Recently, I was shocked (or excited) to hear that our great Wageningen amigo Arthur Mol is to hand over the reins. This “magnificent” position will, no doubt, be occupied by an old white individual with ‘ideals from the eighties that are a few highways removed from the A12. Someone like Ignas Heitkönig or Birgit Boogaard will undoubtedly lack “corporate experience”.’
Still, there should be room to sing rector Mol’s praises. He seems like a nice guy, especially after I witnessed him serve scrambled eggs with Mayor Floor Vermeulen during the AID market.
The AID market was an illuminating event for me in other aspects as well. As a reporter for Resource, I was curious about why so many highly educated people worldwide would choose to come to this insignificant little town on the borders of the Rhine. A frequently given answer (from a biotechnologist from Mongolia to an environmental scientist from South Africa) was: ‘I searched the online rankings for the number 1 programme in my field and found WUR.’
I was curious about why so many highly educated people from all over the world would choose to come to this insignificant little town on the borders of the Rhine
As a Nijmegen citizen who had no intention of spending five years destroying my liver as a bar-crawling student, this town, just half an hour from my parent’s home, was an easy choice. I never really gave much thought to the criteria these students told me about.’
So, to the rector and his predecessors whom I have never met: hats off. Being number one on the global GreenMetric ranking for six consecutive years, number 1 in the Dutch Keuzegids for eighteen consecutive years and 59th of all the universities in the world with students from 113 countries that I will never be able to list. Arthur Mol, well done, dude. You will be missed.
Resource-student editor Felix Landsman (22) is an almost-ex-bachelor student of International Land & Water management and an aspiring adventurer. He is often looking for something.
