Goodbye

This is my last column. I am calling it quits. It’s time. I’ve pretty much said all of what I had to say. And to the extent that I haven’t, I am no longer able to put it down on paper in a clear and entertaining way. Too often I send my column to the editors grumpy and dissatisfied. There are two reasons for this.

First, my brain. It’s broken. I had a cardiac arrest five years ago. I initially thought that I was mostly recovered. I now know that a lot of people going through this make that mistake. The last few years I noticed that the brain damage I have suffered is more severe than I had hoped. I get tired quickly. Especially in noisy environments, from social interaction, and from cognitive effort. Not helpful, as a teacher. And I get tired twice as fast if I do something I get worked up about, like typing angry articles for Delta.

Second, for a while now I’ve had the feeling that I write the same angry article every month.

I often found myself thinking about Ingrid Robeyns’ Van Hasselt lecture these past years, in which she sets out the role that universities should play in a democracy. Robeyns distinguishes three functions of universities: curiosity driven education and research, innovation and problem-solving, and supplying critical analyses of societal issues. Over the last decades, the emphasis has been more and more heavily placed on the second function: innovation and targeted problem solving. Open-ended, curiosity driven education and research have been under pressure for ages. The third, critical, function is even more vulnerable and – if we are not careful – stands to be completely lost. While precisely this function is the unique and indispensable contribution of universities to democracy. And that contribution is quite crucial at the moment.

I have tried to raise this issue in column after column. But I get the feeling more and more strongly that this call falls on deaf ears at TU Delft. I’m not surprised this is the case with our management. But that there has also been so little public critical engagement with everything going on inside and outside Delft in recent years by the many professors at our university has disappointed me greatly. And it worries me.

Time and time again it was the students who stirred up public debate

It is the students, with the support of some brave PhD candidates and other staff mostly from the lower rungs of the academic hierarchy, that have set the right example. Time and time again it was they, using solid arguments and passionate protests, who stirred up public debate as best as they could to get TU Delft moving and force at least a tiny bit of self-reflection – be it about supporting the fossil fuel industry, the mismanagement of social safety, or complicity in war crimes.

A less controversial example, though an even clearer failure of TU Delft, specifically as a university of technology: our dependence on large foreign tech companies. After the initial rush of ad hoc organised online teaching in 2020, I expected a debate about the question of how we want to design our education technologies. How can we do this with public values in mind? How can we do this while keeping our autonomy and freedom to shape our own methodology?

I wrote about this several times. A small group of critical TU Delft researchers showed that neighbouring countries make completely different choices. Internally designed and managed alternatives for various forms of digital teaching were running at various faculties. But all of that was quietly pushed aside in favour of commercial – mainly American – platforms. Without public debate or critical reflection. Now, the issue is again current, but more as a society’s impact on us than the other way around, as our university’s slogan has it.

After all these years of trying to make the same point in various ways, I no longer have much confidence that it makes much of a difference. Rationally, I think that’s stupid of me. But I’ve had enough. It makes me feel lonely. And I’m tired. See reason 1.

Technology is politics. Technology is social. Always

For those few faithful readers who will miss my ramblings: read Robeyns. Read Ursula Franklin. Kris De Decker. Stefan Collini. Audrey Watters. Brian Merchant. Sara Ahmed. Paulo Freire.

Technology is politics. Technology is social. Always. Inescapably. Education, ditto. The history of technology and engineering education is a history of capitalism and colonialism. These historic origins are deeply engrained in our systems and in the culture of our disciplines. Education that leaves this unaddressed is anti-democratic. We have a responsibility to think clearly and critically about the forms of society that our technologies do and do not make possible, where they concentrate power, how things could be done differently, and to engage in public debate about all this – much more than currently happens at TU Delft.

I would like to thank everyone who ever took the trouble to send me a response to something I wrote. Thanks to Tom and Begüm. To the editors. And thanks to my partner who did the first round of editing my articles every month on Sunday evenings.