• Research , Student , Campus

Executive Board President voices both pride and concern in Dies Natalis speech

In St. Catherine's Church yesterday, speaking to a nearly full auditorium, President of the Executive Board Jan Mengelers praised the performance of his sixty-year-old university. TU/e is a leader in research and trains engineers who typically find employment within two months of graduating. But, he also warned, the strain on the education system caused by strong growth in student numbers and insufficient funding from The Hague is placing significant pressure on the university's research.

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As well as expressing his concern about the pressure on TU/e education and research, Board President Jan Mengelers went a step further. At the end of his speech yesterday afternoon, he made it immediately clear that the board members and deans, who recently held their biannual meeting in Lanaken, are keen tackle the difficult issues vigorously. 

“We are a resilient university operating in a society undergoing chaotic change,” said Mengelers. “We will need to adapt and we must make choices. And we must do that together: with staff, students and our external partners. We need to discuss these issues with one another, because that's how we will create the best basis for well-considered decisions.”

Mengelers revealed something of what lies ahead. “We are going to further strengthen our technology profile and profile ourselves as a science-plus university. This means that students will have the choice of studying a purely technical discipline, possibly with a foundation that provides breadth. In this way, our engineers will gain additional knowledge at the margins of their own specialist field.”

But with an unchanged budget, Mengelers believes, practical choices must be made in the coming years. “If we want to hire more staff, that means no new buildings. This is the only way we can create scope in the budget to hire more scientists.”

The coming years will also see a drive to continue digitizing study programs. This will take the form of more online courses and blended learning, said the Executive Board President. He believes there is one urgent question to be addressed: how can we restore the financial balance between research and teaching?

Whether selective admission to the Bachelor's and Master's programs will figure in this respect was a question that Mengelers himself raised yesterday, but which he left unanswered. “Should we perhaps consider introducing fixed enrolment numbers?”

All these "elephants in the room", big and small, will be the subject of discussion during the coming months. “We want to get these elephants out of the room as quickly as possible, and off our campus. And we need to make the choices mentioned earlier without delay, because in 2018 the effect of those choices must already be evident,” said Mengelers in concluding his speech. 

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