Propria Cures responds to conflict with UvA board: “There is no limit to satire”
The satirical student magazine Propria Cures - popularly known as PC - has been living in discord with the UvA for a year. The university no longer wants the magazine on its campuses. What happened and what does this mean for the oldest student magazine in the Netherlands?
“Wanted,” headlined the front page of student magazine Propria Cures (PC) in February 2024. Below it was a black-and-white photo of a librarian with her full name and the word “Newspaper thief” as the subheadline. The librarian allegedly systematically removed PCs from the shelves, PC editors claim. The piece calls her a “walking pot of day cream” and “customer of Adolf Hitler’s barber”, among other things.
This is one of the “incidents” that have caused the oldest student magazine in the Netherlands, which presents itself as literary satirical, to be at odds with the UvA for a year now. The UvA has had enough of it, Het Parool reported last weekend. The paper version of PC is no longer available at UvA locations,” says a UvA press officer. “We didn’t take any chances, but we wouldn’t be worth a damn as an employer if we didn’t stand up for our colleagues.”
On Tuesday evening, Propria Cures’ five-member editorial team gathered in a deserted building in Amsterdam-Noord, near the river IJ. In this cultural centre called A-lab, PC has recently been holding offices and will be working nights on their fortnightly magazine for the foreseeable future. But before that frenzy begins, they would like to talk to Folia about the struggles with the university. Speaking are editors Maarten van Dorp, Alexandra Philippa and Mats Meeus.
“The UvA seems to have tolerated writing the most terrible things about minorities, majorities and human tragedies for 135 years, but now that we have called someone a newspaper thief we have suddenly gone too far,” says PC editor Maarten van Dorp.
Propria Cures has profiled itself as “literary satirical” since its inception in 1890, and once in a while it raises a stir. This happened, for instance, after an interview in 2008 with Albert Verlinde’s anus. The Leiden introduction committee thought this inappropriate and therefore decided to remove the PC in question from the bags of first-year students. The presenter himself could laugh about it, by the way.
Although many Dutch celebrities have been ridiculed in PC, in the past (literary) writers were often the target of ridicule, such as Leon de Winter and the late Harry Mulisch and Joost Zwagerman. Sometimes this led to a hefty riot. Infamous is the montage photo of Leon de Winter in a mass grave, posted at the time (1992) because he was said to have “exploited his Jewish background too much”. It landed the editors at the time with €10,000 in damages and a forced rectification.
The UvA also refers to another incident of threatening an employee. A PC from 2023 contained the following sentence: “Nothing should, but as far as we are concerned, you may die.” How do you view this comment, isn’t this a death threat?
“That sentence must be understood within context,” Van Dorp responded. “The comment was posted in the regular correspondents column, in which the editors respond to readers letters, and only had the connotation of an utterance like ‘walk to the moon’. If you read the context, you can only interpret it that way too.” Jokingly, “I can guarantee the college board that we don’t have an armed branch at PC or anything.
Where do you draw the line for satire?
Van Dorp: “Nowhere. Because if you draw that line somewhere, you implicitly approve of everything that is on the right side of the line. So you have to let go of all frameworks, be able to say everything. For other magazines it is different again, but as a satirical magazine, where there is a joke in almost every sentence and so nothing carries any real weight, the freedom is infinite.”
To illustrate, he points to a 2023 article full of ‘satirical’ death threats to politician Pieter Omtzigt, written by his colleague Alexandra Philippa, now sitting diagonally opposite him. It begins with: “I’m going to kill Pieter Omtzigt. I’m going to run him over with a Peugeot 205. I’m going to stir novichok through his peasant boys and peasant boys through his novichok.” Article title: “This is not a joke”.
“Everyone understands it’s a joke precisely because it’s in Propria Cures,” Van Dorp continues. The more you read the piece, the clearer it becomes,” Philippa adds.
Omtzigt could not laugh about it at the time. He responded on X (then Twitter) that he thought it was “not a successful joke” because of the climate in which politicians are much threatened. What did you guys think of that?
Philippa: “I maintain, I thought it could be done.”
Meeus: “The point is also that it became news because he shared the article himself in front of his tens, hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. Before that, it was only in a magazine for subscribers and UvA students.”
Van Dorp: “What I do appreciate is that he simply said: not a successful joke, and then left it at that. He didn”t call for the magazine to be banned or anything like that.”
How do you look back on your publication “Wanted, Newspaper Thief” about the UvA librarian?
Meeus: “In retrospect, maybe we should have taken out either the name or the photo. Especially because it is a librarian and not a writer, politician or presenter of a television programme. But of course, if you are going to throw away magazines of ours, you are just a bit of a dick. And if you pass the ball, you can expect it back.”
Aren’t riots exactly what you want?
Philippa: “A riot is good. But a riot where you are no longer allowed to lie with your magazine at the UvA is extremely annoying.”
Does that affect your viability?
“Not really, because we find that many people still read it or send in something. And we have a lot of subscribers. It is also still available in all kinds of other places, cafés, bookshops. Of course, it could be that in time it will decline a bit because of this, but we haven’t noticed it yet. However, the approachability for students is now gone, that moment when you can just get a leaf from the canteen of the UB.”
“The magazine bins in which PC was put by editors of the magazine itself were once intended for printed UvA media and Folia which is now fully digital. PC didn”t actually belong in them, but that was tolerated, until PC started insulting individual staff members several times, by name, surname and photo. PC was urged several times to stop doing that. In any case, we have been discouraging the use of prints, flyers, etc. for years given our sustainability policy. The magazine bins have therefore been removed.”
How did you think contact with the UvA administration went?
Van Dorp: “That was a bit of a struggle. In total, the contact by e-mail back and forth lasted a year, without us getting an invitation for an interview. Finally we decided to go to the Executive Board Q&A (any UvA student or employee can go there and have a conversation with the Executive Board, ed.) and there it felt like we had come for an audience. ‘We didn’t ban you,’ they said. ‘But we gave you an exception, which we are now withdrawing, because in principle, distribution of external magazines is prohibited on campus’.”
According to Van Dorp and Meeus, college president Edith Hooge in particular took a lot of personal responsibility in the conflict with Propria Cures and “a subcutaneous tension was palpable” with her. They suspect she had a personal interest in thwarting Propria Cures, something that would violate the Code of Good Governance Universities of the Netherlands.
They explain: in 2022, Hooge’s spouse, Lennart Booij, was offered a lucrative position by Mayor Femke Halsema as programme director of the celebrations surrounding Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary. A critical article in Propria Cures revealed that this deal violated European procurement rules. As a result, Booij missed out on the 125 euros per hour (in a 20-hour working week) he was supposed to receive for this job.
According to the UvA, this did not play any role in the decision-making process. “PC has been urged several times to stop naming/shaming individual employees,” the UvA responded when asked. “This already happened in 2023, when Hooge did not work here at all, and later also in March and April of 2024.”
“Propria Cures is a satirical magazine but insulting, doxxing and slandering employees has nothing to do with satire,” continues a UvA press officer. “That was cross-border as far as we are concerned. It affects colleagues personally who did not ask for it and are not in a position that could justify it. As an employer, it is our job to protect these people.”
