Why an elected President of the Board isn’t a good idea

The new university council party DAG submitted a memo in which they plead for an elected President of the Board. Currently, the president is nominated by the Supervisory Board and appointed by the Education minister. The Supervisory Board has the final say in holding an election, but we nevertheless discussed the memo in the council to see what all parties think of an elected chairman.

What we think

We are not in favor of an elected President. We think that the university exists for the benefit of society as a whole. Therefore, the final decisions concerning the university should be made by that society. That is exactly what happens now: society elects the members of the House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer), which supervise the Education minister. The minister appoints the Supervisory Board, which in turn nominates the Board of Directors. As the university is paid by the society, we are obliged to account for what we do with the money we get. The university shouldn’t be a black box that can spend taxpayers’ money without any oversight.

Furthermore, we fear that an election might interfere with the mandate of the university council. As an elected Board would also have a direct mandate from the academic community, they could use their mandate to overrule the opinion of the council. There is also the risk of conflicts within the Board, as board members could be elected on wildly different programmes.

Moreover, we question the desire among students for such an election. If we look at examples in Belgium, we see that only twenty percent of students turned out to vote. We also disagree with the proposal to give less weight to students’ votes compared to those of the staff. We believe that students and staff are equal participants in our academic community.

Besides our fundamental objections, we see a problem in the search committee proposed in the memo. The committee would be tasked with finding suitable candidates. These candidates would then present themselves to the community, followed by the election. We fear that this selection process might lead to very similar candidates. The election would then merely be a choice between Poppem-A, Poppem-B and Poppem-C, without any clear programmatic distinctions between candidates.

The current procedure

The final decision will be made by the Supervisory Board. We don’t expect them to hold an election. They will probably follow up the advice given by the advisory appointment committee (benoemingsadviescommissie) and propose a new chair to the Education minister. By law, this committee has to have one student member. Our faction chair Henk-Jan Wondergem was nominated by the council in september for this position.