Campus

TU Delft Board polls students and staff about partnerships with fossil fuel industry

TU Delft is struggling with partnerships with fossil fuel companies. What decisions would staff and students make? An online consultation lets them ‘work out their dilemmas’.

Activists from End Fossil occupied education building Pulse on 10 May 2023. (Photo: Thijs van Reeuwijk)

A questionnaire, dialogue sessions and a ‘Moral Deliberation Chamber’: in October the Executive Board announced these three initiatives in which students and staff could share their thoughts on TU Delft’s partnerships with the fossil fuel industy. The first one, an online consultation, has now started.

Positions and measures
Students and staff will receive an invitation email containing a unique access code to take part in the survey. It involves a questionnaire with various positions on measures that TU Delft could take on collaborating with the fossil fuel industry. Filling it in takes 15 to 20 minutes and the closing date is 20 December.

‘A choice situation of a government authority or an organisation is simulated’

The survey was compiled by Populytics, a TU Delft spin-off. Through participatory value evaluation (PVE), it wants to find out what people at TU Delft think about issues such as climate change, collaborating with the fossil fuel industry, the energy transition, and how they think these should be translated into policy.

‘The essence of a PVE is that a choice situation of a government authority or an organisation is simulated as closely as possible, allowing participants to experience the dilemma. You see the issue in an approachable manner and get an overview of the implications of the policy options and constraints’, states the explanation on the TU Delft website.

Uitkomsten
The outcomes of the online questionnaire, the dialogue sessions and moral deliberation
should form the basis of an advice jointly issued by the Integrity Office and the Climate Action programme to the Executive Board in March next year. All reports and the final advice will be made public.

Also read:

News editor Marjolein van der Veldt

Do you have a question or comment about this article?

m.vanderveldt@tudelft.nl

Comments are closed.