{"id":82219,"date":"2017-12-14T16:16:15","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T15:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=82219"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:22:54","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:22:54","slug":"twenty-years-academic-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2017\/12\/14\/twenty-years-academic-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty years of academic news"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Demographic change doesn\u2019t have to be forced,\u2019 as Young Liberals (JOVD) president Puck van Putte said only last month on the EM website in an interview on diversity policy at EUR. She would have changed her mind pretty soon if she\u2019d had a look through the past of EM. Let\u2019s take a brief look at 20 years of EM, from women\u2019s emancipation to Tariq Ramadan.<\/p>\n

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The problem of too few women at the top<\/a> has been high up on the agenda in the academic debate for 20 whole years, and this state of affairs has remained more or less unchanged for 20 years too. In the October 1998 edition (volume 1), former Minister of Education Jo Ritzen worked out that it would take another 51 years to achieve equal numbers of male and female academic staff. Only 5.8% of the professors at EUR were women in that year.<\/p>\n\t

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EM is 20 years old, and to celebrate that, EM will stop making paper magazines. Of course, we will continue online! In this context, editor Elmer Smaling browsed through twenty years, looking for stories that matured well or well, er.. less well.<\/p>\n\n\t<\/div>\n

Two years later, EM editor-inchief Ad Hofstede complained about \u2018the glass ceiling being made of bullet-proof glass more than a metre thick\u2019. And in 2005, EUR was second from the bottom out of all Dutch universities in the \u2018GlassCeiling Index\u2019. In 2007, EM talked about the \u2018leaking pipeline\u2019: the fact that women tend to drop out of the academic world after obtaining their PhD. But in that same year, one optimistic contributor said that everything would work out fine by itself, since female students get better results than male students; it was just a question of time. But haven\u2019t we heard all this before?<\/p>\n

During the 20 annual EM volumes,a lot of peculiar individuals visited the university. Some of these were frankly controversial. This was generally due to EFR, the student association at the Faculty of Economic Sciences (now ESE). In April 1998, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat gave a lecture in the Auditorium at the EFR\u2019s invitation. EM described him as \u2018an old man with watery eyes\u2019. And right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn was present at the traditional EFR election debate just before the 2002 general elections. This was his first debate since that famous evening after the municipal elections, which turned into a head-on collision between Fortuyn and his arch-rival (or rather \u2018doormat\u2019), Ad Melkert of the left-wing PvdA. Melkert was at the Erasmus debate too and made a reasonable come-back, although Fortuyn was the one who stole the show. It was his last visit to EUR: he was assassinated two months later.<\/p>\n

The \u2018extremely controversial\u2019 category includes a visit by Filip Dewinter, leader of the extremist \u2018Vlaams Belang\u2019 party in Belgium. He was invited by the Business Administration student association Sviib in 2005. This resulted in a \u2018letter to the editor\u2019 in EM, in which Social History lecturer Dienke Hondius referred to the debate as a \u2018disgraceful exhibition\u2019. Former Ulster terrorist David Hamilton visited Woudestein as well; the Navigators invited him to give a talk about his religious conversion in 2003.<\/p>\n\n\t

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\n\t\tAbout 12 police officers had to be called in\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n
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Other people who have set foot in our Auditorium due to student associations include Irish politician Gerry Adams, German Chancellor Schr\u00f6der, Israeli politicians Netanyahu and Peres, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, UN secretary- general Boutros-Ghali, and the new US Minister of the Interior Tillerson.<\/p>\n

But individual people aren\u2019t the only ones who cause controversy: a debate on the Armenian genocide held by Studium Generale in 2006 got completely out of hand. Just before the debate, SG tried to prevent a tumultuous evening by adding a Turkish historian to the panel as requested by Turkish organisations, but this didn\u2019t make much difference. An eye-witness account in EM ran as follows: \u201cRight after the debate, a group of Azeri and Grey Wolves unrolled flags while howling like wolves and shouting Turkish slogans. About 12 police officers had to be called in.\u201d<\/p>\n

