{"id":149690,"date":"2023-02-02T12:41:08","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T11:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=149690"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:26:37","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:26:37","slug":"many-dozens-of-chairs-receive-funds-from-foundations-and-agencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2023\/02\/02\/many-dozens-of-chairs-receive-funds-from-foundations-and-agencies\/","title":{"rendered":"Many dozens of chairs receive funds from foundations and agencies"},"content":{"rendered":"

If all goes well, by autumn of this year, universities will be launching a national register of the ancillary positions of professors. Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf insisted on this after revelations of conflicts of interest in academia.<\/p>\n

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As he explained in current affairs programme Nieuwsuur <\/em>in November: <\/em>\u201cWe simply need to have a website where you can see what other jobs a professor or researcher has.\u201d<\/p>\n

There should also be more clarity surrounding the funding of chairs. One of the reasons for this decision was the discovery that a chair at Leiden University had been receiving funding from the Tax and Customs Administration. Pieter Omzigt, independent Member of the House, asked if the Minister was able to provide an overview of the chairs that were receiving government funding from outside the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.<\/p>\n

Overview<\/h2>

This overview is now available<\/a>. It includes 263 chairs, which are receiving funding from bodies including the Tax and Customs Administration, Rijkswaterstaat (part of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management), municipalities and provinces, but also from agencies such as Statistics Netherlands, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, the Council for the Judiciary and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. Various foundations and museums are also funding chairs, such as the Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre, the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam and the National Museum of World Cultures.<\/p>\n

This overview does not yet include \u2018endowed professors\u2019, who receive funding from the business community, for example. \u201cThe overview per institution of endowed professors and sources of funding is not yet complete at this time\u201d, according to a letter<\/a> sent by the universities to Minister Dijkgraaf.<\/p>\n

On top of that, the question is to what extent this funding will be made public for each chair. A letter to the Minister states that \u201cThe Universities of the Netherlands are researching how these overviews can be made accessible at sector level<\/em> from the UNL site\u201d (italics by us).<\/p>\n

Tax specialists<\/h2>

However, the university association has now created an overview of the funding of chairs in the area of taxes. The list includes 26 cases, some of which are also included in the other list. Sometimes it concerns the funding of PhD positions.<\/p>\n

At Erasmus University Rotterdam, for example, there is a professor of Financial Accounting who is employed full-time by Ernst & Young Accountants and works for the university two days a week. Tilburg University has chairs paid for by KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The Tax and Technology chair is funded by the Tax and Customs Administration and \u201cprivate parties\u201d. Aegon is funding a Pension Tax Law chair at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.<\/p>\n\n\t

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