Demonstration on 10 June to go ahead despite fall of cabinet

UvA full professor Rens Bod has already seen a list of topics that, now that the cabinet has fallen this week, would be declared controversial by the House of Representatives. This would mean that these topics would no longer be put to a vote. “But I didn’t see the Internationalisation in Balance Act (Wib) on that list,” says Bod, one of the organisers of the demonstration against the cabinet’s policies, which will take place next Tuesday on Dam Square.

Spring Memorandum

As far as Bod is concerned, there is no question that the demonstration will go ahead, even now that the cabinet has fallen. “The 1 billion in cuts have already been approved by both the House and the Senate, but the Spring Memorandum includes an additional 400 million in cuts for the entire education sector. I know from experience that the lion’s share of this will have to be coughed up by higher education. With this demonstration, we want to put pressure on the outgoing cabinet to remove these additional education cuts from the Spring Memorandum.”

Internationalisation

The Wib, the law that regulates the number of international students coming to the Netherlands, also remains a problem, even now that the much-criticised language test will be removed from the new law, following a parliamentary motion, which will also lead to the abolition of the English-language bachelor’s programme in psychology. Bod: “Not only is this law extremely harmful to higher education as a whole, it is now completely unnecessary, as the number of international enrolments is already declining sharply. If this law goes ahead, we will be faced with a large number of redundancies in two years’ time.”

Incidentally, there will be another rail strike on the day of the demonstration, this time in the West region (province of South Holland). The AOb and FNV trade unions have therefore arranged bus transport to Amsterdam.