These days, every University Council or faculty council meeting includes a confidential part – sometimes brief, sometimes long – that outsiders are usually left in the dark about. Why, though? It’s understandable in cases involving individual staff members, like the appointment of a professor. But what about everything else? Over the past two decades, there’s been a clear shift towards more closed-door meetings.
At the same time, council members appear to be in favour of openness. As far back as 2016, during a brainstorm session, they advised that transparency should be the norm and confidentiality the exception, but only when justified. This principle (“public, unless…”) is even included in the university’s participation regulations. As one student member of the University Council put it to Observant in 2023, “These are issues that concern the whole university – they’re not state secrets.”
The reality
To be fair, things have improved somewhat in recent years. But in reality, transparency is more often preached than practised. The Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) and the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience (FPN) are leading the way by discussing many issues publicly and keeping confidential meetings brief. Law and FPN even distribute minutes of faculty board meetings and share information the university administration is usually reluctant to release, like enrolment data. But some faculties, like Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML), no longer even share the agendas for their confidential meetings.
At the University Council, the picture is mixed. The merger with the hospital – arguably the largest administrative and organisational undertaking in Maastricht University’s history since its founding – is being discussed behind closed doors. We have no idea what council members have been saying about it. Similarly, plans for the Heerlen and Venlo campuses and the university’s investment plans are confined to confidential agendas. And discussions on sensitive topics – like the pro-Palestinian activists who occupied the FASoS garden last year, demanding that the Executive Board cut ties with Israeli institutions – don’t always take place in public either.
Behind closed doors
To some extent, this can be seen as a kind of game. University administrators are often willing to be transparent about sensitive topics, but only on the condition that discussions remain confidential. If council members refuse, they risk being left out of the loop entirely. Instead, they decide to play it safe and close the doors.
Councils are also known to hold confidential preliminary meetings. Is this where the real discussions happen – the ones often absent from public meetings? Is this where council members express their true opinions and views? We have no way of knowing.
Anonymous voting
And why should votes be kept anonymous? Last September, the University Council voted on funding for student organisation boards, disagreeing over whether Tragos should receive the full amount requested. Four of the ten student members ended up voting against. Which ones? Presumably representatives from NovUM, who had publicly voiced their objections multiple times. But the minutes don’t say.
Little concern
Council members are free to ask questions about issues where the Executive or Faculty Board either wants to withhold information or only share it confidentially. But this rarely happens. Take the new animal testing facility at FHML. In 2021, after years of delays in the construction of a new biomedical centre, the FHML Faculty Council found out through Observant that the Faculty Board was considering renovating the existing facility instead. Dean Annemie Schols called the handling of the situation unfortunate, but the council didn’t dwell on it. They also expressed little concern when the related report was delayed by a year. Only once did a council member raise the issue publicly in AOB. Whether tougher questions were asked behind the scenes remains unknown.
Sharing on Instagram
All of this makes it difficult for voters to get a clear understanding of what their votes actually do. Communication from council members themselves is limited. The University Council launched an Instagram account (@umuniversitycouncil) in 2022, but it has posted just 26 times – mostly in recent weeks – and has only 258 followers.
Individual council members, who often have far more followers, rarely share anything about their council work on their accounts. With a few exceptions, student parties are only active on Instagram during campaign periods. For the rest of the year, voters must make do with the occasional call for candidates or board member introductions.
Election debate
During election time, council members can engage with voters through the election debate or the election paper, where candidates introduce themselves and present their views. But this year, two student parties – DOPE, long a prominent presence on various councils, and the new one-candidate party Voxis – were absent from both.
Voxis cited personal reasons for its absence. DOPE put it down to miscommunication and chose not to take part in the debate following last year’s controversy, which saw student party KAN accuse a board member of the rival NovUM party of exerting undue influence over the debate behind the scenes – a claim the university’s Central Elections Office denied. DOPE is instead focusing on “a personal approach” of engaging students directly in the faculty buildings.
Wendy Degens and Cleo Freriks