‘Save the humanities before it is too late – say I, a technical student’

These are uncertain times for higher education in the Netherlands. After the Cabinet presented its plans to cut hundreds of millions of euros in higher education, universities see their only way out as continually cutting back on their academic offerings.

Leiden University was the first to announce this, and this week Utrecht University did the same. What is striking about their plans is that both of these universities, which are known for their classic and wide ranging courses, are opting to cut down on their humanities courses and not the natural sciences.

Looking at it through the eyes of the faculty managers, this may be an obvious choice. They tend to be small degree programmes, and so the costs of teaching are thus quite a bit higher than the faculties’ financial revenues. So it is understandable that the faculties opt to reduce the number of degree programmes. But in reality, this is more subtle.

Financial choices

It is not a faculty that gets the lump sum from the Government, but a university as a whole. The universities then decide how that money is shared out among the faculties. This means that the lack of funding for the humanities at the universities of Leiden and Utrecht are not solely because of ‘not profitable’ degree programmes, but also because of the financial choices that the central university administrations make. Apparently the humanities will not get the financing that they need.

This means that the very future of the valuable humanities is under pressure. This is a real pity. We live in a time of major societal challenges: climate change, polarisation, war, and so on. These problems will not be solved by technical solutions alone, quite the opposite.

Take climate change. We know how we can produce sustainable energy (wind turbines have already been invented); we know how we can farm fewer animals (veggie burgers really don’t taste like cardboard anymore); and, we can make airplanes largely redundant (trains have been around for a while). And yet CO2 emissions are rising around the world every year. The challenge in these societal problems has long not lain in technology or physics. It has lain in the humanities.

Without the humanities, our technical dreams at TU Delft will never become reality

Future in jeopardy

We need national and international collaboration to deal with worldwide problems, and to do this, we need to have knowledge about people and the world at our fingertips. Don’t misunderstand me, education and research in the natural sciences remain hugely important. But with hundreds of new students every year for each degree programme at each university, the future of physics in the Netherlands is not in jeopardy. But the future of Latin American, Korean and African studies are.

For this reason university management should do the right thing and reconsider how the income is divided across the faculties. Cutbacks in the natural sciences will also hurt. As a technical student and hobby astronomer I would be the first to feel the pinch. But I really do think that we have more to lose if we cut down on the humanities.

If university managers really want to have an impact on society, they will have to be brave and spend their money differently. Save the humanities before it is too late. If not, our technical dreams at TU Delft will never become reality.