Old fashioned academia made worse by wave of Dutch nationalism
Pros
- some directors of departments make an effort to make things better, unfortunately they are not given space of manoeuvre by higher managerial ranks - made a lot of good friends in my department
Cons
- management obsessed with saving money to the point that instead of investing in people they send valuable staff away to avoid promotions - many Dutch nationalists in the high ranks of the university are nurturing a negative attitude against international staff - international staff treated differently especially after Brexit. International staff is told explicitly that they should not aspire to promotions or permanent contracts since so many international academics in England are trying to move to the Netherlands and Leiden - obsolete vision of academia and research funding based on on the Dutch market - management attempts to keep academics in office hours even if this undermines their international visibility and capacity to attract international research funding. This goes very far with "departmental spotters" who check how much you work in your office and endless, obsolete meetings with other people at the department just to keep people in. Such research and organisational meetings are often suffocating in the sense that the time which is not spent teaching cannot be used to open up to the outside world or simply to do research. - Leiden seems very proud of this way of doing academia and different ways of doing it are not well received. - there is an hard-core of "homegrown" Leiden people who are not keen of letting outsiders in
