Photo Resource. After quite a climate activist stance in the 2023 event, the opening of the academic year (OAY) was business as usual again this year, with an ode to science. And not a word on the cuts planned for Wageningen.
At the end of the last academic year, Executive Board member Rens Buchwaldt announced that WUR would have to make substantial cutbacks. According to a message posted on the intranet, WUR will need to make cuts amounting to 80 million euros, and will also be looking at personnel costs. The previous academic year also ended with students and staff protesting about Gaza. The students kept going too, staying on the bridge throughout the summer.
The demonstrators were in evidence again around lunchtime. Security staff were keeping an eye on the campus, and at around a quarter to three about 15 students turned up at Omnia to unfurl their banners in front of the footbridge and chant their slogans. Inside Omnia, two members of staff could be seen in the audience wearing Palestinian shawls. After President of the Executive Board Sjoukje Heimovaara opened the event —explaining this year’s theme ‘The Water-Food Connection: Ensuring Future Food Security’ — the employees came up on the stage and called on those present to come to the alternative opening of the academic year as well.
Then researchers Hester Biemans and Wieke Pot took charge of the science part. They spoke about the impact of water shortages and excess water on food security, and discussed the measures needed to cope with the effects of climate change and the threat of food shortages.
Unmentionable
Before Carolien Kroeze brought the OAY to a close, for the first time in her new capacity as rector, Heimovaara played a video made by the Dutch universities association to draw attention to the major cuts in higher education planned by the government. She explained what was at stake. ‘The government’s cuts will seriously endanger the future of the Netherlands. They will destroy what we have built up together. Don’t let this happen. Stop the cutbacks in our universities and science.’
Kroeze, too, mentioned the cuts and spoke of the ‘challenges’ we face. ‘We need healthy ambitions and carefully considered choices,’ said the rector. It appeared nothing could be said yet about WUR itself. There was no mention of whether and how concrete financial choices would be made this year, not even on whether there was anything to report yet. Kroeze did however refer indirectly to the demonstrators. ‘We value the university as an independent academic institution with room for open, free debate.’
Which made the 2024 OAY an ode to science and academic debate, but at the same time an example of how issues that are major talking points on campus remain unmentionable on such occasions.
