Shortly before Christmas I received, like all other members of staff, an electronic University Newsletter in my inbox, with at the top of the front page a piece by the Executive Board (college van bestuur) about the results of the recent Personnel Monitor survey. In this piece the members of the Board, reacting to data showing 'that the level of pride in our organization is declining and that members of staff are identifying less and less with the university', asked themselves, apparently in all innocence: 'How can that be? What does it have to do with?'

I had never before felt compelled to react to an article in a university newsletter, but this one seemed to demand an immediate response, which I duly mailed to the editors. Having received no reply and no acknowledgement from that quarter, I take the opportunity now to make the content of my message public via Mare.

Grim atmosphere

As far as the academic staff of the Humanities Faculty are concerned, some of the most important answers to the Board's rhetorical question are obvious. The grim atmosphere surrounding the rehousing of the Faculty in the new Humanities Campus is accurately evoked in a whole series of articles in the Mare by Joost Augusteijn ('Why I resigned from the Humanities Campus Steering Committee'), Remco Beuker ('How our Humanities were knowingly demolished'; 'No member of staff can stop the advance of the university as student-squeezing money machine'), and close to a dozen members of staff of the History Institute ('Flexible work spaces and shared offices are disastrous for our academic work').

The views expressed in these pieces are those of the great majority of us. In a recent survey by the Advisory Board of the Leiden Institute of Area Studies (LIAS), for example, only eight out of 100 respondents said they approved of the current rehousing plan, while 79 found it unacceptable.

Scandal

To this can be added: the scandal of the quarter of a million euros worth of illegal spy cameras that were installed in the lecture theatres during the corona pandemic, at a time when working cameras for remote teaching were hardly to be found; the gross managerial miscalculation regarding the Sleutels housing complex, which miscalculation forms part of the reason for the current faculty workspace crisis; the fact that the misery of involuntary working from home during the corona crisis was opportunistically seized upon by university bureaucrats to justify a unilateral decision to reduce permanently and drastically the office facilities provided to academic staff on campus; and the incessant changes and reorganizations in educational support services and study coordination, which hinder the work of lecturers and teaching programme leaders, and about which the academic staff are never consulted, only informed.

All in all, then, plenty of reasons for dissatisfaction and a sense of alienation among those who perform the core tasks of the university: teaching and research. Their needs and interests are increasingly ignored by their colleagues in the managerial, administrative and housing departments, whose task it should surely be to facilitate, and provide optimal support for, the work of the academic staff.

David Henley is Professor of Contemporary Indonesia Studies