Executive Board says unsafe behaviour is unacceptable, but lashed out at those reporting it

After a petition signed by more than 1,150 people and angry reactions by representation bodies and trade unions, the Executive Board announced in an email sent on Wednesday 20 March that it would not proceed with a court case. The Executive Board had considered a civil court case to fight the report in which the Inspectorate of Education concludes that TU Delft is doing too little to safeguard a safe working environment for its employees. A seven part objection by TU Delft is still online. TU Delft’s management produced this document in an attempt to dismantle the Inspectorate’s report point by point. It says that the report is full of ‘factual inaccuracies and unnecessary, disproportionately damaging findings’.

It is the norm that academic institutions that are being assessed by the Inspectorate of Education may respond to the penultimate version of the report. Putting the response online, as TU Delft did, is less usual. A TU Delft spokesperson says that making the reply public was done in the interest of being ‘transparent’ and to ‘give more context’ to the decision to do so. “We want to show that this action didn’t come out of the blue. It was preceded by a process.”

Fact versus experience

During the course of the investigation, 148 former and current employees reported incidents to the Inspectorate. The reasons for doing so were wide-ranging: intimidation, discrimination, sexism, bullying and other forms of unsafe behaviour. TU Delft’s rebuttal says that it is taking all these reports ‘extremely seriously’. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter, TU Delft’s management casts doubts on the incidents reported. ‘What the reports and the interviews state are not proven facts and are also not automatically unsafe behaviour’, they write to then make the point that the Inspectorate should have looked into this more thoroughly.

In its report, the Inspectorate of Education concludes that the Supervisory Board does too little to gather information on social safety and that its distance to TU Delft employees is too large. Here too, TU Delft is disqualifying its employees. ‘Signals about possible unsafe situations’ reach the Supervisory Board members ‘through various routes’. ‘That a few people interviewed here, as your draft report states, have a different impression does not change the facts.’

‘Victims or perpetrators?’

The TU Delft Board also wonders if the employees that approached the Inspectorate were perpetrators themselves. ‘Are the people who reported incidents real victims, or were they actually the perpetrators who created unsafe situations for others, making those other people victims once again of an unsafe environment?’ The Inspectorate should also have looked into this more deeply, says TU Delft.

The tone of the rebuttal is sometimes attacking. The Executive Board warns that the Inspectorate could incur damage to its reputation if TU Delft administrators would have to defend themselves in public. This warning to the Inspectorate is stated in part seven of the defence document, a chapter that TU Delft tried to black out. But an error made these passages relatively legible. Delta previously wrote about how fear of reputational damage for the management in particular runs like a thread through these passages.

Meeting report wrongly addressed

The Executive Board reproaches the Inspectorate in very strong terms. It accuses the Inspectorate of ‘harming the confidence of individual staff members in several ways’. How this was done it does not say. What is clear is that the inspectors sent a meeting report containing confidential information to the wrong employee.

A spokesperson at the Inspectorate confirms this. “We too were transparent about this mistake. It is not good when something like this happens to sensitive issues, but we contacted the relevant people. We believe that the situation is now resolved.”

Disrupted Christmas drinks

The Executive Board is also critical about the timing of the Inspectorate’s investigation. The Inspectorate announced shortly before the Christmas holidays that it had opened a hotline. This would not only have ruined the Christmas holidays of employees, but also their Christmas drinks. The rebuttal states that ‘The call became such an undesirable hot topic at several Christmas drinks that were being held that same afternoon, and set the tone for what should have been enjoyable and relaxing gatherings to mark the start of the Christmas break’.

A spokesperson indeed admits that a discussion had taken place at the Inspectorate about whether the hotline should be opened just before or after the Christmas holidays. “We thought that it was important that employees had the time and space to think about how they wanted to respond to our call. The sooner we could start our investigation, the sooner the situation for the employees could be improved. This is why we ultimately decided to start before the Christmas holidays.”

‘A lot’ and ‘often’

TU Delft asserts that the draft report ‘is imbued’ with ‘vague and suggestive wording’. The Inspectorate constantly refers to ‘many interviewees’, ‘often’ and ‘a large number’. In doing so, the inspectors assigned a scale to their findings ‘that is not reasonable’, the Executive Board argues.

The spokesperson explains that not stating numbers was a conscious decision on the part of the Inspectorate. “Apart from discussions, our information is also derived from reports, emails and documents. If you state numbers, you also need to state the sources that the numbers come from. We did not want to do this because of traceability. Adding it all up, we believe that words like ‘a lot’ and ‘a large number’ are justified.”

‘Looking back is not useful’

In total, the board tried to refute 638 partly repeated points in the report. All in all, the Inspectorate report allegedly contains so many errors that the next version would have to be called ‘draft’ again. “TU Delft writes ‘draft’ because given the number of changes needed, it would first need to see a modified draft report to which TU Delft could again respond.”

This never happened. The Inspectorate did go through all the board’s objections, but only made a small number of changes. “That an academic institution views our findings differently, is possible,” says the Inspectorate’s spokesperson. “We only check if our draft report contains any factual errors. In this case, we saw few factual inaccuracies and we mostly added or clarified things.”

On the question of whether the Executive Board still stands behind its objections, in part given that it will now not start a court case, a spokesperson answered that “time has now passed. We will not fight the report in court anymore, and we now want to put our energy into improving social safety. At present, looking back serves little purpose.”