New interim dean Henk te Velde: ‘I don't have to do it alone’
Professor Henk te Velde started as interim dean of the Faculty of Humanities on 1 March. Mark Rutgers' successor is faced with the task of getting the faculty back to financial health.
‘In my opinion, you can only fulfil a task like the one facing our faculty if all employees are involved in the discussion,’ argues Te Velde. 'Of course you can officially dictate from above what needs to be done, but the strength of our faculty lies precisely in the professionals, both academic staff and support staff. I really like that several of them have told me that they are happy I’ve become dean. The great thing is that I don't have to do it alone: on the one hand, I can rely on the enormous substantive knowledge of very many colleagues, while other colleagues have a perfect grasp of how the processes work.'
Faculty Board
Te Velde hopes his academic background will help him in this new role. 'I am in favour of this kind of management position being filled by an academic, rather than a professional administrator. Moreover, under these circumstances, where a lot has to be done in a short time, I think it’s good to have someone in place who already knows the faculty, but no longer has any major personal interests in it.'
The new dean is referring to his retirement at the end of the interim term. ‘For both Jos (Schaeken, the new interim vice-dean of master's education, ed.) and myself, the fact that we are close to retirement makes it a little easier to take on this job,’ says Te Velde. 'The downside is that it does put us in a somewhat unusual Faculty Board, with two historians, three members in their sixties and only one permanent female member. That’s not ideal, especially as I have previously noticed how well things work in a team that is diverse in terms of gender, age and type. At the same time, we should be glad that people are willing to do this for the faculty at the present time.'
Three pillars
The policy Te Velde envisages will rest on three pillars: education, research and the faculty's social mission. ‘Much of the discussion about finances focuses on education, because that is where our income is primarily generated,’ he says. 'At the same time, this emphasis on money sometimes obscures what is really at stake: that we as a faculty will lose our raison d'être if we no longer attract students. I see it very emphatically as our task to give students a good academic education to prepare them for a position in society.'
That academic education relies on research that is also carried out at the university. ‘Our research attracts students to Leiden and The Hague, but of course it also has value in its own right, actually a lot of value, as in our specialist programmes that are unique to Leiden and other excellent research carried out here,’ Te Velde says. ‘Those programmes may not attract the most students, but the research in these fields is extremely valuable.’
The same goes for the faculty's role in society. Te Velde: ‘We teach in areas where you would find it hard to imagine there no longer being an academic variant in the Netherlands, such as teacher training for school languages. That particular social mission weighs heavily for me.'
Nevertheless, the new dean sees a hierarchy in the various pillars. ‘I still find it hard to imagine a faculty where less attention is paid to that social mission for school languages, for example; I can't imagine a faculty without meaningful research, and there is simply no longer a faculty at all if there is no longer meaningful education.’
Different dossiers side by side
Te Velde wants to do justice to all these aspects by focusing on different dossiers simultaneously. 'Initially, the Faculty Board's idea was to concentrate on programmes with a small intake in order to rationalise the range of faculty programmes offered. That triggered quite a discussion. At the moment, shared teaching seems to be a good option, while at the same time we have come to realise that this has benefits not only in the programmes with a small intake.'
Programmes like History or International Studies have a high intake, but are also organised more efficiently, according to Te Velde. ‘That also applies to language teaching, which is now done in many different ways,’ he says. ‘We could be more streamlined in that.’
The faculty office is also being looked at. 'There, we work with a proportionality principle: the percentage of the budget that goes here is fixed in the budget. So if the budget decreases in other areas, the office will have to decrease with it.'
‘Essentials preserved’
Te Velde wants to keep an eye for the human dimension: ‘There are no non-performers running around at our faculty. They are all people with heart, who work hard and have an original contribution to make. That weighs incredibly heavily for us in the restructuring discussions, while at the same time we have to take substantial steps. It would be very nice in two years‘ time to leave behind an organisation in which the essentials have been preserved and where the crisis may even have offered room for new initiatives.’