Just over a month after the Education Inspectorate report came out, columnist Dap Hartmann gives the Executive Board some free advice: come clean, be accountable and quit window dressing.
It has been a month since Panic Friday, the day on which the Executive Board hastily decided to bite back before the devastating report of the Inspectorate of Education was made public. Very little seems to have happened since then, but there was probably a lot of panic mongering behind the scenes. During this shitstorm, one Executive Board member underwent a three-day training course at INSEAD to learn things that an Executive Board member should already know. Out of the kindness of my heart, I offer three guidelines that the Executive Board apparently cannot think of themselves.
The Supervisory Board must resign immediately. It is outrageous that they have not already done so, because there has been no supervision whatsoever. A new Supervisory Board must consist of critical, independent people who are not recruited from the network of friends, have no business ties with TU Delft, and do more than lavishly dine with the Executive Board twice a year.
The Executive Board must not resign, but should be answerable for what has gone wrong in recent years. A new Executive Board would undoubtedly consist of similar Teflon-coated directors who can comfortably start with a clean slate and present great plans for a better future.
Stop protecting those bastards, get rid of them
Many people were unfairly treated by TU Delft and some of them have left in disgust. Get to the bottom of what went wrong. In many cases it will turn out that specific professors and deans were responsible. Stop protecting those bastards, get rid of them, under penalty of publicly exposing their misdeeds. That is the only way to regain the trust of employees. In addition to satisfying the victims, a clean-up operation carries a preventive message: if you misbehave, you will be kicked out. Currently, the miscreants are staying put while the Executive Board promises reform. This is inadequate and unacceptable.
The first concrete actions have been announced, but they do not bode well. There will be four meetings where everyone can put forward ideas for better social safety. This puppet show will be performed by the B€r€nschot consultancy agency, hired by the Executive Board, which will use the Mentimeter toddler & nitwit toys to find out what is going on at TU Delft. It will undoubtedly be visualised using word clouds and pie charts. This lame attempt to prove that we are really being heard is, in reality, a perfidious diversionary tactic. To make matters worse, it was initiated by the ‘Social Safety Project Team’, which consists of nine people, most of whom are part of the problem while some even have blood on their hands. You are under heavy fire but suddenly committed to improve social safety at TU Delft? That would be like admitting Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Unthinkable, right? Integrity and credibility must be essential requirements for a ‘Social Safety Project Team’.
As far back as seven years ago, I offered to become Rector Magnificus, the paterfamilias who ensures that everyone feels at home at TU Delft. That offer still stands.
Dap Hartmann is Associate Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Delft Centre for Entrepreneurship (DCE) at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. In a previous life, he was an astronomer and worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Together with conductor and composer Reinbert de Leeuw, he wrote a book about modern (classical) music.
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