Studium Quarantine: working from home with Rob van Duijn

In 1990, you started doing community service with Studium Generale. So you’ve been working with SG for nearly thirty years now. Doesn’t it ever get boring?
It’s extremely dynamic. You’re always dealing with other people and you hear so many different stories. And when there’s a full hall, an enthusiastic speaker and a responsive audience, it’s very rewarding. That makes it easy to keep on going.

Actually, you graduated as a drawing teacher. Didn’t you ever want to go down that road?
When I’d done my community service, I stayed on working for Studium Generale part-time. I thought I’d be able to draw and paint on the side. But it didn’t happen. I concentrated completely on the work.

Was the work very different in the past?
Our programme is continually changing. First, we organised mainly series of talks on a particular theme. Since 2008, the programme has included lecture series, which have made the normal programme freer and more varied. We’ve also developed in line with the internationalisation of the university. Nowadays, fifty percent of the programme is given in English.

Has that meant a change of audience?
It happened quite gradually. When everything was still in Dutch, fewer students showed up. The English-language programme has ensured our survival. A regularly recurring discussion is whether Studium Generale should be intended for students in the first place. Students are very important, of course, but we also want our activities to be accessible to everyone. Fortunately, the university feels the same way. Everybody’s welcome.

Studium Generale organises activities that cover many different fields. Are there subjects you find particularly appealing?
In this line of work, you come across many interesting things. Sometimes it may involve quantum mechanics, and sometimes health or social issues. You get to know a bit about everything. I’ve really developed along with SG, and I have very broad interests. I’m an arts and culture person with no background in physics, but I now find scientific themes very interesting as well.

Do you then go and delve more into the subject?
I just go to the lectures and I don’t read a book on the subject afterwards, but I do believe strongly in personal development. That has to continue, even after you’ve finished your studies. Studium Generale contributes to that development. And I’m continually in action myself. The quarantine means that I’m suddenly spending every evening at home, whereas before I was out every night. I attended our lectures twice a week and often went to the theatre and cinema.

Do you spend a lot of time on your work outside working hours?
I make notes on everything. Then I read the newspaper and think – hey, that’s an interesting topic, or an interesting person. I’ve got a great long list of scientists, opinion makers and cultural people, who I think we should invite to give a talk. Now, in corona times, I’m continually listening, reading and looking, and in no time at all you get a whole list of people. They may be virologists, but also people who are concerned with ethical questions. What’s it doing to us socially, psychologically or economically? I’m always looking at different aspects of a topic.

What do you do with your evenings now?
I watch more things online. But I don’t really like it. The viewing experience is different. I miss being with people; the live experience. Going somewhere together; the feeling that you’re experiencing something together. And people’s reactions, to which you react in turn, and discussing the experience afterwards. What I do think is useful is that you can press the pause button and go to the toilet. But that affects your concentration, which isn’t good, although it can be efficient in a two-hour online lecture. Another useful thing is that at certain points you can just fast forward to get to the conclusion. But it’s not only your concentration that suffers – the atmosphere vanishes as well.

Do you like being in the spotlight?
I’ve never found it difficult to stand in front of a group and talk to them. I also did a bit of acting, a long time ago. Amateur stuff. As a panel chair, I sometimes feel like a fish in water, although I sometimes wonder afterwards what on earth I said and did. If you draw attention to yourself, you also have to be open to the fact that people will form an opinion of you. Not that I particularly want that, but you can’t escape it.

What’s your life been like since 16 March?
I’m adjusting really well. I’m enjoying working at home with my husband. It’s nice to have someone at home; having coffee, eating lunch and going for a walk together. I’ve started doing jobs around the house and painting; that sort of thing. I do miss sitting with friends at an outdoor café though. I don’t really need to be out every evening or going to the theatre all the time, although I do like to be among people and to dance at a festival or party. But I can amuse myself at home perfectly well too.

Talking of festivals: the PAS festival has been cancelled.
Yes, that’s a great shame. PAS is such a fun and interesting festival for so many people. It always gives the team a huge boost to organise something like that at the start of the season. All week long, you’re running to and fro, from early in the morning to late at night. It’s absolutely exhausting, but it’s wonderful bringing the public together like that through lectures, music and theatre. It encompasses everything Studium Generale stands for. It’s a fantastic way to show the university to the city: here we are and we’re doing interesting things. Come on in and celebrate with us.

