TU/e provides student cabinet with a minister for Innovation

On Monday the 29th of March the Student Cabinet presented itself, complete with a student Prime Minister, ministers representing all Dutch universities, and their own coalition agreement. Coming from TU/e master student Dirk van Meer is part of it as the minister for Innovation. But what’s the reason behind it? “We are not the voice of students.”

by
photo Bart van Overbeeke

“Draw on student teams to help shape the future of the Netherlands - build on a foundation of research and science. Mark Rutte and Sigrid Kaag are always welcome to mail me," says master student Chemical Engineering Dirk van Meer, who has gained the ministerial post for Innovation in the Student Cabinet.  At TU/e he was active at the student teams SOLID and CORE, and at the moment he is the  CEO of startup CORE Chemistry.

The student ministers have no formal connection to political parties, nor are they representatives of student unions or university governance councils. However, they have struck their own coalition agreement. The fourteen universities under umbrella organisation VSNU have each appointed a student representative to fulfil a ministerial post. The Minister of Agriculture studies at Wageningen University & Research, and the Minister of New Delta Works is from Delft.

Van Meer about the reason why he has been enthrusted with Innovation: “I live for innovation, it delights me. It is such an essential part of the Brainport region. The term innovation often comes up chiefly in the context of Brainport and Mainport, but I am convinced that what we have achieved here can also work in other provinces in the Netherlands.”

Challenge-Based Learning

The innovations that Van Meer is proposing are intended to come about chiefly by way of Challenge-Based Learning, an approach already widely applied at TU/e at innovation Space and within the Bachelor College. “This involves companies presenting students with real-world issues. They work in multidisciplinary teams on problems of this nature and often come up with unique ideas and solutions. What's more, this approach offers students a huge learning experience. It gets them working on relevant subjects, problems of national or international scope.”

This concept is one that Van Meer is keen to roll out across the whole of higher education. “It will get students engaged in societal challenges and they will be working on innovations in order to solve these problems. I see it as the ideal combination of education and the solution of world problems. Likewise, the big companies with which we collaborate, like ASML, Philips and Jumbo, endorse this method of working.”

Read on below the photo.

No political colour

Besides Van Meer there are also ministerial posts for New Democracy, Peace and Healthy Living. Each minister has written a short and concise proposal explaining how they see the future: where should we be heading? All these documents have footnotes referencing scientific articles.

The oldest minister in the student cabinet is the 40-year-old student Walter Loog of the Open University; he has taken responsibility for “life-long learning” and thinks the government should treat all students equally, whether they are enrolled in fulltime or part-time degree programmes.

The Prime Minister is from Twente University. His name is Timon Metz, and he’s doing a Master’s in Industrial Engineering & Management. He was chosen from 25 candidates. Not by students, but by someone in the Department of Marketing and Communication, plus a few others. So who is this PM actually speaking for? “Hopefully I speak on behalf of science and the universities," Metz says. “We are not the voice of students! We are not of any political stripe. What we do is translate scientific knowledge into policy for this country in twenty, thirty or fifty years. It doesn’t matter if it’s left, right or diagonal.”

This ‘coalition agreement’ doesn’t cover everything, Metz admits. “We also don’t have a Ministry of Finance. We want to stay away from real politics – well, obviously, you can’t completely. But we want to look at the long term from a purely scientific perspective.”

Briefly put, a student cabinet that doesn’t speak on behalf of students but on behalf of scientific knowledge. And one that doesn’t want to be political, but is anyway. In a kind of parody of the traditional new government group shot, the ministers can be seen with red election ballot circles placed on their stomachs, but no one elected them.

Tongue-in-cheek

“We are doing all of this tongue-in-cheek”, spokesperson Piet van Ierland said on behalf of the universities. “We are helping with the formation of the real government from the sidelines, but this is not a lobby for higher education and we are not creating a new political platform. Dutch universities have a lot of knowledge that is worth sharing. We want to challenge political leaders to look further afield: let others get involved in strategic thinking.”

The students were free to write whatever they wanted to, he said. The only pre-condition was that the student ministers had to look beyond their own opinions and back up their writing with references to scientific literature. “Not populism, not your own opinion, but sound ideas based on really solid knowledge."

The student cabinet’s coalition agreement was presented to outgoing Education Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven this afternoon at a special gathering. At TU/e Robert-Jan Smits, chairman of the Executive Board, was given it by Van Meer (see main photo).

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