Valuation regimes in academia: Researchers’ attitudes towards their diversity of activities and academic performance

Evaluation systems have been long criticised for abusing and misusing bibliometric indicators. This has created a culture by which academics are constantly exposing their daily work to the standards they are expected to perform. In this study we investigate whether researchers’ own values and expectations are in line with the expectations of the evaluation system. We conduct a multiple case-study of five departments in two Dutch universities to examine how they balance between their own valuation regimes and the evaluation schemes. For this we combine curriculum analysis with a series of semi-structured interviews. We propose a model to study diversity of academic activities and apply it to the multiple-case study to understand how such diversity is shaped by discipline and career stage. We conclude that the observed misalignment is not only resulting from an abuse of metrics, but also by a lack of tools to evaluate performance in a contextualised and adaptable way.

Making it “work”: mothers’ perceptions of workplace breastfeeding and pumping at Dutch universities

Background Dutch breastfeeding rates are below World Health Organization’s recommendations and targets despite the benefits for individuals and society. Increasing the rates is complex due to multiple breastfeeding determinants, of which maternal education and employment are dominant. This study aimed to identify the perceptions and experiences of mothers employed at Dutch universities regarding barriers and enablers to workplace breastfeeding and pumping. Methods The study adopted a descriptive, qualitative research design. Thirteen semi-structured online interviews, underpinned by the Social Ecological Model, were conducted in 2020 with three experts and ten academic employees from five universities who had breastfed or pumped at work within the past five years. Qualitative data were examined through a thematic analysis. Results Four main themes were identified: physical work environment, social support, work culture and organisation, policies and legal rights. Most mothers had more negative than positive experiences combining breastfeeding with work. They were unable to exercise their rights as a breastfeeding employee due to inappropriate and inaccessible lactation rooms, a lack of communication and information-provision, other people’s lack of awareness, inflexible working hours and unadjusted workloads, especially for teaching positions. All participants found the duration of Dutch maternity leave too short. Conclusions Universities need to increase institutional efforts at multiple levels and meet their legal obligations to support breastfeeding employees. Workplace interventions should be combined with more political commitment to normalise breastfeeding, monitor compliance with maternity protection provisions at work and prolong parental leave to encourage breastfeeding continuation.

Englishization of Dutch higher education

The Netherlands is one of the countries where the Englishization of higher education is most evident. The percentage of bachelor’s and master’s programmes at Dutch universities through the medium of English is among the highest in Europe. This chapter addresses the concern and public controversy generated by the preponderance of English. It illustrates how language policy encapsulates the changes in Dutch universities and the impacts these have on stakeholders and compares these with a study of students’ perceptions of EMI. The analysis contends that Englishization can only be understood in the light of the impact of neoliberalism on academia, highlighting the incongruity between the critical voices in the public controversy and the discourse of university administrators.

Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access. Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route - open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way. Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories. This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”. In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level. It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.

Translating Researchers’ Experiences into Training on Research Integrity at Universities of Applied Sciences (TETRIAS)

"In the Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs) applied research is gaining an increasingly important place in their activities, not only as a means to improve teaching but as a means to develop innovations and professionalism as well. The establishment of a clear framework of research integrity is an important condition to foster the research environment. Up to now, in the UASs there is no specific training for researchers that helps researchers to develop the necessary competencies. This project seeks to address this issue by developing a training program on ‘Responsible Conduct of Research’. To identify what topics should be covered twelve researchers from six different UASs and seven different domains were interviewed (Economics, Arts and Culture, Pedagogy, Technology, Healthcare, Business Administration, and Bioinformatics). Their input resulted in a picture of the state of the art in integrity issues that the interviewees considered as important. Based on an explorative qualitative data analysis and the project team’s expertise tailored learning objectives and appropriate learning methods were formulated. The training program will likely be offered through the Association of UASs (Vereniging van Hogescholen) to all UASs in our country. "

Operationalizing public value in higher education: the use of narratives as an alternative for performance indicators

More than 25 years after Moore’s first introduction of the public value concept in 1995, the concept is now widely used, but its operationalization is still considered difficult. This paper presents the empirical results of a study analyzing the application of the public value concept in Higher Education Institutions, thereby focusing on how to account for public value. The paper shows how Dutch universities of applied sciences operationalize the concept ‘public value’, and how they report on the outcome achievements. The official strategy plans and annual reports for FY2016 through FY2018 of the ten largest institutions were used. While we find that all the institutions selected aim to deliver public value, they still use performance indicators that have a more narrow orientation, and are primarily focused on processes, outputs, and service delivery quality. However, we also observe that they use narratives to show the public value they created. In this way this paper contributes to the literature on public value accounting.

Brief aus den Niederlanden

In this letter to our German colleagues we describe the situation, mentality, and organization of academic philosophy in the Netherlands in comparison to Germany. We proceed in five acts. In the first act, A wide beach, we set the stage and introduce the two academic landscapes; in the second act, Between controversy and frontal teaching, we compare the Dutch and German academic temper and practices. In the third act, Flat land, flat hierarchies, we parallelize the geography of the Netherlands and the organizational structure of Dutch universities. In the fourth act, Philosophers among merchants, we discuss the positive and negative sides of the liberal, transparent, competitive and progress-oriented spirit of Dutch academic philosophy. In the fifth and final act, Philosophy from the pragmatic point of view, we conclude what we can learn from our Dutch neighbours: We plea for a non-elitist, down to earth, straight-forward, and open-minded way of doing philosophy, where one is neither shying away from controversy nor too shy to come down from the ivory tower and mingle with the audience.

Circles and Spheres of Free Philosophizing

This chapter is mostly dedicated to the historical circumstances and the intellectual context of Spinoza’s conception of the freedom of philosophizing. In the Dutch universities during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the expression “freedom of philosophizing” was inseparable from disputes between Cartesian philosophers and Calvinist theologians about academic freedom and the separation of philosophy from theology. Spinoza, however, widened the scope of the expression and brought it into contact with another broad controversy regarding freedom of religious conscience going back to the early years of the Dutch Republic in the later sixteenth century and the controversy between Lipsius and Coornhert. The chapter argues that it was Spinoza who first managed to bring these two conceptions of academic freedom and freedom of religious conscience together under a single, systematic conception of libertas philosophandi.

The new century

Chapter 5 is a discussion of the rise of Dutch physics around 1900 based on three speeches, by Lorentz, Haga, and Zeeman, on the flourishing state of Dutch physics at the universities of Leiden, Amsterdam, and Groningen. All three speeches deal with the promise of the electromagnetic theory, electricity, and atomism and show that the electromagnetic world view was the center of attention in 1900. Dutch science was promoted by a new type of secondary education, the expansion of physics at Dutch universities, the modernization of the university curriculum, and the new, more individualistic view of science as a pursuit in its own right. Competition from places like Göttingen and Copenhagen gradually diminished the role of Leiden in physics, leading to the end of this “second golden age.”