In response to my previous post on the imminent threat to Dutch universities to have their budgets cut with up to 1 billion euros a year, I received a few emails from (mainly younger) staff to ask how they could contribute to the protests.
I will respond specifically for the current Dutch case, but I think we could learn from international experience here. So if you have additional thoughts on what university staff could do to make sure the material conditions in which they need to do their work are adequate (and for public universities this means not having their public budgets cut in a way that creates inadequate funding), then please do share your suggestions.
- Inform yourself. On the Dutch case, most information on what happened in the last 6 years has been published in Dutch (e.g. this piece which contains a short overview of what WOinActie did). The piece I wrote on our blog earlier this week should provide some basic background to those who don’t read Dutch. In any case, non-Dutch scholars are smart enough to use technologies to translate Dutch pieces, so language shouldn’t be a barrier if you don’t want it to be one.
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Join a union. In the past, the unions have been the most important allies of the workers-based activist group WOinActie; they organized our demonstrations, gave us access to rooms to hold meetings, shared crucial information, etc. They are also an organization who keeps collecting data and raising the issues of excessive workloads. In the case of the Netherlands, there are two main unions – the general FNV and the teacher’s union AOb, which I personally see as being more strongly involved in our struggles.
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Make sure you don’t miss any announcements of demonstrations and other protests. The easiest way is to join the WOinActie email list (instructions on how to join here), but WOinActie is also on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
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Raise awareness. Share on social media articles you read that explain and analyse what is happening. Print op-eds from newspapers and tape them to your office door or on the wall in the coffee corner. Ask in a staff meeting who has been to the demonstration and what they thought about it. Use your superbrain to think about what else you could do.
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Mobilise and organise. If there is another demonstration (apparently, 14 November), invite all your colleagues to come along. Ask your head of department, or your dean, to share a message with all staff. If in due course there is a poster for the demonstration, print it and stick it on a notice board. Send it to departments which are largely absent. In particular, the technical and engineering universities could always use some extra nudges; they have much more money than the general universities (they get paid 50% more for their teaching even if they teach the very same course, and they receive much money from industry). I think they have shown disappointingly little solidarity over the last years, and I hope someone will mobilize there specifically.
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Wear a red square. Yesterday, a colleague came to my office to ask for a ‘red square’ – a small squared piece of red cloth that we wear on our shirts. It is the symbol against inadequate university budgets. My colleague was going to teach, and thought that if he would wear it, students might ask, and then he could tell them what was going on. Great! Also, make a bag of red squares and distribute them (it really isn’t difficult to make a bag of red squares, you just need to invest some time and a tiny bit of money).
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Inform your students. They are directly affected too with the higher enrollment fees that would be imposed on students who take a long time to finish their degrees (never mind that Mark Rutte took more than 7 years to finish his history degree). But students also need to know that staff’s working conditions are their learning conditions. If work pressure again goes up, it will mean more hurried supervision, no time for anything ‘extra’ that students might ask, and so forth.
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Write an op-ed to the national newspaper, or to local newspapers. Admittedly, this might be for those with advanced activists skills, but still, I think many more could give it a try.
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Ask those higher up in the tree to use their power so that more staff know they can engage in actions (1) to (8). Heads of departments, deans, and those with similar layers of power, can spread information, in a way that also gives a seal of approval, to a much larger group of staff.
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If you have connections in politics: forward them the arguments in print; drop them an email; share them your worries.
What else could we do?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Charles Bakker 09.06.24 at 1:17 pm
Follow the money. If university budgets are being slashed, it is because those with money do not think it wise to invest as much in universities, and more especially, arts and humanities departments. We need to be figuring out why. Why does Western society seem to be turning its back on what these departments have to offer? A big part of it may be a perceived lack of return on the investment. But I suspect that a bigger part has to with ideology. If one disagrees profoundly with the ideology being taught, whether implicitly or explicitly, in the classroom, then one will be motivated to work against the promotion of that ideology in any way one can. This might look like scrapping tenure, or filling the administration with cronies and loyalists to one’s own vision for a better society, or slashing budgets, or all of the above, etc.
Ok, so if this is the problem, how can we actually make a difference? I think we need to focus on public outreach. I’m not talking about going around and asking for money. I’m talking about learning how to be influential in an age of influencers. We need to be creating interesting content, and tapping into alternative models for income generation. If advertising and fundraising is what pays the bills for social media influencers, then why don’t we adapt as philosophers, historians, linguists, etc. by harnessing these same means of income generation. And no, we don’t have to sell our souls by becoming corporate/capitalist sales folk. We can follow in the footsteps of such brilliant content creators such as Ze Frank and the creators of Crash Course Philosophy. These folks focus on promoting education by making it fun and accessible. That is what we need to be doing more of.
John Q 09.12.24 at 8:32 pm
A big question relates to the “higher-ups”. At one time, it was reasonable to treat the university as a community with shared interests which its leaders could be expected to advocate. Now, in Australia at least, our situation is more like that of, for example, craft workers in a factory owned by a private equity company. We have shared interests, for example, in public policies that keep the factory going, at least until the owners work out a way to sell it. But we can’t assume that the owners’ interests are the same as ours or that they care at all about our old-fashioned craft values.