No justice in cuts

A good way to discuss all three of these problems is by using the Delft Center for Entrepreneurship (DCE) as a specific example. Having taken DCE’s sustainable business game and design challenge courses, I found the courses excellent and the faculty highly motivated. Unfortunately, DCE also just had five of its seven staff members cut and its facilities scaled back. DCE’s future is uncertain. So let’s examine what’s wrong with this budgetary cutting process.

First, priorities: the impression I get from talking to faculty members around the university is that Deans place a priority on research. This means they preserve the programmes that crank out papers, while cutting the programs that don’t. Research is undoubtedly important, but a technological university should also be focusing on implementing research, especially at a university like TU Delft, where most students want to go out and do things, like building bridges, rather than merely writing about how to build bridges. In fact, firms and governments want students to be able to do things as well, but student, business and governmental priorities are not a Dean’s priorities. We see this in DCE, where despite receiving rave reviews from students and running minor programmes that are full within 30 minutes of enrolment starting, DCE gets cut. And this is despite being one of the only places on campus where the government specifically subsidises the programme and companies pay the university to allow students to mix with other disciplines in order to develop real solutions to real business problems.

Second, the process is opaque: there doesn’t seem to be any discussion about what areas are best to cut – not within the faculty and not with students. There isn’t even a nod to equity that all departments should be cut equally. But discussion is essential: in my programme we would call this
stakeholder analysis, and it’s vitally important if you don’t want to (a) come off like a condescending, power-hungry jerk when making decisions, or (b) make simple mistakes that wind up being bad choices, just because you failed to ask for another viewpoint. DCE is a part of the TPM faculty, and that’s how the process has played out there as well.

Last, student involvement: there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to measure student input when considering what to cut. As I’ve said, DCE’s programmes get excellent student reviews, but that hasn’t stopped a 70% personnel cut. The TU administration might also bother to ask students what they think, if for no other reason than to legitimise the process. Or they could even go so far as to value student input and treat the matter as a dialogue – this would yield better results than excluding students from the process.
In short, it’s disappointing to see the administration get their priorities mixed up, making hard times even worse. By protecting the favourite projects of a powerful minority on campus, the rest of us are left out in the cold.

Devin Malone, a second-year MSc student of industrial ecology, is from Anchorage, Alaska.

Rooms
As of May 2010, international students will have the option of selecting from a range of furnished student rooms offered by Duwo. The first person to pay gets first choice. Duwo will incorporate this selection function on its website. Until now, Duwo has issued student apartments to internationals students, but this has led to complaints when students compared their rents to other student residences. Soon international students will know in advance what accommodations they can get and for what price. 

Iranians victorious
A court in Den Haag has ruled that Iranian students and researchers in the Netherlands may not be barred from participating in programs that involve the study of nuclear technologies. In 2008 the Dutch government instituted the ‘Iran Sanction Regulation’, which effectively denied Iranian researchers for entering any nuclear installations in the Netherlands, including the Reactor Institute Delft. Iranians were also denied enrollment in certain MSc programs involving nuclear technologies. The ban also included Dutch citizens whose parents are of Iranian origin. For the past year, Iranians and various student and academic organizations throughout the Netherland have staged protests against the Dutch government’s sanctions, charging that they violated laws guaranteeing equal rights, constituted a form of discrimination and violated academic freedoms. Last Wednesday the court in Den Haag agreed, ruling that the ‘Iran Sanction Regulation’ must be repealed.

Shell venture
TU Delft and Shell will join forces in a joint research program aimed at developing innovative technologies for extracting oil and gas trapped in subsurface reservoirs. The new program, dubbed ‘The Recovery Factory’, will develop new measurement and control techniques for charting the subsurface, as well as study how injecting chemicals, such as CO2 and polymers, into reservoirs makes oil more easily producible. The six-year program will necessitate the appointment of eight new PhD students at TU Delft.