By hiding their struggles, academics increase isolation, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy, making it harder to seek help and deepening their challenges, writes Ali Vahidi. He pleads for an environment where honest dialogue is encouraged.

One year after the Inspectorate of Education’s report on social safety appeared at TU Delft, IDE Dean, Caspar Chorus, assesses the social safety policy in this received letter. How should administrators and managers create this policy?

For columnist Jan van Neerven, it’s clear: the Executive Board and the outgoing Chair of the Supervisory Board at TU Delft are paving the way for future collaboration in the development of the Rotterdam campus.

Invest, cut, invest, cut. Columnist Alex Nedelcu sees a cycle in higher education and he hopes that it doesn’t make people cynical. His conclusion is that he has to fight the same battle as his parents.

Action group Students and staff for Palestinian rights (Delft Student Intifada) is planning to give 400 TU Delft professors a box ‘with evidence that proves the need for TU Delft to divest from Israeli universities’. ‘Our purpose is to refocus the conversation to TU Delft’s obligations under international law’, writes ME researcher Mayank Gupta on their behalf.

Birgit van Driel was in Central America and Colombia for four months and was amazed by the feeling of community and friendliness. She thinks that we at TU Delft can learn from this.

Students love using quotes. Mirte Brouwer’s student dorm even keeps a list. She has her doubts about the quotes hanging around campus as part of the social safety campaign.

In an ancient manuscript, Dap Hartmann discovered a parable about the Kingdom of Delphinia, where the Superficial Boar keeps a close watch over the Kingdom’s integrity. Until, one day, rumours about a conflux of spider nests do the rounds.

A lasting change in our university culture cannot only rely on victims of social unsafety to speak out. The community should actively condemn wrongdoing, columnist Jenna Pfeifer writes in her first Delta column.

Dr Rachel Los recently did something completely new. Apart from the required acknowledgements, she added ‘anti-acknowledgements’ to her TU Delft PhD thesis. These were aimed at everyone who had made it clear to her, implicitly or explicitly, that there was no space for her as a woman in the sciences. ‘We have to deal with this undermining’ she writes in this letter.