How Dutch universities are handling reopening during the pandemic: a meticulously prepared and collectively agreed national plan to avoid virus outbreaks
An introduction to “live science” to students outside, in a square in the historic centre of Middelburg, The Netherlands
By:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
1 October 2020 (Delft, The Netherlands) – In an attempt to insert a few elements of “normality” in my life, I have been skipping around Europe. I have been suffering from platform fatigue. There are far too may platforms for us to pay sufficient attention to them all. You can’t be expected to dive into Teams, cross over to Twitter, then a Zoom chat, then leap into LinkedIn, and then traverse the entire damned course over and over, all day long, without being exhausted and more than a little anti-social by quitting time (if there is still such a thing).
Yes, some platforms get much more attention, and others much less. Given our Project Counsel Media team reports on several industries … advertising/media, artificial intelligence, cyber security, legaltech … we have found possessing a diverse, extensive, well-rounded social media portfolio enables you to speak to a variety of people in a variety of registers and tones, plugged into a variety of organizations and networks.
And I imagine all of us have become very aware of platform fatigue and we have started to make more conscious decisions about where we spend their digital lives.
But, crap, I am really tired and fed up. I need to go to where the conversation is, to explore different on-site vistas to see what serendipitously turns up. And there is so much “new new” stuff happening, for example, in network analysis and text mining in e-discovery, and Big Data analytics for legal fact-finding – all kinds of new techniques to help find complex relations in electronic data sets. Those areas have been the purpose of my trips.
So I have been hopping the train (avoiding airports) and I’ve hit the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, the Grenoble Institute of Technology in France, the Swiss AI Lab in Zurich, Google Analytics in Paris, and the Microsoft Machine Learning Center in Amsterdam to chat with people … face-to-face. Refreshing.
But this piece is not about my legaltech discoveries (that will be covered in another post). It is what I discovered (after numerous chats across Holland and scanning the Dutch newspapers) about The Netherlands’ cautious, carefully planned approach to university teaching during the pandemic – a strategy in stark contrast to the full reopening planned by many UK and U.S. universities. If you want to find examples of people doing things sensibly, the Netherlands is normally a good place to go. But, alas, the Dutch success depends a lot on Dutch social history (I’m half Dutch, half French, by the way). Sadly for the UK and U.S. they can’t change theirs.
What hit me immediately was the general approach, how Dutch universities are handling reopening during the pandemic, and I found campuses at 20 per cent capacity. This is backed up by a meticulously prepared and collectively agreed national plan to avoid virus outbreaks, in the hope that campus life remains sustainable into the winter.
It’s a balancing act. The coronavirus pandemic has forced every country to ration physical social contact. Football fans want to cheer from the stands. Parents want to throw confetti over their just-married offspring. Clubbers want to dance. Given these competing demands, how important is it to have students mingling on campus?
At one end of the spectrum on this question is neighbouring Germany, which a German professor at the Delft University of Technology told me delayed the start of its academic year by a month, to the beginning of November, and will keep an estimated 90 per cent of classes online. University heads there have soberly emphasised the health risks of returning to campus and stressed that students can study independently. They need to measure “sustainability”, the professor told me.
Showing rather less caution is the U.S., where many colleges have flung open their doors to new students – and their tuition fees, of course – triggering, as predicted, a wave of coronavirus outbreaks, hasty closures and condemnation of perceived recklessness. A New York Times tracker has already identified at least 60,000 new cases at US colleges since late August, while academics have estimated that there were 3,200 new campus-related infections per day for the first two weeks of the autumn semester. In the UK, meanwhile, campus reopenings have led to headline news as students across Scotland and in Manchester have been required to quarantine themselves in their accommodation for two weeks to contain outbreaks.
The Netherlands is trying to steer a course between these two poles. Rectors and ministers have made a passionate case that face-to-face teaching and socialising is essential to the future of universities.
Most campuses are operating at about 20 per cent capacity, so they conspicuously lack the usual bustle of a new academic year. Uniformed “corona control” personnel stand ready to explain the rules to the knots of newcomers dotted here and there. There is a lot of hand sanitiser but not many masks; instead, the emphasis in the Netherlands is on keeping at least 1.5m apart. Every room has a maximum capacity taped up on the door and arrows stuck to corridor floors mark out a one-way system to avoid congestion (many Dutch city streets have similar markings). At most universities, the aim is to have students and staff on campus at least one day a week. European Commission officials are extremely impressed at how the Dutch university sector has managed to come up with a coherent plan to facilitate this and have sent observers to see how it is done.
Indeed, the Dutch press has detailed how university presidents and the government have been in constant contact, constant collaboration to chart a way forward since the Netherlands imposed what it called an “intelligent lockdown” in mid-March. Rather than impose mandatory measures, the country’s approach was to challenge each sector – transport, hospitality, universities – to come up with its own plan to make sure people kept their physical distance. And they all did. The Association of Universities in the Netherlands formed its own coronavirus crisis committee, which met daily and spoke with the education minister herself about once a week. The Netherlands prime minister Mark Rutte even dropped into two virtual university lectures to gauge the success of the digital transition.
The result of this dialogue is a periodically updated “service document”, plus other guidance, agreed by the universities and the government, which lays out the parameters for the reopening of campuses. There is scope for local flexibility, but, overall, Dutch universities have agreed to take a similar approach. This is because Dutch universities realise that they are in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: if one opened up more than the others and suffered an outbreak, then there’s a risk that campuses might have to shut nationwide. You try to have a common line. Because then you can explain it to your own students. If you told your students at the university in Rotterdam that they could only come one day a week, and your students find out their compatriots at the university in Delft you can come five days a week, you would get questions.
