How open should the university be?

As far as Letschert is concerned, the recent political discussions in the Netherlands about the internationalisation of academic education are somewhat shortsighted. “In the long term, we must attract foreign students given the Netherlands’ aging population. If we lock the door now and implement nationalist measures, we’d be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” One of the major concerns of UM is that international students will not come at all because of coronavirus. “I hope so, I haven’t seen any decline in registrations yet”, Letschert says. “New students may be hesitant to move to Maastricht, so we are communicating the measures we’re taking to guarantee a good level of safety. For example, we’re adding people with physical health expertise to our mental health staff. Those people can direct students to the right professionals. That’s sometimes a quest, especially for our foreign students.”

There are concerns that coronavirus has set university back in some ways – given that it can no longer open its doors to students. But it is also prompting new innovations. “Researchers are suddenly putting aside competitive attitudes and taking on a sense of joint responsibility. Although competition is not necessarily bad, it’s excessive in academics. Researchers sit on data for a long time, which is bizarre. All of a sudden, that’s changing very rapidly.” The development is in line with the plans of the European Commission, which reserved € 25.8 billion  for open science in its next multi-year plan. “This is definitely the time to take open science a step further”, Letschert says. “We must hold onto this.”

Disaster year 2019/2020

UM’s 2019/20 academic year has been defined by crises. First there was the hack, with the university closing its doors and systems until it paid the hackers a ransom. Then came the pandemic. Letschert: “Both the corona crisis and the cyberattack have questioned the open identity of the university. You want to receive students, colleagues and alumni everywhere with open arms: in the library and on the servers. That’s part of being a public institution. The hack taught us the hard way that this approach has limits. We paid those hackers, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to re-open so quickly. It’s clear that we need to protect ourselves better, especially if we remain partially online for a long time. But we can’t avoid talking to financiers as well. Digital safety has a huge price tag. It shouldn’t come at the expense of education and research. ”