The Facebook page “Stuff Dutch People Like” recently published a list of what Dutch people do not like. First place: Being confused for a German. Second place: Germans. Whoa! 

Recently, I received an offer to write a regular, five weekly column in Dagblad De Limburger. The newspaper was looking for a new group of columnists and thought I might be a suitable candidate. I don’t think this blog was the reason; a journalist who then came to interview me for an article in the paper just before my first column had apparently read little of my writings. He wanted to know my exact writing style, whether I was prone to tantalizing columns in which I would focus on tensions brewing in the region.

At the start of this academic year, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, I was asked to participate in a debate here in Maastricht on “borders”: the frontiers that surround us here in the southernmost part of the country to the east, west and south. 

In een nostalgische bui denk ik nog wel eens terug aan mijn eerste baantje. Vol jeugdig enthousiasme achter mijn stalen Gispen bureautje. Gewapend met telefoon, fax én een roestige typemachine waar ik mijn vingernagels op brak. Daarnaast rende ik (vaak letterlijk) het hele gebouw door om met collega’s persoonlijk zaken af te stemmen.

Soon I will host a champagne toast in honour of our employees who have given 25 or 40 years of service. These are the happy days in the life of an administrator, you see. It has only been since last year that we’ve been able to honour people who have served 40 years. That’s extra special when you know that our university will celebrate its 40th anniversary only in 2016. These people are the true pioneers of UM. They jumped into the deep end and are still swimming around forty years later. I just calculated how many hours of their lives they have spent so far at this university. Assuming a 38-hour week and 8 weeks of holidays per year, this amounts to 66,880 hours. That gave me a moment’s pause. 

Do you remember where you were on 9 November 1989? Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—a crucial moment in the German and European history of the twentieth century. 

‘Everything valuable is vulnerable’, wrote one of the greatest Dutch poets, Lucebert, in 1974. Coincidentally, this was also the year that the first fifty students started the medicine programme in Maastricht, even before the official approval from The Hague (the Rijksuniversiteit Limburg was only established in 1976).

Ton Wilthagen recently argued that universities should bring their knowledge to the market more convincingly... This blog is only available in Dutch.

In communications the medium is the message. Don’t mail if you can call. Don’t call if you can visit. That is my motto, also in 2015. Of course you can wish your friends a happy New Year via a post on Facebook or LinkedIn, a 140 character Tweet, or by sending an e-mail to all your relations. Some people create a funny YouTube video, pin a nice picture on Pinterest, upload a photo via Instagram, and some write a postcard. My favourite way is ‘old school’: with a handshake or three warm kisses.

The senseless killings and horrific attack on a newspaper and on a shop. Of course these terrorist attacks are violations of the right to life and the freedom of expression and therefore on our democratic societies. The perpetrators wanted to instill fear and to create chaos and undo our precious freedoms. Inhuman and illegal. But that is so obvious that we did not write about it. It is also obvious that states will do whatever it takes to defend themselves and protect their citizens. And that is what they must do under the positive obligations to protect! The balance is to accept that societies will not be risk free and that barbaric idiots, whatever their invoked justification, will occasionally pop up and kill. The balance is therefore to protect our freedoms and liberties in the pursuit of the achievement of security. Let us not walk into the trap of over-responses and blaming. And let’s also work at prevention and the eradication of exclusion, poverty and unemployment, and in favor of protection of youth and assistance of families and parents.