Prof. Steven W.J. Lamberts, Rector Magnificus: Welcome Address
Our university originates from the Netherlands School of Commerce, which was established in 1913 by Rotterdam businessmen.
Apart from Economics and Management as well as Medicine and Health Care our University over the last decades also developed and built upon a third domain of knowledge, a domain called law, culture and society in which the disciplines of law, social sciences, history and arts and philosophy are brought together.
Erasmus University has never become a broad university as was originally promised to us by the Dutch government. No faculties of language and literature nor of science and technology could be developed in order to further support the intellectual and research climate in the city of Rotterdam and its surroundings. I’m sorry to say that further extensions at present will be very limited because of the decline in the financial resources for universities in our country. As a strategy, however, we have chosen for a firm and strong stimulation of our international position in which around and within the domains I mentioned a number of graduate and post-graduates programmes have developed which at present are rapidly expanding and have become very competitive.
Our university has an unusual distribution of the number of students between faculties. Several weeks ago the faculties of management, economics and law received at the start of the new academic year for their first year bachelor programmes about 1300, 900 and 1000 students, respectively. In contrast to these high numbers only about 180 students in psychology, 200 in sociology, 150 in public administration, 90 in history and in arts and culture and finally 57 in philosophy started their studies.
Such a difference in numbers of students in the big 3 and the 6 much smaller disciplines are of more than general interest, because the satisfaction of the students at our university seems directly correlated with the size of their classes.
The Ministry of Education, as well as a Dutch weekly magazine yearly conduct a survey with a questionnaire in which a number of factors concerning the quality of the studies as well as the satisfaction of the students are measured. The results are summarized into one figure indicating the quality of the educational programme. Interestingly the same survey is used for all bachelor programmes at all Dutch universities thus providing the opportunity to compare and benchmark the quality of education at our university with others.
The results of these surveys published in recent weeks provide us with interesting information. All our smaller sized bachelor programmes (including Art and Culture Studies) scored first or second in the competition with in most cases 7, 8 or 9 competing programmes in the country. In contrast the faculties with around 1000 students per year grade in the middle of the group. Detailed analysis tells us that most students, being part of such enormous classes do not feel recognized and also not challenged enough. This problem of mass education at our university is the biggest target for improvement at our university in the coming years.
One conclusion certainly is also that amongst these huge faculties the smaller ones like that of history and culture are little gems that the university board should cherish, protect and support. With the limited number of students it is very difficult for these smaller faculties to support themselves financially and to develop more research programmes. Still the Faculty of History and Arts has been successful in obtaining important and prestigious research grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and lately the Faculty has started together with the faculties of Law and Philosophy the Erasmus Centre for Early Modern Studies which coordinates, stimulates and furthers the history of Dutch thought and culture from humanism to enlightenment in a European context. The Centre is cooperating with the library of the City of Rotterdam which is the proud owner of one of the major collections of the works of Erasmus worldwide. Today it is the Faculty of History and Arts’ turn to propose a honorary doctorate, a doctorate offered to Dr. Howard Becker whose book “Art Worlds” is more or less the basis of our well appreciated bachelor programme Art and Culture Studies, that started 15 years ago. I want to welcome Dr. Becker especially here this afternoon and would like to invite now professor Sparreboom to give a presentation on the Faculty of History and Arts under the title “State of the Art(s)”.
