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.
Our new columnist Britte Bouchaut is concerned about the cutbacks that TU Delft will have to make. What will they involve? No more free coffee? In her eyes, the plans for the Rotterdam campus are inconsistent with the financial challenges that TU Delft faces.
Columnist Ali Vahidi is concerned about screening based on nationality at Dutch universities. He knows many colleagues who fear the impact of this policy on their research, while rectors and academic institutions do not seem to question this injustice.
Columnist Jan van Neerven believes that more attention should be paid to the link between social safety and gender diversity in leadership positions. With dismay, he observes that the Delft Technology Fellowship programme has been discontinued due to budget cuts. “At a time when vision and decisiveness are needed, the Executive Board is turning back the clock.”
Columnist Alex Nedelcu is not against being sceptical – scepticism is the foundation of good science, and it is healthy when faced with so many conflicting narratives. But you can’t only be sceptical towards those you don’t like.
There are lots of jokes about clay sculpting at IDE, but columnist Mirte Brouwer explains why the assignment, perhaps surprisingly, can be very useful.
Dap Hartmann watched four hardly seen videos about TU Delft’s strategy on YouTube. He noticed that they are full of empty statements and meaningless phrases, and wonders who on earth wrote them.
This is Bob van Vliet’s last column. After trying to make the same point for years, he has little faith that it’s making a difference. There is another reason that he is stopping too.
