{"id":103388,"date":"2019-09-23T16:02:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T14:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=103388"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:24:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:24:29","slug":"eshcc-and-the-wolf-a-cautionary-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2019\/09\/23\/eshcc-and-the-wolf-a-cautionary-tale\/","title":{"rendered":"ESHCC and the wolf: a cautionary tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than a year and a half now, the small island of Erasmus University where I teach and work, ESHCC, has been under-fire. The unfortunate truth is that dealing with imposed deans, accusations of fear culture, and possible annexations is not very attractive, at least not in the academic world. And it seems like our growing recruitment numbers, good student evaluations and the arrival of big grants are just not good enough to confront the other narrative.<\/p>\n

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Ana Uribe Sandoval, chair of the ESHCC Faculty Council.<\/span><\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>

In this context, last week we learned \u2013 in some counted letters and published in the university portal as well, as if it was a minor thing \u2013 that the Executive Board had hired an external forensic office to look surreptitiously into the mailboxes of colleagues at the ESHCC in order to find the origin of a supposed leak. And since we have been in turmoil for months, it seems like just another chapter of a dwindling soap opera with a mediocre screenwriter.<\/p>\n

But it is not. If the past months could be framed as the exhausting fight of a small school to survive, this last event needs to get the attention of EUR in general. Both the substance and the form of what is happening impact anyone who ever thought of themselves as members of this \u201ccommunity\u201d.<\/p>\n

The substance: protect those at the top, bury the whistleblowers<\/h2>

We were informed last Tuesday that the Executive Board had commissioned an external forensic investigation firm to find a supposed \u201cleak\u201d to newspaper NRC<\/em>. The leak would be linked to a news story about misconduct, specifically plagiarism, by our former interim dean in her 1988 dissertation and her speeches as rector of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) between 2007 and 2017. According to the EB\u2019s intranet notice, they had \u201cserious grounds to suspect that ESHCC employees could be the source of this article\u201d.<\/p>\n

Why is being the source of an article a problem? This question is apparently answered in the same notice as follows: \u201cthe article has lead to discussions and created an atmosphere of distrust and insecurity that is very damaging for the person involved\u201d. In this sentence, there are three consequences that demand critical reading.<\/p>\n\n\t

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Read more<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t