How does the current situation affect the SG team?
I count my blessings regarding all the online possibilities nowadays, but I do hope that those online things are no longer necessary as soon as possible. Meetings via Zoom, for example. In the beginning, it’s fun. “Oh, you’re here too!” Seeing everyone again for a while. Chatting over a cup of coffee and arranging practical matters work just fine. But video calling doesn’t lend itself to having a real in-depth discussion about the programme or to creative brainstorming. Listening and watching is very intensive. If you see that someone’s not saying much, there’s no time afterwards for personal attention. There’s something essential missing. What is that? The soul?

Are there positive sides to it too?
What is good is that things aren’t rushed any more. Everyone was always busy doing as much as possible, preferably all at once: working hard, being sociable, experiencing everything and travelling. Now we can’t do a lot of those things, we’re thrown on our own resources. Empty agendas give peace of mind. It’s important we hang on to that a bit. Whilst something is often missing in online contact; a certain focus, you can rediscover it in one-to-one contacts. Going for a walk together and having a good conversation, for example. Although you have fewer contacts, the contacts you do have are more intense.

Are there lessons we can learn from the corona crisis?
In every crisis, there are always lots of people who say that everything will change for the better. I hope so too, but I’ve seen in other crises that we soon end up thundering down the same track again. I worry about those at the back of that track. How will they fare? There’s plenty of solidarity at the moment, but will it continue? Take the financial crisis of 2008, for example. Then, people were saying “Wow, we’re going to have to deal differently with lots of things”. But before you knew it, the banks were all decked out again and now it’s even worse than it was. I live in hope, but I’m an optimist and a pessimist at the same time. I fear for the people at the bottom of society.

As Studium Generale, do you want to address this?
I think it’s important to pay attention to matters like poverty, for example, and social issues, refugees and the climate. We have to do so, on the basis of what we’re able to do, which is to bring things up for discussion and let the experts have their say.

Isn’t the threshold for visiting our activities too high, especially for the people at the bottom of society?
Of course, what we present is intellectual fodder, but everybody’s welcome. People do make the association: “It’s from the university, so you need to have studied for it”, and it’s not easy to shake off that image. The PAS festival is, of course, very accessible, with short lectures on all sorts of themes. But if you really want to do something for people on the fringes of society, then you have to actually go to the fringes of the city. I can envisage taking the university into the neighbourhood and organising a sort of mini touring PAS festival.

I can imagine that lectures might sometimes be difficult.
You don’t always have to understand everything in order to find it interesting, like with natural sciences in my case. One lecture about Alzheimer’s was attended by a whole group of MBO (vocational education) students, who found the scientific story very interesting, as they were working with Alzheimer’s patients themselves. So it was great to find out more about how the brain works and how the research was going. The threshold is high, however. Imposing buildings and an intellectual audience. There are big differences. It starts at primary school already in some ways. The kids I look after went to the local school. I live in the Wittevrouwenveld neighbourhood. Yet when they get older, a sifting out process takes place at a certain point.

What’s Studium Generale doing at the moment?
We’re trying to transpose our qualities into an online environment. It’s an interesting challenge. I’m trying to think about what we can add to the online landscape that already exists. I take a good look at what other people are doing and what I like about it. When does it work and when doesn’t it? We’re now opting for variety and trying things out, such as our online discussions.

What’s happening with the regular programme?
At first, I thought we’d be able to continue our live programme again in May, but now it’s turned into September. And then there’s the question of what will be possible then. We have three scenarios for it. A: we’ll reopen just as we were. B: we’ll reopen, but then with restrictions, i.e. far fewer people 1.5 metres’ apart, alongside live streaming. And C: everything has to take place online. In the case of C, you really have to think about the form in which you provide something. Things we find important are interaction, being together, listening and discussing, and we have to think about how to do that online. Just live streaming the lectures is one-way traffic. We want to safeguard quality.

Do you think live streams will attract a different audience?
I myself find that if something is online, I’ll only look at it a month later or forget it altogether. But if the lecture takes place in real life, I actually put it in my diary. Then there’s a greater need to commit to it. If a lecture is recorded, it’s easier to decide not to go, with the idea that you can always catch up with it later online. Yet we’ve often had people saying, “I’ve got to come all the way from Eindhoven. Can’t you put it online?” It might be good that corona has prompted us to provide this extra service. The online plans we were always putting off are now speeding up.

What are the plans for the 2020-2021 programme?
Travel will still be a problem for a long time to come, so it’s difficult to invite international speakers. We’ve been able to postpone quite a lot of the cancelled programme activities, but the question is what will happen to them. We’ll have to rethink many of the themes in relation to the changes in the world. The world is in such a state of flux at the moment that themes are popping up that we want to deal with in the coming season. And the content of the postponed lectures will change as well. Take the lecture by Jonathan Holslag, for example. He’ll certainly be linking up his lecture to current events.

Text and visual material by Amber Helena Reisig.