Growing Pains as UvA Celebrates its 388th Anniversary

The new year found the University of Amsterdam (UvA) celebrating its 388th anniversary. Its birthday party featured its rector magnificus, Karen Maex, giving a speech arguing for “new and fundamental research in an interdisciplinary context.” Such a turn of phrase inspires fear that specialisations are due further cuts.

Interdisciplinarity was intended to encourage researchers from typically distant faculties and fields of interest to collaborate on projects. Such a holistic approach, it was and is hoped, would lead to discoveries/academic progress which could combat the “complex” challenges of the contemporary world such as climate change. The undermining of educational standards could also be seen as one of those challenges.

While the notion of interdisciplinary work remains a potentially profitable idea (in both senses), it only works if all involved parties are sufficiently knowledgeable about their fields in the first place. However, interdisciplinarity is increasingly being used as a way to excuse a decrease in the amount and quality of students’ contact time with lecturers, and this trend will only make meaningful interdisciplinary discourse in the future less likely. The UvA isn’t an island, of course, and government policy has a lot to answer for in relation to the arrival of what can be considered a general downgrading of university provisions. The humanities appear under particular pressure from this sleeper threat.

Letters sent from the UvA’s Humanities Faculty Student Council (FSR FGw) to the dean (all publicly available) suggest a worrying tale. In September 2019, the FSR warned against proposals to reduce the amount of tracks provided by the Classics & Ancient Civilizations and Archeology courses; a reduction in tracks did take place, albeit with concessions. Reducing tracks means that, while the course exists, students will spend more time during those courses in elective classes which, while fulfilling the promise of promoting interdisciplinarity, will likely have nothing to do with old stuff or digging.

A month later, the FSR highlighted that details regarding the implementation of 2015’s austerity programme were fuzzy. “It is unclear which parts of the educational programmes have been lost and which ones have been renewed,” it wrote1. As yet, students and staff are unable to study the exact losses suffered by the faculty since austerity was introduced. Students either working unsocial hours on the minimum wage or getting into debt to pay uni fees are unlikely to be happy that their financial input is unaccounted for. Meanwhile, €250,000 was found to pay for staff to work on the conceptualisation of a new programme (still without content or concrete plans for implementation) called Humanities in Context, whose website asks: “How do we ensure that in 2025, we will still be pioneering and internationally influential in the humanities?” Err.

More than one proposed merger between tracks has taken place over the past few years. The Discourse and Communication and Tekst en Communicatie research MAs were combined. One result is that Dutch language students are now unable to receive lectures and seminars on this subject in their native tongue. More recently, it has been suggested that students in the Art & Culture masters could be streamlined into one big course, as if theatre studies, music studies and cultural analysis provide a homogeneous way of thinking, or are even about the same thing.

The argument that electives are a great way for students to “choose” their own path would be more persuasive if the system the UvA provides students to pick them with wasn’t such a mess, and if courses weren’t prone to being oversubscribed. In the event that the number of mandatory tracks are reduced, the yearly fee won’t change, meaning that new students would get less for their money in comparison with alumni peers. More students for one lecturer also means less individual time students get to interact with a researcher as part of small workgroups or one to one, even though getting better acquainted with researchers is one of the main reasons people enrol in postgraduate degrees. All in all, a great way to prepare humanities students for 2025!

The prohibitive legislation against flat shares and freelance work being introduced over the next couple of years will make Amsterdam a less practical choice for all but the most financially secure prospective students of the future. Relying on locals to make up for the possible upcoming deficit in attendance numbers may not be such a smart idea either, seeing as the UvA has become increasingly anglophone. This will all undoubtedly have an effect on who the students and lecturers are, which is already a contentious point. That the humanities faculty working group on diversity recently dissolved itself in the face of institutional inaction suggests that that conversation is at the bottom of the Uni’s in tray.

Whoever remains will need to remind themselves that they are part of an institution which doesn’t keep its promises. Five years ago, those involved in the Maagdenhuis Occupation were promised access to the same building this February in order to reinvigorate the discussion around introducing democratic staff and student involvement into the mechanics of the UvA’s decision making processes. Permission to access was revoked just three weeks before the commemorative event was due to take place. Such an event would help engage all members of the UvA community, as well as alert people to the University’s devaluation of specialised knowledge. That such opportunities for community strengthening are mostly absent from university life is another worrying contemporary trend.

If only there were nonpartisan reports about the University’s efforts to provide ever lower-quality higher education, all while selling itself as “part of the living fabric of Amsterdam” and “one of Europe’s most prominent research-led universities,” as its website boasts. Perhaps the UvA should fund some “fundamental research” into itself?

1) Translated from the Dutch by the author.