The news wasn’t entirely unexpected, Gorgievski tells over the phone. “Pieter Omtzigt (an MP who spoke out a lot about internationalisation, ed.) seizes nearly every opportunity to mention psychology as an example of a programme that shouldn’t need to be offered in English. And when you look at the statistics, which show that a quarter of international psychology students remain in the Netherlands after their studies, while that figure is 40 percent for some technical programmes, it doesn’t even seem that unreasonable.”
Speechless
Still, Gorgievski was ‘speechless’ on Tuesday after Executive Board president Annelien Bredenoord announced that the programme would revert to Dutch as of 2027, as part of a package that universities are offering to the minister, so they can keep control over which international programmes are removed. “You’re being offered like this, as if you’re being thrown under the bus”, Gorgievski says. “We had, of course, been preparing plans to comply with the language assessment for some time. But according to the executive board chair, no plan would be good enough to convince the politicians. An offer without psychology would not be feasible.”
In anticipation of a review of all non-Dutch language programmes by minister of Education Eppo Bruins to potentially abolish them, universities have made their own proposal to turn certain programmes to Dutch or reduce the number of students. The condition for this proposal is that the review is to be cancelled. The Executive Board expects that many more programmes would be eliminated if this review were to happen. The minister announced on Wednesday that he doesn’t intend to scrap the review.
The international bachelor’s programme in Psychology is the only EUR programme that will completely discontinue in the proposal, starting in 2027. There will still be a Dutch bachelor’s programme in Psychology, and the intake restriction (600 first-year students) is likely to remain the same as it is now for both English and Dutch combined. In that way, there will be more places available for Dutch students.
‘You think: that politician simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about’
Professor of Clinical psychology Matthias Wieser was not surprised either, but still found it a ‘shock’ to hear the news, he shares via Teams from Tilburg, where he is temporarily escaping university troubles at a music festival. “Especially because you don’t really understand why this needs to happen. Then you hear Omtzigt continually saying that therapy cannot be conducted in English, and you think: that politician simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because psychologists work in so many more places than just therapy. And now we’re giving in to this populist nonsense!”
Too early
For Linda Dekker, the abolition of the international psychology programme is happening too soon. “Because so many things are still not completely clear”, says the assistant professor after a University Council meeting, of which she is a member. “Take, for instance, that language assessment. The details of this assessment are still unclear. We have all sorts of arguments for why the programme is valuable. The visitation committee wrote a positive report two years ago, precisely because of the internationalisation. And now it feels as though actions are being taken quickly: ‘We’ll just scrap Psychology to save the rest.'”
About ten staff members with an international background work in the programme. According to Gorgievski, they could potentially teach third-year courses, of which a third may remain in English. They can also move into the master’s education, which will remain in English.
Wieser understands that the universities are taking initiative and want to control which programmes are turned into Dutch or abolished. “This has been a difficult decision, and you have to give the Executive Board credit for that.” But he is also disappointed that the university board did not involve the psychologists earlier. He also doesn’t understand the reasoning that the psychology programme in Maastricht is exempt because that university is in a border region. “There are all these Germans in the programme there, do you really think they will stay in the Netherlands after that?”
Germans in Maastricht
What Gorgievski finds particularly hard to accept is the difference with the English-taught programmes in Economics and Business Administration at EUR. “They will have to lower their student intake. Why aren’t we trying the same for Psychology first, before we abolish the entire programme?”
Wieser, who is German himself, is not too worried about his own career, but is concerned about the careers of his colleagues and the science in broader terms. “I know that many colleagues have already started with Dutch lessons, but not everyone will be at a good enough level by 2027. I think this is particularly bad for Dutch psychological sciences. English is the lingua franca in science, so teaching in that language is beneficial for both foreign and Dutch students.”
Fewer students
As a Dutch national, Dekker doesn’t see her position threatened that much. “But if we lose students, we will soon have to do the same work with less money, and ultimately with fewer people. So there is an uncertainty for me there as well. It is hard to predict how the intake will be with only Dutch students. The disappearance of foreign students also creates more space for Dutch students at other universities, and we are all fishing in the same pond.”
‘If we lose students, we will soon have to do the same work with less money, and ultimately with fewer people’
The implications for the programme are still very unclear, says Gorgievski. “We have an intake restriction of 600 and about 1,000 Dutch applicants each year, so you would think we can meet that target. But students can apply for multiple programmes at the same time. Moreover, it could be that popular programmes either increase their intake restriction or scrap it altogether. So who knows, we may stay at 600, or we might end up with 300. I have no idea.”
More activist
Wieser would have liked to see Erasmus University take a more activist stance against what he sees as the wrong decision to dismantle English-taught education in the Netherlands. “I had hoped for a bit more ‘Harvard’ and a bit less ‘Columbia'”, he draws a parallel with the United States, where Harvard ignored Trump’s order to, for example, scrap diversity policies, while Columbia quickly complied out of fear of financial consequences. “But Bredenoord explained, and I know this too, that we are a government-funded institution, unlike Harvard, and that this is therefore not possible for us.”