And controversy doesn\u2019t always come from outside either, as several EUR academics have caused it themselves. An example is the fraud case involving Dirk Smeesters in 2012<\/a>. This young promising Belgian RSM scholar was caught fabricating research data (or at any rate \u2018amassing\u2019 it). After the university started investigating the matter, Smeesters \u2018accidentally\u2019 lost a large part of his rough data due to a computer crash and a move at RSM. Smeesters eventually handed in his resignation.<\/p>\n

There was a second large-scale case involving scientific integrity that same year, this time at Erasmus MC, where endowed professor Don Poldermans was doing research into use of beta blockers. During this research, he himself filled in patient questionnaires, took blood samples from patients without their consent, reused certain data, and also used data from patients who weren\u2019t part of his research. The research was stopped; Poldermans confessed and was sacked.<\/p>\n

And then we have the Tariq Ramadan affair. This Swiss philosopher, Islamic thinker and Arabist joined EUR as guest professor in 2007, which immediately resulted in controversy. Some people regarded Ramadan, who also acted as advisor to Rotterdam Municipality, as someone who could get through to young Muslims, while others viewed him as a wolf in sheep\u2019s clothing. It eventually turned out that the second group were right.<\/p>\n

EUR students passed on Ramadan\u2019s comments on gay men to the Gay Krant magazine. It also turned out that Ramadan was presenting a TV programme for an Iranian broadcasting company in London, which was sufficient reason for Rotterdam Municipality to sack him in 2010. This dismissal made his position at EUR intolerable. But the university wasn\u2019t careful enough when settling the matter, as one court ruled in 2012 that EUR had been too hasty in revoking Ramadan\u2019s guest professorship. This affair resulted in a remarkable sequel after it emerged in 2017 that 6 women had accused Ramadan of sexual abuse, which took place before and after his professorship at EUR. During 20 years of EM, incidents involving student associations crop up just as persistently as the glass ceiling.<\/p>\n

Two RSC students ended up in hospital in 1998 and 1999, the magazine\u2019s second year. One of them had drunk himself comatose and the other one\u2019s alcohol level was at least 5%. But both of them survived. \u201cI must say, they do teach you how to drink at RSC,\u201d EM\u2019s editor-in-chief commented dryly. There was hardly any openness about the incident; \u2018only one brief press release\u2019 appeared in print. A year later, RSC was accused of excesses during initiation rites at camp in \u2019t Harde. Candidate members were prevented from sleeping and drinking, beaten with hockey sticks and baseball bats, and taunted with unflattering comments such as \u2018Your mum and dad must have puked their guts up when you were born\u2019. All these incidents together resulted in EUR\u2019s withdrawing its recognition of RSC for a couple of years. RSC\u2019s sister association Minerva in Leiden said this was an \u2018extremely harsh punishment\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\t

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\n\t\tIn 2010, a clash occurred between student associations and the free press\n\t<\/blockquote>\n\n\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n
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One interminable issue that has finally come to an end is the merger between RSC and its female counterpart, RVSV, which was discussed as far back as 2001. But it didn\u2019t happen, which is understandable what with all the male students\u2019 excesses. Nonetheless, segregation of the sexes was unusual, as the only associations which had not yet \u2018jumped on the merger bandwagon\u2019 in 2001 were those in Utrecht and Rotterdam. The merger in Rotterdam eventually took another 16 years to accomplish.<\/p>\n

The Van Tromp social club didn\u2019t last that long. It was set up in 1983 as a protest against student associations being on such a large scale, but by the 1990s its members were \u2018getting on a bit\u2019. The end came in 2003, as most first-year students said they \u2018thought the club had been disbanded\u2019 during Eureka Week. Another student club relegated to the academic history museum was Gaudium, which was also set up in the 1980s as an alternative to the overcrowded student associations. The committee decided not to take on any more members in 2011 and the club was then sold.<\/p>\n

