Protests in Amsterdam once more

One year to the day after the Maagdenhuis protests, things are heating up again in Amsterdam. Instructors and students at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) want the institute’s supervisory council to resign.

On Monday, students and instructors were once again protesting outside the Maagdenhuis, the university’s administrative building. They feel that the supervisory council is not listening to them and are calling for the management members to leave.

On Friday, the deans, the Central Staff Council and the Central Student Council sent a letter to the council to make their dissatisfaction known. They want the managers to acknowledge that the collaboration between the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and UvA has failed, writes De Telegraaf. They demand that each organisation gets its own board.

‘Negligent’

Moreover, they feel that the council is not doing its job properly. ‘The supervisory council has been negligent. If you look at UvA’s financial policy over the past couple of years, it’s very strange to think that they didn’t intervene. And the council has stood in the way of a transparent and democratic appointment procedure for the university council. They pretend that they’ve done a lot, but it’s all a farce’, says Xandra Hoek at Asva Student Union to university magazine Folia.

The protesters feel that the supervisory board is unnecessary and that their job can also be done by instructors and students. ‘They decide on policy from which they are too far removed. They barely communicate with the workplace, but they have enormous influence over what happens there’, says Hoek.

The protesters formed an honour guard in front of the Maagdenhuis in the hopes that council president Atzo Nicolai would come out. But the council remained silent. According to Folia, the activists finally left after they decided that ‘we had made our point.’

12-04-2016