Hicham El Ouahabi | Is confidence in The Hague’s common sense justified?
Education cuts: deliberate malice or dangerous indifference? Columnist Hicham El Ouahabi is not so sure. “What is lost is far greater than what is saved.”
The other day, I dreamt that a column of tractors, fully loaded and driven by teachers, researchers and students, headed towards The Hague with much fanfare. Trailers full of straw, manure and piles of printed theses and dissertations were poured out over the Binnenhof without mercy. In no time, crisis consultations followed in the Catshuis. Shortly afterwards, a visibly confused man appeared on camera at a press conference. He stressed no fewer than 15 times that there were no plans for education cuts. There were not and there are not, he repeated again and again.
And then the alarm clock went off.
Last week, twenty thousand people gathered on Malieveld to protest against the education cuts. With banners and protest signs in the air, a cup of tea in one hand and speeches kept neatly within time, the protest was exactly what you would expect from the education and science corner: orderly, civilised and full of confidence in the common sense of The Hague. Whether that confidence is justified? The coming months will tell. In any case, the signal was loud and clear.
The same goes for the signal that, in my opinion, is embedded in the choice to deal historical blows in the education and science corner. I am reminded of the book by historian and journalist Anne Applebaum. In Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum describes, among other things, how certain cuts are framed as unavoidable measures under the guise of ‘efficiency’, when in fact they serve very different purposes. She describes, for example, how governments in Eastern Europe use cuts to weaken critical institutions, without this being immediately apparent. What is also not immediately apparent: what is lost is far greater than what is saved.
Yes, the Netherlands is not Poland or Hungary; our institutions and rule-of-law culture are too different for that. Nevertheless, the austerity plans will put further pressure on teaching, research and innovation. Add to this the growing and increasingly vocal view that science would be an ideology of a small hobby club, and my pessimism may become a little more understandable. The optimist in me does not believe all this stems from deliberate malice. But indifference, the attitude of oh well, can sometimes be just as dangerous.
Maybe I am rambling on. Maybe, just like in my dreams, I make connections that are not really there and merge what I have seen and heard before into one whole. And yet it continues to gnaw at me that it is precisely the places where thinking is sharpened, new ideas are developed and established convictions are called into question that are in danger of taking the hardest hit. Historically cutting those foundations is not an inevitability, but a choice. One that reveals more than it conceals.
Maybe it’s time to get that tractor driving licence.
