TU/e is steadily working on a complete overview of emeriti

Thijs Bax and Ruud Metselaar, former professors at TU/e and both members of the commission that organizes activities for this group, are satisfied with what the university currently does for them. The emeriti meet annually for two lunch meetings and a dinner. But when it comes to a complete overview of every professor who was once active here, TU/e has some catching up to do. We are steadily working on that, says the committee’s secretary Jannelies Smit.

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image Mohsin Siraj

At lunch meetings in 2015 and 2016, Rector Magnificus Frank Baaijens and President of the Executive Board Jan Mengelers used to update ‘served out’ - the literal translation of emeritus - professors on TU/e’s scientific policy and the current state of affairs at the institution they had often worked at for many years. It shows that the university’s leading administrators attach great value on good relations with their retired professors. And many of them want that relation to continue. The lunches generally attract ten to fifteen former professors, and the turnout during the annual diner is at around 70 people because partners are welcome as well. The lunches and the dinner are facilitated by the Executive Board.

Album Academicum

In order to put more emphasis on the ties between the university and the emeriti, TU/e took the initiative of creating an Album Academicum. This web register, which recently went live, eventually has to contain not only the names of every professor who was once active at TU/e, but relevant information about the respective emeritus as well. This overview now contains over 250 names, but former TU/e staff member Michiel Wijers has on his own worked on a register throughout the years that currently contains the names of 834 emeriti.

Jannelies Smit acts as secretary of the Activities committee for Emeriti and was in charge of transferring data from Wijers’s register to the overview on the TU/e site. Smit: “I had the privilege to work on that from early 2016 to the end of 2018 alongside my activities at the department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry (ST) and my membership of the university council, which meant that I couldn’t work on it continuously. Finding and adding relevant information took quite some time.” The board of the department of ST, supported by the Executive Board, was more than willing to make that time available, but that stopped in 2018 since there was never an official budget.

Thijs Bax, a former professor at the Department of the Built Environment who retired in 1997, is clear about the possible risk the General Data Protection Regulation (AGV), which was implemented last year, might cause when it comes to sharing data: “We shouldn’t handle that too frenetically. That information was once provided on a voluntary basis and most of it is publicly known.” Bax refers to the decease of an emeritus, for instance. Fellow board member Ruud Metselaar: “It would be good if you could share such information with the entire group. In the event of a former colleague’s passing, you could decide to attend the funeral service, for example. And we should also be able to actively approach retiring professors with the request to become a member of our group.”

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