Dark clouds over Dutch Universities

On Monday, the first day of our academic year, I went to a demonstration. The reason for the demonstration are the announced budget cuts for higher education, which our new right/extreme-right government wants to implement. The figures aren’t set in stone yet, but the financial appendix that was presented when the new government took office suggests that there will be a direct cut to the budget of higher eduction of 150 million euros in 2025, and increasing up to almost 1 billion a few years later (I read somewhere that this is equivalent to the size of one Dutch public university). The cuts would come in different ways – some are reversals to budget-increases that were made by the previous Minister (the renowned scholar Robbert Dijkgraaf who left his prestigious job in Princeton to serve as our minister of education); there are also indirect cuts because the government plans to reduce the number of international students (which will lower revenues for universities); and general cuts to HE. The government will also lower the payment universities gets for a student that takes too long to finish their undergraduate degree, and then expects the students to pay much higher fees. Importantly, the previous government made a Bestuursakkoord (a sort of ten-year contract) with the public universities, which this new government now modifies significantly, without agreement from the universities.

There was a real sense of defeat among the participants at the demonstration that I talked to, which I also sense very strongly. Why?

There is a sense of defeat because we fought intensively for almost 4 years to put inadequate funding for HE on the political agenda. When the Netherlands had a new government in 2017, who announced a 100 million budget cut on HE, Rens Bod, a professor from the University of Amsterdam, launched a petition to protest against this cut – which was one in a long row of relatively smaller cuts to HE over the previous two decades. From 2018 till the next elections, the activist group WOinActie used a wide range of tactics to protest against inadequate funding – and as I’ve mentioned here before, I was deeply involved in this activism. We tried to combine reasoning and argumentation in our lobbying work with actions that tried to make the case in the public realm. In retrospect, I think it was crucial that we kept talking directly with the minister of HE, Ingrid van Engelshoven, and didn’t allow her to get away with empty responses to our questions. And we saw that over time her position shifted. In the beginning we felt she was hiding behind the fact that this was part of the Coalition agreement and thus “nothing she could change”; then she said she acknowledged that there was extreme work pressure in universities, but wanted to solve this “in a budget neutral way”; and eventually she commissioned an external study that showed that the sector was underfunded, which paved the way for her party (the liberals D66) to demand an increase in the HE budget of 1 billion. That increase happened under Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf. But now it turns out that victory might have been very short-lived, as the current right/extreme-right government will bring back structural underfunding to the universities. The amount of energy the activists of WOinActie (and, in more diplomatic ways, also established organisations such as the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences) put in was enormous; it was a victory that an independent audit confirmed that our demands were justified; yet all of this now appears to have been pretty much in vain.

This brings me to the second reason to feel that we are in a really dire situation. The victory of 2022 was only possible because Ingrid van Engelshoven, the minister of HE, could be reasoned with. She was willing to listen to our arguments, and she was willing to reconsider her position. I am not sure we can assume this is the case with the present coalition, since they simply pushed aside the entire political process that happened between 2018 and 2022. Without giving any reasons as to why they think it can be justified to re-introduce financial inadequacy. The budget plans also indicate that they tend to cut the highest tax brakes for entrepreneurs, and undo an announced increase in dividend taxation and on capital income – three measures that will cost the treasury far more than a billion from 2025 onwards. So other scenarios are eminently possible.

Digging deeper, we see the third reason to believe we are in a really dire situation: there is not a single party in this coalition that genuinely values universities. Our ruling parties are to a considerable extent anti-science, anti-intellectuals, anti-cultural-elites, anti-public sector, and anti-critical thinking. So no surprise they attack universities (as well as the entire cultural sector, the public radio, and so forth).

There are four parties in the coalition: the VVD is in essence a party for rich people and entrepreneurs; they see HE in purely instrumental terms for the economy. BBB, the new party of the farmers, is a party that prioritizes the interest of agro-business over climate action: they are deeply populist and dislike science when it gets in their way. PVV, the one-man-party of Geert Wilders, hates universities for the critical role they play in society. He is a close ideological friend of Viktor Orbán, which should tell you all you need to know. And finally, there is the new party NSC (“new social contract”), which profiles itself as economically in the center and culturally conservative. Perhaps they have some key people in that party that can be reasoned with and do not avoid giving real answer to questions – but on HE, I haven’t seen it yet. Also, three of those four parties overwhelmingly consist of people who were not in politics until this year; so they probably have simply no idea of what the recent history on this dossier is.

On Monday, Rens Bod called upon us to get ready to strike, and strike in a way that is disruptive. My experience with WOinActie has made me rather disappointed in the willingness of faculty in the Netherlands to fight for their own universities: they rather free-ride on the activist efforts of others, than make a significant effort themselves. But I hope I will be proven wrong.