‘Do you happen to know of a basketball court in Leiden?’ Luc Sels (1967) points to the ball in the cabinet of his office in the Administration and Central Services Building. ‘That’s the only thing I brought with me from Leuven. I’m a huge basketball fan and played at a relatively high level for a long time, as a point guard. I’m strong in terms of insight and accuracy. But I’m not very tall and physically couldn’t compete with the two-metre guys.’

‘My two youngest sons play for the Stella Artois Leuven Bears. We have a basketball hoop in the garden. During the week I live in Leiden, but when I’m in Leuven on weekends, the first thing I do is play a game with the three of us. The accuracy is still there. Simon is fifteen, around 1.90 metres tall, has shoulders twice as broad as mine and he knows all the dirty tricks. Playing against him, I’m starting to feel that at my age, the robustness is fading a little. I team up with his eleven-year-old brother Wout – who is also very good – to play against him. It’s great fun, but we usually lose.

‘Two weeks ago, I was in Leuven for the Bears’ match against ZZ Leiden. Leuven thrashed Leiden. But ZZ thrashed Leuven when they played here in December.’

Sels himself traded the city where ‘most of life has taken place’ for Leiden, where he has been President of the Executive Board since November. He studied sociology in Leuven. ‘My father graduated in sociology of religion, my sister in family sociology and I in labour and business sociology. The conversations around the family table about major social issues undoubtedly influenced my choice.’

He went on to become a professor and served as dean for nine years before being elected rector in 2017. ‘Administrative positions were not part of my career script. I was elected to the policy role of dean by my colleagues with a number of votes I couldn’t turn down.’

What did they see in you?
‘You’ll have to ask them.’

They’re not here right now.
‘I find it very difficult to say this about myself, but I think it has something to do with a combination of vision, ambition and openness. As an administrator, you’re constantly beset by the trials and tribulations of everyday working life, and I think my outward-looking perspective has always allowed me to rise above that. I had a clear goal: I wanted to make the faculty one of the strongest in Europe.

‘I don’t like to be called the chief of the house, at most the first among equals. My style is to give employees a clear sense of what is going on. This also makes them more willing to accept unpopular decisions.’

What changes did you implement as rector in Leuven?
‘I was dissatisfied with the policy. The university lacked an overarching strategy. It was very much focused on Flanders and not very internationally oriented. Old universities tend to get stuck in the past and not look ahead enough.

‘There was a major shift. The number of international students has grown by 36 per cent. Leuven has also become the most successful university in the Horizon Europe research programme. The university now has a European image. I think the Netherlands looks at this with a certain degree of admiration.’

Is Leiden also not looking outward enough?
‘No, I think Leiden is an excellent university, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

Or perhaps you would, in order to bring about change here as well.
‘When I started as rector in Leuven, Leiden was an example for me. Former rector Douwe Breimer has always been a mentor from afar; he was on our Board of Governors. The ties with Carel Stolker have always been excellent, and Hester Bijl is one of my main peers.

 ‘I followed the developments surrounding LDE (a collaboration between the universities of Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam, Ed.) with great admiration. The Leiden Bio Science Park is of European top quality, and the Archaeology and Humanities faculties are internationally acclaimed. Leiden has an incredibly interesting portfolio, and we don’t recognise this enough. I think people here speak about their own university with far too little pride. I want to instil that sense of pride here.’

What is not going well here?
‘There’s nothing I would say is really going badly.’

Unlike you, politicians want to put the brakes on internationalisation at universities.
‘In my first week in Leiden, it was a top priority. University umbrella organisation UNL has lobbied very hard to water down the plans of the Balanced Internationalisation Bill (Wib) and that now seems to be paying off. By the way, Flemish universities can only dream of a language policy like the one in the Netherlands, because they have much stricter language legislation. From a Flemish perspective, it’s a lenient bill.

‘It’s good that we no longer have to convert English-taught programmes to Dutch. The focus is now more on the numbers of students admitted. This is a good middle ground between the societal demand to temper internationalisation and the academic need to attract the best talent in the world. Moreover, these students are very important to our economy and overall prosperity.’

In your Dies Natalis Lecture, you said you wanted to make a stand for the humanities and social sciences, which are under more financial pressure than other faculties. How do you plan to do that?
‘Firstly, by continuing to emphasise the relevance of these programmes. The humanities comprise a huge range of area studies, from the Middle East to Arabic studies and from Russian and Japanese to Korean and Chinese. You can’t understand political tensions if you don’t know anything about the language, culture and history. We can make a huge contribution to that knowledge. We must try to link that expertise more closely to security studies and international relations, for example.’

‘What I do not want is to accept the argument that we should abolish small language programmes because they’re not financially viable. They give Leiden a unique profile and we will spare no effort, including financially, to keep them alive and make them more relevant. In this, dean Henk te Velde is my ally.’

