The Faculty of Arts is awaiting approval from the university council for its name change to Faculty of Humanities. But after two months of confidential discussions, the board of directors withdrew the proposal last week.
It was supposed to be a simple formality. After all, the arts faculty council already approved the name change, which the board had publicly announced in January. A formal approval from the board of directors and the university council seemed to be in the bag.
However, there has been a snag. The proposal was suddenly declared confidential by the university council two months ago. According to chairman Bob Bergsma, this was due to ‘considerations of the council itself’. These considerations are known to the council and the board but do not need to be justified outside of that, Bergsma said.
Resistance
It is now clear that there is resistance to the proposal. Not only was the document discussed confidentially multiple times (each time without justification to the public), but the board also withdrew the proposal last Thursday, Bergsma confirmed. As a result, no vote could be taken.
The board only does this if discussions with the university council indicate that the document needs to be revised or completely scrapped. Usually, it is thought that a revised document will receive approval.
Public questions
There was a moment in April when it seemed that the discussion would be opened up. During a committee meeting, arts executives Thony Visser and Wouter Heinen were present to publicly answer questions from the university council.
These concerned the reason for the change, the additional costs, the actual necessity of implementing the name change now, and how the process with the faculty had gone. Critical questions that had already been raised by the faculty council and to which the executives now gave the same answers.
Anxiously waiting
But what the response of the council members was to those answers remained unclear. Further discussion of the answers was again confidential. Just like last week’s discussion, in which the board decided to withdraw the proposal.
Meanwhile, the Faculty of Arts is anxiously awaiting the outcome. ‘We can only get started once we have approval’, spokesperson Marijn van Bronkhorst said. ‘Especially in IT, there is a lot to do’, she said. ‘There are many thousands of pages where the name needs to be manually changed. That will take some time.’
The fact that the decision is being delayed means that the target date of September 1 may not be met.