It’s that bad? I know little about the political climate in the Netherlands apart from what I’ve read in the last week, but that’s depressing to read mate
It’s not a recent thing. Being obviously foreign was not an issue until the mid 00s, but gradually things shifted. I tend to try and blend in when I can. Major light skin privilege.
It’s not something I discuss with my Dutch friends. They don’t understand.
That thing still looks like a combat robot from a science fiction movie. Especially the muzzle devices look so silly. I know they are important as they measure the actual muzzle velocity, which helps to make it as accurate as it is, but still: http://leopardclub.ca/reviews/Meng/Gepard/images/real-muzzle-2.jpg
These poor empty warehouses that had all this equipment that was never used. What will we do with this space? Oh I know let’s buy more equipment. Source-Me (a guy that loves military hardware)
Did you not read the article and just react based off what you think is in it? What they are protesting is the relocation of the red light district to outside the city
The Dutch are about the least afraid-of-sex people there are. It sounds like the mayor is corrupt and developers want the land (which is prime real-estate right near the central train station) for luxury Russian oligarch stolen-loot banking schemes, which is pretty much what the central city of every major European capital is used for these days.
Good someone , i.e. Utrecht, started to bail out of the current ranking system. Continental Universities are hard to compare with British & American ones, afaik. The teacher- student contact is more on the foreground compared to the latter.
Ergo, if teachers need to write papers all the time to maintain ranking, they’ll have actually less time to bother with teaching and maintaining contact with students progress & question. Imo, this is a very important element in (higher) education. *Edit
The "integrity" part is a very valid criticism. A big part of these rankings is how many papers the faculty publish per year. So you see a lot of higher ranked universities' professors adding their names to a lot of reasearches where they didn't really do anything except review/advise.
Yes, in the business world this often comes with the Icarus paradox, a phenomenon that eventually leads to a business’s failure by the very elements that brought its temporary success before.
MedUni near me used to be like that, which ended up deteriorating the quality of doctors they put out so considerably, the hospitals in the country that historically would employ the graduates coming out of there instantly, were starting to hire primarily elsewhere.
They since switched to being far less "churning out papers" focused and putting a lot of time and effort in applicable research and experience training and that turned everything around again.
Their ranking on that shitlist Times puts out dropped (considerably) as a result, yet the request from foreign students to study there surged.
Your reputation in your region and sector is still more important than some fictitious score some media outlet gives you.
How do you rank research output consistently. Every university is expected to create their own exam content, how do you effectively measure education attainment across universities?
Push for research outputs can also create perverse incentives for rapid publishing in whatever is considered quality journals - which are usually themselves associated with universities - rather than the pursuit of quality research and academic integrity.
It leads to increased strain on researvhers and a unfruitful obsession with any kind of academic output that can be easily counted. Of course research outputs are inherently important, but the whole academic publishing industry has just gotten weird the last decade or so.
A university I know of brought in a policy of only two terms for postdocs, so regardless of where they were in their research, they either had to become a lecturer or move on.
The reason behind this was to bring new postdocs in. Not to increase the quality of the research, but because it was a very effective way of opening up access to new funding streams.
These funding streams are of course very time limited and commercially driven, so what normally happens is some half assed piece of work is produced, with possibly an attempt to monetised and then more often than not discarded. Actually producing work that furthers an academic field seems to be very much down the list of priorities…
I think this is quite a common criticism to have, but a top-100 uni like this probably profits from keeping the status quo. Takes a bit of courage to step up.
Not courage, but integrity. It’s easy to criticize anything, if you don’t have to pay any price. You can either cuddle yourself comfortly in your nice words or act on them, but only the latter is what counts.
Translation: We’re making sooo much money off the backs of the suckers we employ that we’re concerned of the backlash if they found out just how bad we’re screwing them.
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