Before you took office, the decision was made to make significant cuts to the International Institute for Asian Studies. Will you reverse that decision?
‘Definitely not, because that would create chaos at the start of the new Executive Board’s term. We want to bring consistency.’

How will the Executive Board tackle workload pressure?
‘I can’t prove it, but I think the work pressure issues at KU Leuven are even more urgent than they are here. Given my expertise in the labour market, it’s relatively easy for me to compare with other sectors. And I have to say that burnout figures for universities are lower than in the private sector.

‘I appreciate that in the Netherlands, there is more respect for the separation between work and private life. In Flanders, work emails continue throughout the weekend and people work six days out of seven.

‘A lot of workload pressure is also self-imposed. Ambitious academics invest every free hour they have in additional research. They give too little thought to the fact that they are dragging support staff along with them.

‘As the Board, we’re also implementing a change ourselves. We currently still meet every week, but that puts a lot of pressure on people, because after each meeting, it’s a Herculean task for the services to prepare the next one in time. Soon, we will start meeting once every two weeks. That will bring some relief to those supporting us.’

Can academics also start meeting less often?
‘If we as the Board meet less frequently, this will also have an effect on other parts of the organisation. Don’t underestimate that. I’m here to ensure that scaling back the cuts actually benefits education and research. Otherwise, Vice President of the Executive Board Timo Kos will have a much more daunting task in reducing the workload.

‘We also continue to emphasise that we want to take a different approach to things like citation scores and career expectations. We need to look at multiple solutions.’

The university employee experience survey shows that trust in the Board is very low.
‘That’s a major concern for me; we need to work on rebuilding that trust. As the Board, we need to be more visible and more approachable. Staff should at least be able to communicate their concerns.’

Staff also experience social unsafety.
‘On that point, the previous Board took courageous action in several cases. I believe we must remain decisive. No matter how great the reputation of the misbehaving professor in question, we must take action.

‘Leadership courses will become mandatory. Understanding what works and what doesn’t work in supervision, guidance and openness in leadership goes a long way.’

But the main criticism is that this kind of misconduct arises from the strong hierarchy in academia.
‘We must stop viewing academia as something exceptional. In Flanders, a central reporting point for social safety has been in place for three years. Of the total number of reports, universities account for five per cent, while more than fifty per cent come from SMEs.

'At the same time, universities involve many authority relationships with enormous dependencies: PhD supervisor and PhD candidate, the student who is graded by a lecturer. These are vulnerable relationships. The problem is that social safety has gone undiscussed for so many decades, so there is a huge amount of catching up to do. That is the burden of leadership: you have to keep up with developments, but society doesn’t give you enough time to do so.’ 

Another issue: why is there still no advice from the Committee on Human Rights about academic collaboration with Israeli universities? Are there tensions within the committee?
‘I’m not going to comment on that. I don’t know which way the advice will go either, but I hope it will come soon.’

Do you think it is justified that more university buildings will be occupied in the meantime?
‘I haven’t played my wild card yet, so I’m going to play it now. It’s not my style of leadership to anticipate things that haven’t happened yet, because then you start bringing them on yourself.’

How significant was the death of engineering student Sanda Dia – who died in December 2018 during an initiation ritual of the Leuven student club Reuzegom – for you?

Sels becomes visibly emotional. 

‘I have to try not to get choked up now... That event still weighs heavily on me. It is the black page of eight years as rector.’

You were criticized for not taking firm enough action because the Reuzegom members were not expelled from the university.
‘To this day, I stand behind all our decisions, but I also leave room for doubt. I would like to say a few more words about how that unfolded, but it’s becoming difficult again...’

Sels falls silent for a moment.

‘Sorry. As an administrator, you experience pressure from society to act immediately in internal disciplinary proceedings, preferably within a week or a month. But the judicial system only reaches a conclusion years later. You have to wait for that.

‘At the time, we were unable to determine which of the eighteen Reuzegom members had been present on the fatal day, and who had done what. Should we have expelled them from the university, knowing that other Flemish universities were not allowed to refuse these boys?’

‘We then decided to impose a light sanction (suspensions and assignments), while at the same time focusing primarily on rehabilitation. I still stand by that decision. During the period when the initiators were waiting for a criminal verdict, we worked with them on reintegration and instilling a sense of guilt. However, we were only partially successful.

A year later, the judicial file was leaked to Het Nieuwsblad. Only then did it become clear to us, and to everyone else, how horrific the events had been and what role the different members had played. If we had had that information earlier, we would have made different decisions.

‘We then permanently expelled seven students from the university after all. We were criticised for this and it was interpreted as an attempt to save our reputation. I was vilified in the press: we couldn’t do anything right any more. Only later did there come to be more understanding, both within and outside the university. The judiciary was grateful that we had allowed criminal law to take its course. I will always defend the rule of law.’