlands is a democracy, why do the students and faculty assume that they have a right decide for themselves how to operate a university paid for by Dutch society as a whole?” Not sure why you repeat almost verbatim what Vassili already said but you seem to be unaware that in the traditional model of University autonomy, the faculty have *always* had substantial rights to self-governance (i. e. to elect the president). The question has been over the rights of students to have a say. As I pointed out, university autonomy has eroded in recent decades. I would appreciate if more knowledgeable people (Ingrid?) could expand on how this process has played out.
Enzo Rossi 02.26.15 at 6:43 pm
@Cassander: because deciding the content and priorities of highly specialised research and teaching is not like making sure that banks don’t get robbed, cities don’t burn down, and so on.
TM 02.26.15 at 7:00 pm
Wrt to WL’s point about the 1930s, it is worth pointing out that Universities in that time (and up to the 1960s) were authoritarian elitist institutions. Many of the students who were fascist sympathizers were organized in Burschenschaften, deeply reactionary fraternities for the sons of the privileged. The German university was opened to the broader public only after the protests of the 1960s (especially with the Öffnungsbeschluss of 1977 (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsreform#Die_bundesdeutsche_Bildungsreform_der_1960er-_und_1970er-Jahre)). This is actually interesting history, not fodder for throwaway polemics.
The Temporary Name 02.26.15 at 7:14 pm
Are there still battles over the extra administrative load and cost involved with accreditation?
Cassander 02.26.15 at 9:14 pm
@Enzo
> because deciding the content and priorities of highly specialised research and teaching is not like making sure that banks don’t get robbed, cities don’t burn down, and so on.
Expected this argument, two. things wrong with it. First, there are plenty of highly technical areas of government policy, none get education’s independence. Let’s not have baseless special print. Second, the students and teachers here are not making arguments about efficiency but of rights. Why do they get special rights?
TM 02.26.15 at 10:57 pm
25: You are arguing for the government directly running universities. Maybe that really is a good idea but it doesn’t have that much traction outside of China. I guess I should rephrase that: the idea has a lot of appeal but few politicians outside China would say so outright. There’s this pesky thing called academic freedom, which we still subscribe to on paper.
floopmeister 02.27.15 at 1:10 am
…they may be bored students on worthless courses they haven’t had to pay for, jockeying for status and effectively having a party and trying to get laid (activists).
I’m assuming you are giving yourself the authority to decide on the worth of various courses, no?
Cassander 02.27.15 at 2:17 am
@TM
No, I’m asking why it’s democratic for everyone to vote on what the police or doctors do, but not democratic when everyone votes on what the universities do.
Watson Ladd 02.27.15 at 6:04 am
@Cassander: Because of the value of free inquiry. At my alma mater a scholar of magic got shot by the Romanian secret police for discussing ties to the old regime. At my current institution a professor is facing all sorts of trouble due to research into pesticides. If the manufacturer could get him fired they would.
Furthermore, we don’t vote on what doctors do, and I don’t want to. What do I know about the properties of aspirin vs. ibuprofen? The simple fact is a professor knows more about what to teach, and why it matters, then their students. It requires discussing unpopular viewpoints: Foucault praises the ancient regime, Marx is Marx, Freud involves babies masturbating, Adorno supports NAMBLA, Weber disses Catholicism, etc.
The job a university performs can only be done free from outside interference. To provide a haven for unpopular views and free discussion requires that those holders of unpopular views be protected and that politicians stay far away from imposing conditions on that discussion. And that mission is essential to developing the minds of the populace, cultivating virtue, and the highest pleasures in life.
TM 02.27.15 at 2:33 pm
28: very confusing. Not clear if you are making a normative or factual statement. Of course as a matter of fact we don’t vote on what doctors or the police do.
cassander 02.27.15 at 6:20 pm
@TM
>28: very confusing. Not clear if you are making a normative or factual statement. Of course as a matter of fact we don’t vote on what doctors or the police do.
Of course we do. Take the justice system. We don’t elect individual cops, of course, but but we elect people who govern them, or who appoint the people we do, and write laws that dictate how they behave. What we certainly don’t do is establish independent police institutions that write their own rules of conduct and choose their own leaders. The closest you get to anything like that anywhere else in the public sector is judges who, at least in the common law tradition, get to write a lot of their own rules. But even there, the current judges don’t get to elect their own supreme courts.
@Watson Ladd
>The job a university performs can only be done free from outside interference. To provide a haven for unpopular views and free discussion requires that those holders of unpopular views be protected and that politicians stay far away from imposing conditions on that discussion.
This is an argument is explicitly anti-democratic (not that I have a problem with that, just pointing it out), and not the one the students in question are making. They are not arguing for autonomy of individual discussion, they are arguing over who controls the board, i.e. who gets to control discussion, the country as a whole or the students and faculty.
TM 02.27.15 at 7:57 pm
You make no sense, cassander. You said you are not arguing for governments directly running universities. And faculty and students shouldn’t run them. Then who should run them? Somebody appointed by the government? That is not democratic. The boards that run US public universities, for examples, are neither democratically legitimized, nor representative of the population whom they supposedly serve, nor do they mostly have any expertise in education or research, nor are they themselves affected by the decisions they make. I don’t know your preference since you haven’t stated it but that model is not the least bit democratic. And likewise many other public institutions are not run democratically, certainly not the police.
cassander 02.28.15 at 7:50 am
> Somebody appointed by the government? That is not democratic
That’s how we run the police, prisons, courts, lower education, and almost every other public institution in every democratic government in the world. If elected officials appointing people to run things isn’t democratic, then there isn’t a single democratic government on earth.
Val 02.28.15 at 3:46 pm
Cassander @ 20
“The Netherlands is a democracy, why do the students and faculty assume that they have a right decide for themselves how to operate a university paid for by Dutch society as a whole? We do not give police, lawyers, and criminals extra votes on how the justice system works”
I am very taken with this analogy. I suspect that you are equating police with university admin, lawyers with academics and students with criminals.
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