But as native of this country I can tell you this: collaboration is wired into the Dutch psyche. It all goes back to the fight against the water. Holland is below sea level, so if cities and municipalities did not work together – if Amsterdam was always competing with Rotterdam for international trade – they would not work together in the fight against the water. Always, when there’s a crisis, the Dutch line up, and this is a beautiful example.
It also helps, that the country’s 14 university heads are a small enough group to all know each other personally, arguably taking the edge off the competitive instincts that characterise, say, the U.S. university sector. One Chinese professor I met with in Amsterdam told me in Hong Kong, another relatively small university system, there is a similar highly coordinated level of openness across its campuses.
Still, settling on a uniform approach to Covid-19 was not easy given the variety of institutional missions. One university administrator confided some institutions wanted to go their own way, only to be “torn by the hair” back into line with a reminder that “if you don’t work together to keep the water out, we’ll all drown”.
A park in Amsterdam
Dutch universities also appear to have come to a compromise with the country’s sometimes hard-drinking fraternities, which are often organised along city lines and recruit members from multiple universities. A normal September might see inebriated new students swimming in canals or hurling rotting fruit at each other, but, this year, alcohol was restricted in fraternities during “initiation week”, while events had to end at 10pm. Instead, fraternities had to make their recruitment pitches during freshers’ fairs – with the surprising result that they attracted more members than ever. As one Dutch newspaper reported, they thought that no one would sign up, but they’ve had to turn down people. Well, when there’s a crisis, you want to be part of a community, don’t you? Since initiation week, the alcohol ban has been lifted, but fraternity members still have to stay 1.5m from one another. Of course, there is stress on that system with alcohol involved but the consensus so far is that fraternities have largely behaved themselves. But the partying that goes on in private houses is much harder to monitor and control. How can you prevent people getting together if they are living with seven, eight, sometimes 16 people in one house?
And there is conflict. This is not all going to run perfectly. LSVb (the country’s main student organisation) published a notice that universities haven’t gone far enough in returning students physically to campus. Online education leaves students at risk of loneliness, disadvantages those who lack space at home, limits in-depth class discussion and risks forcing students to socialise in riskier private spaces.
But even opening up campuses partially has been a considerable management challenge If they went for online-only, it would make life for support staff and teachers much easier. Hard-pressed lecturers, who, in March, scrambled to switch their courses online, are now being asked to convert some of their teaching back into physically distanced space. In addition, they need to continue to provide a digital alternative for students who feel ill – and might otherwise risk a campus visit – and for international students who have not yet travelled to the Netherlands. You need to have the online fallback option at all times.
And the pandemic has also strained Dutch universities’ finances, a situation across all countries. Costs have risen enormously. Cloud space, for instance, has had to be rented to host video lectures because local networks are unable to handle the massive spike in traffic. One university hired two concert halls in its city – at €250,000 for a six-month lease – to create extra space for lectures – all while losing income due to mothballed catering services.
Adding to universities’ financial anxieties has been a clamour – mirroring similar demands in the UK and US – from some student groups for a refund of tuition fees because of the curtailment of physical teaching earlier this year (tuition fees for Dutch and EU students are currently €2,143 a year, halved for the first year).
But the Dutch government has announced that only students whose graduation is delayed by the pandemic will receive any kind of compensation. It didn’t get any cheaper to teach online. They really need the money now to invest in good digital education, but also in high-quality student-teacher contact.
And how will this play out? With a long autumn and winter ahead, any conclusions drawn now about the success of the Netherlands’ campus reopening are hostage to fortune. But, as I write this , there have been no reported Covid outbreaks on campus (although some students have fallen ill after socialising at home or in bars).
As for student demand, registrations are actually up more than 7 per cent on last year as Dutch students scrap their plans for gap years abroad. Although universities won’t have final figures for how many students have actually turned up on campus until later in October, the signs are good so far. International student numbers have also held up year-on-year, although there has been a shift towards EU students, rather than those coming from countries further afield, such as China. Still, the experience of the pandemic seems to have confirmed to sector leaders the risks of over-reliance on fees; even prior to the pandemic, many were warning that a scramble for international fees has not only made UK universities financially vulnerable but also created homogeneous departments, often overly dominated by Chinese students. The proportion of Dutch university income from tuition fees overall grew from 7 per cent in 2004 to 9.5 per cent in 2018, according to data from the Rathenau Institute, a thinktank.
The mood on Dutch campuses, however, is certainly not one of smugness or self-satisfaction. Instead, there is a wistful longing for the bustle and excitement that should have been. It is almost as though some academics are surprised at how much they miss the crush of new students. Signs of enforced isolation are everywhere. Seats in communal spaces are turned so as not to face each other. Desks that students once crowded around for group work are now lined up in serried rows, all facing forward, towards a chalk board.
The hope is that this restraint means that at least a part of the Dutch “Bildung” will be preserved throughout this academic year.
The Dutch concept of “Bildung”, which roughly translates into English as “education”, also encompasses the notions of growing up, developing and even becoming a personality. Having fun isn’t treated as some grubby, tacitly tolerated distraction from study, but as an essential part of being a student.
But it remains to be seen whether, in 30 years’ time, Dutch politicians from the class of 2020 will reminisce to journalists about the life-changing campus conversations they managed to have even during a pandemic.
