Maagdenhuis occupation, Amsterdam, February 27,2015. Guido van Nispen/Flickr. Some rights reserved.It has been two weeks since the first occupation of the Bungehuis, one of the main buildings of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The more recent occupation of UvA’s Senate House – the Maagdenhuis which was famously occupied back in 1969 – and the breadth of the grassroots movement for a New University exposes the problems of Dutch higher education. Increasing student/staff ratios, chronic underfunding, creeping micromanagement of research and teaching, and growing authoritarianism from university management are all conspiring to turn universities into a bureaucratic version of Walmart. The twin pressures of authoritarianism from above and neoliberalism from below make it necessary to develop the democratic alternative put forward by the movement for a new university.
The history of the Dutch university since the 1990s is the history of a market-inspired--or market-mimicking--authoritarianism. By the late 1970s most Dutch universities were committed to openness, democracy and equality for all their members. The university’s main constituency has always consisted of students, teachers, and staff. The descent down the authoritarian rabbit hole began with a set of structural and ideological commitments induced by unyielding government pressure in the mid-1990s.
Around that time, university bureaucracies and top management came to gradually substitute themselves for the university’s demos under the guise of ‘indirect representation’. At the same time, students were insidiously being transformed into consumers--with some needs attended to by the bureaucracy without any corresponding political empowerment--through the twin process of inter-university competition and the widespread introduction of market-inspired benchmarks.
