The current financial situation stands in stark contrast to that of almost a year ago, when Mare revealed plans by the Faculty Board to scrap or merge unique programmes and specialisations. A reorganisation was not ruled out. The reason for this was an annual budget deficit of around six to eight million euros.

‘The Faculty Board’s decision not to make any forced redundancies still has to be submitted to the participation body,’ Dean Henk te Velde explains. ‘This is certainly good news, but in the longer term, the faculty is not out of financial trouble yet.’

How do you explain this turnaround?
‘Six months ago, we seemed to be heading towards a structural deficit of 8 million euros by 2030. However, once we started implementing measures (natural attrition, a recruitment freeze and no more temporary hires, Ed.) and their effects began to show, we saw the budget deficit shrink.

‘Secondly, we thought we only had sufficient reserves to last us one or two years, which wouldn’t get us very far. But when we checked our coffers again to see how much money we had left, it turned out there were more temporary funds than we had previously thought. We’re going to dedicate our entire faculty reserve to solving this problem. That, in combination with a shrinking deficit due to the measures, will result in a balanced budget over the next five years, meaning that the problem is solved for that period. This buys us time, which we must now use to look for structural solutions.’

Where would the cuts have been made if a reorganisation had in fact been necessary?
‘We had assumed that a balanced budget would only be attainable by making forced redundancies. LIAS and International Studies staff in particular saw the writing on the wall and feared for their jobs. There is some overcapacity among lecturers there, because student numbers have dropped. Though we didn’t want to focus all our austerity measures on them, and legally we wouldn’t have been able to do so anyway.

'We’re also fortunate that the Test for Foreign Language Education is being removed from the Balanced Internationalisation Bill. That had been hanging over the faculty like the sword of Damocles. It would have been disastrous for International Studies. That programme is of great financial importance to us. We would have faced mass redundancies and the whole faculty would have been thrown into disarray.’

If that money had been found in the coffers last year, could the Board have avoided bringing up the idea of scrapping and merging programmes?
‘If we had known all that from the start, we could have gone through this whole process in a more relaxed way. But something had to be done regardless, because even with the current measures, it remains to be seen whether this will be sufficient in the longer term.’

‘Initially, we saw no other option than to discontinue programmes. But after the news broke, there was a lot of resistance to this idea: it would cause damage to the faculty and bring in too little money. And so, we made the decision not to scrap programmes, but to cut courses across the faculty instead. Six months ago, getting all programmes on board seemed like a pipe dream, but the shock effect of scrapping programmes has helped tremendously.’

Wouldn’t it have been a good strategy to drop the bomb first in order to wake up the faculty?
‘If you knew how much the Faculty Board struggled with that proposed decision and the resistance it triggered... Look: if we had known at the time that this was the way to get the faculty moving, it could have been a strategy.’

But that was not the case?
‘No, no, absolutely not. ‘You’d have to be extremely conspiratorial to think of that.’ 

But the fact of the matter is that the faculty will shrink by 150 FTE by 2031. How does that reconcile with reducing workload?
All programmes have been working for several months now to streamline their curricula: fewer elective courses, more shared teaching, larger groups. Instead of hiring additional staff, we are reducing the range of duties.’

In a farewell interview in Mare, your predecessor Mark Rutgers said: ‘No matter how you look at it, there will be a loss of quality. We will be left with fewer staff, fewer chairs and therefore fewer specialists. For students, that inevitably means loss of knowledge.’ Can the quality of education be maintained with 150 fewer FTEs?
‘It’s going to be a challenge. At the same time, we are doing the impossible in Leiden. The current Dutch funding model is based on large programmes with many students and simple curricula. We, on the other hand, have a lot of very small programmes, which we still want to keep. It might be tempting to believe that everything was better in the past, but you can also look at it the other way: although we’re cutting courses across the faculty, this allows us to retain the small programmes.’ 

The current solution is temporary. Moreover, the problem that started it all – fewer PhD completions, fewer earned credits, higher salary costs – is still there. What will the faculty do to achieve long-term financial health?
‘We don’t know what the situation will be like in five years, except that it is fairly unpredictable. We need to be prepared for multiple scenarios. One of these is that 2031 will turn out to be a crisis year. So in the coming years, we need to better prepare the faculty for potentially difficult situations.’

‘Everything we have set in motion now, including cutting courses and sharing teaching so that we can manage with fewer staff, is the first step. The second step is to consider the long-term effect of all these measures. The third step is to attract new students through new programmes. The Executive Board is also asking us to consider sources of income other than the government, such as sponsorship or commercial activities.’

Won’t that complicate matters in terms of conflicts of interest?
‘You’ll have to resort to unorthodox measures to avoid being entirely at the mercy of government whims. You shouldn’t rule out those options in advance.’

Are you relieved that you don’t have to dismiss staff?
‘(Interim vice dean, Ed.) Jos Schaeken and I came here with the task of getting the faculty’s finances back on track. That would probably have required a lot of forced redundancies. Just before the summer break, we came to the conclusion that things suddenly looked very different. While that is, of course, great news, it also leaves us feeling a little confused.

 ‘At the same time, the task of preparing the faculty for the future is still there, and in a way, it has become even more challenging: because there is a risk that the sense of urgency will fade. We should stop acting as if we’re in a crisis, but we do need to keep moving forward.’

Staff were extremely shocked by the situation the faculty found itself in last year and may be thinking: was all this unrest necessary? I can imagine that staff are angry about this.
‘Me too. If you’re far removed from the Board and dependent on what comes at you, you feel helpless and uncertain. People wondered why all of this was happening, when they were working so hard. We need to clearly explain what happened that has led to this current, more favourable, situation and be accountable for it. And we need to make clear what we are still asking of the staff. We still have some follow-up work to do in that respect.’