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In 2010, a clash occurred between student associations and the free press. EM published a \u2018light-hearted\u2019 article in the traditional Eureka Week issue about these associations\u2019 practices which, the authors claimed, consisted of \u2018pseudo-fascistic rules of conduct drilled into victims by sadomasochistic means\u2019. These comments weren\u2019t exactly appreciated by RSC and RVSV members, who claimed that the article was full of \u2018perfidious lies\u2019. Shortly after this, EM heard from various sources that large numbers of the otherwise attractively-designed Eureka Week issue had been dumped in refuse bins. The president of the Chamber of Associations referred to this coordinated disposal as \u2018an equally light-hearted act\u2019.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, the history of 20 years\u2019 EM runs parallel to the emergence of the Internet. Right at the start, cyberspace resulted in articles that would make your jaw drop nowadays. For instance, the new professor of Electronic Marketing, Cor Molenaar, argued in 1999 that \u2018most of these companies have no business on the Internet anyway\u2019. He added: \u201cPlease take yourselves off here with all speed.\u201d This sally was mainly aimed at companies posting their brochures online, but Molenaar was still able to envisage a golden future for companies on the Internet. He gave them an unusual piece of advice: \u201cTake your time and have a good look round. You\u2019ll see that porn sites are the most advanced ones, so maybe your company should examine the way they work.\u201d It seems that not much has changed when it comes to surfing at the office. The \u2018millennium bug\u2019 also came in for a lot of attention in digital circles at the end of the 1990s. People were scared that the change in date on computers (from 1999 to 2000) would result in all kinds of disasters. EM got in a panic with the rest: \u201cWe\u2019re in for power cuts, burst water pipes and plane crashes.\u201d But all that actually happened on New Year\u2019s Day 2000 was that two ticket machines broke down in Australia and an alarm went off at a nuclear power station in Japan.<\/p>\n\n\t

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Nowadays, \u2018chatting\u2019 is completely normal, but it used to be associated with unsavoury types. One editor was fairly correct in his forecast of \u2018snap chatters\u2019: \u201cThe word chatter always conjures up a mental picture of misanthropic teenagers sitting up till well after midnight and exchanging obscenities in secret languages.\u201d But this meant IRC channels, ICQ and ThePalace.com back then (try googling them). The article also explains the first \u2018emoticons\u2019 to readers. People were still afraid of the \u2018dark side\u2019 of the \u2018electronic superhighway\u2019, while the first signs of a filter bubble became visible: \u201cMost students don\u2019t look any further than their search engine and differing opinions are hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another digital phenomenon that came on the scene during EM\u2019s early years is the mobile phone, or the \u2018mobile\u2019, as EM called it in 1999. A lot of students already had one back then. But Ton Mulder, lecturer in macro-economics, wasn\u2019t at all keen: \u201cA man aged over 50 with a mobile telephone looks so totally pathetic,\u201d he said. How right he was!<\/p>\n

EM has made some blunders in its view of the \u2018spirit of the times\u2019.<\/a> It announced a new social network in May 2007, especially for students, which (it said) was going to be BIG. No, this wasn\u2019t \u2018The facebook\u2019 (the article was dropped later on); it was the Philox network. Other social media which were going to be equally big (according to EM in 2007) were Zorpia, Wayn, A Small World and (believe it or not!) LinkedIn. The year after that, EM jumped on yet another bandwagon which never made it after all: Second Life. \u201cThe only thing still missing is that you can\u2019t feel or smell anything. But it does go a very long way in a visual sense,\u201d says researcher Valerie Frissen, who has immersed herself in this world.<\/p>\n

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In 2009, Frissen commented once again in a special about social networks popular at the time. Twitter and Facebook came up, even though Facebook was a network \u2018focusing mainly on students\u2019, which was popular among international students in the Netherlands. There was a full-page item about Twitter where the phenomenon was explained. After this special, the emergence of the Internet rather faded into the background in EM because the novelty had worn off. This lasted till 2016 when the EUR website was hacked, which in turn resulted in a huge operation to increase security on the website and improve protection of personal data.<\/p>\n

Since 2016, EM\u2019s publications have gradually been cut back step by step to once every 3 weeks and then once a month. By contrast, the number of articles on the website is skyrocketing. This means that after Christmas 2017 (right around this time!) EM will be completely incorporated into the World Wide Web via erasmusmagazine.nl. At your service. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\t

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De redactie<\/h2>\n\t\t\n\t\t
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