Former Maastricht board member temporarily appointed to TU Delft Executive Board

Bos will take over Van der Meer’s role as Vice President Operations (VPO). He will join Rector and Chair Tim van der Hagen and Vice Rector and Vice Chair Hans Hellendoorn. Like Bos, the latter also has a temporary appointment. Van der Hagen will depart early, in January 2026.

TU Delft’s current Board structure will be modified in January. It will have the same structure as almost every other university: Chair, Rector and VPO.

One by one

In February, TU Delft announced that the three Board members would be appointed one by one. The name of the new Rector would be known ‘around summer’ 2025 so that they could help in selecting a Chair. Both would then take office officially at the beginning of 2026. They would then help look for the third Executive Board member.

Until then, Nick Bos will take on that role as Marien van der Meer’s first Board term of office of will end on 1 August. The Supervisory Board started her reappointment process in autumn 2024, but concluded that reappointing her was not an option.

Supervisory Board

On the intranet, Luc Soete, the acting Chair of the Supervisory Board, said that ‘the right person had been found’ in Bos. Bos was an ‘administrator with the right experience in the academic world’ and could start straight away. He knows Bos from his own time as Rector at Maastricht University. Bos was Vice-President during part of that period.

Bos can get to work at TU Delft on a number of major issues, such as the budget cuts (‘reallocations’) on which the Executive Board must decide after the summer. Improving social safety is also high on the agenda, with the Education Inspectorate set to publish its progress assessment in December.

Soete himself reached the end of his second term as a Supervisory Board member on 1 May 2025. He was succeeded by Arthur Mol, a professor at Wageningen University. But Soete remained as acting Chair as Tijo Collot d’Escury suddenly stepped down on 1 March. Collot d’Escury said that this was to avoid a conflict of interest with his consultancy firm Roland Berger.

Historian

Nick Bos studied and earned his doctorate as a historian at Utrecht University. He then worked for the University of Maastricht for 25 years, first as the Director of the Student Service Centre, and later as a General Director. Between 2014 and retiring in 2024, he was a member and Vice Chair of Maastricht University’s Executive Board.

In a farewell interview in the Observant, Maastricht University’s newspaper, he said that he could not sit still. He would work for Brightlands, of which he was one of the founders, for two days a week as a freelancer. Brightlands is an innovation ecosystem consisting of campuses in Heerlen, Maastricht, Venlo and Sittard-Geleen.

Hard worker

In the interview, the Observant typecasts Bos after talking to a lot of people who knew him. This gave rise to the following characteristics: ‘a hard worker, policy geek, devoted to Maastricht University, critical, control freak, dependable, honest, sharp witted and sometimes a bit blunt’.

One group found Bos a little distant: ‘a stoic and distant man, an enigma who isn’t easily approachable’. Others point out his ‘soft’ side: ‘empathy, supportiveness and willingness to go to great lengths for his employees’. Bos himself says that ‘I’m not a people manager … My passion is more in achieving concrete goals. That’s what gives me the greatest satisfaction in my work. Obviously, I never do that alone, but always with a team’.