University of Twente dismisses dozens of staff, Delft also cuts back

The University of Twente has been facing financial difficulties for some time. These are largely caused by the faculty of Technical Natural Sciences, which has been making losses for years and where a reorganisation was already announced in September.

Now it appears that the faculty is indeed taking drastic measures. Not only are 46 staff members being dismissed, but the faculty is also scrapping eight departments (research groups affiliated with a professor). In recent days, the management has held discussions with the affected staff members.

A dismissed researcher tells RTV Oost that the atmosphere in the faculty is ‘tense’. He is an associate professor and is losing his job at the university after twenty years. He was supposed to give lectures in the coming weeks, but that will stop ‘with immediate effect’.

A spokesperson for the university states that ‘nobody has to hand in their keycard from one day to the next’, but that the dismissed staff members are, in principle, ‘exempt from work’. They may still supervise students if they wish, but they can also stop working immediately.

According to the management, the eight departments do not fit the profile of the university, generate too little revenue, or are insufficiently involved in education. It is still unclear whether primarily academic staff or support staff will be affected by the reorganisation, writes the university news medium U-Today.

What will happen to the PhD candidates of these departments is also not yet known. They are not always employed by the university but are supervised by professors or assistant professors from the department to which they are connected.

The technical university in Enschede is not the only one facing financial problems. Last year, Wageningen announced that it needed to cut back by eighty million, and last week, TU Delft also revealed a similar amount of ‘adjustments’.

That TU Delft also needs to implement cuts comes as a surprise. This institution has shrunk much less in recent years than Twente, where a quarter of the intake suddenly disappeared in 2022. In Delft, it is primarily maintenance costs, inflation, energy prices, and personnel costs that are putting pressure on the budget, according to the management.

All faculties must find ways to spend ten per cent less in the coming months, the university news medium Delta reports. Layoffs are ‘not the preferred option’ for the management, but they are also not ruled out.

It seems that only Eindhoven will escape unscathed among the four technical universities. This may be related to Project Beethoven: the previous cabinet hastily reserved billions to keep chip machine manufacturer ASML in the Netherlands. Approximately 450 million of that is intended for educational institutions in Eindhoven, although a smaller portion is also allocated to Delft and Twente.