“It’s an exceptionally pleasant job, I’m rather looking forward to it.” Those were the very first words, recorded in early December 1986 in Observant, that the Maastricht university community heard from the new President of the Executive Board, Loek Vredevoogd. He passed away on 28 December last.
That is to say, Vredevoogd was the intended new President; his appointment had not yet been finalized at that point. Both the university council’s selection committee and the council itself still had to give their opinion; only after their approval would the candidate be officially announced. By the Minister of Education and Sciences, that is—at the time, university administrators were still appointed by the minister; later this role would be transferred to the supervisory boards.
But the regional and university press had no intention of waiting for an official announcement. Nor was that necessary, because the process surrounding the succession of board President Rob van den Biggelaar, who was to step down in early 1987, turned out to be as leaky as a sieve. After some investigative work, De Limburger published a list of four candidates as early as August 1986, names and all. This caused a scandal, and the entire quartet was subsequently rejected even before an official nomination was made. The name of the next candidate leaked at the beginning of October via Observant: a former State Secretary for Public Health, who irritated the Maastricht staff when it emerged that he thought he could do the job part-time, four days a week. He later withdrew, saying that his family did not want to move to the south.
And then, yes, there was Vredevoogd at last—the senior civil servant at the Ministry of Education and Sciences whose name, once again via this university newspaper, also appeared in the press prematurely. Oh well, by then, people had grown used to it; it was no obstacle to his appointment.
But who exactly was this deputy director-general for higher education? Within the university, where people thought they knew the ministry fairly well, he was so unknown that at first several versions of his name circulated: Vreugdeveld? Vredevorst? Vollebrecht?
That unfamiliarity was easy to explain: within the ministry he had mainly concerned himself with higher professional education and had launched a major reorganization there, ultimately transforming the existing patchwork of small colleges into the large universities of applied sciences we know today.
In short, Maastricht gained a Macher—a man who took his role as President very seriously. And he encountered a university that seemed in need of some direction. At the time, the (then still) State University of Limburg, barely ten years old, had only about 3,000 students, and that number urgently needed to grow if long-term viability was not to be jeopardized. Creativity was not lacking in Maastricht; one programme, institute or faculty after another was devised, but there was little coherence to all those plans. Vredevoogd wanted to introduce “a measure of strategic thinking.” In his farewell interview with Observant (March 1995), he spoke of a “nervous university (…) all very uncoordinated.”
And so, in the years that followed, he himself coordinated several promising expansion plans: cultural and science studies, psychology. He managed to convince ministers time and again with the same argument: “It’s innovative, it’s good, and we have the people for it.”
He preferred to keep the process in his own hands and, above all, out of the public eye. Hence the secret dinners in The Hague with ministry officials—he still knew them all. And thus important memoranda with important plans were kept in-house for as long as possible. What if Observant got wind of them? What if an immature idea—and it remained immature until it had received an official stamp from every single conceivable body involved—were to be discussed publicly? The very thought made him shudder. For Vredevoogd only liked publicity when it was positive, and he had a deep-seated loathing of leaks. Sometimes he accused the wrong people of that; if we had obtained an interesting report via indirect channels, he would suspect the secretaries who had been involved. To their shock, the ladies would then see a less pleasant side of the President.
Observant itself did not have to deal directly with that anger: he respected—presumably with a growl—the magazine’s editorial independence. More than that, after Vredevoogd had left to become President of the Executive Board at Leiden University, he would regularly let it be known that he missed “his” Maastricht periodical. You would run into him at a UM party and hear him say: “At your sister paper Mare I get torn apart on the front page every week! They don’t write news reports, they only do commentary! Okay, I often had it in for you, but at least you don’t do that!”
But how did he end up in Leiden? That had to do with another luminary plucked from Maastricht’s Executive Board: Job Cohen. He was rector magnificus when, in 1993, he was asked to become State Secretary for Education in the third Lubbers cabinet. In that role, he was confronted with a massive governance crisis at Leiden University, in which the board President was dismissed and the university council was left with only an advisory role, losing its rights of consent.
Cohen then went looking for an interim board President and quickly found one: his colleague from the Maastricht Executive Board, who had performed so well there. Vredevoogd was willing to wield the sceptre in Leiden for a year, but that single year turned into eight when it became clear that his approach also won broad support there. In Maastricht, people found it regretful, though not dramatically so, that he did not return for another term, Observant noted. Vredevoogd himself admitted that the challenge at the RL had more or less been exhausted for him. Maastricht had by then grown to more than 7,000 students. And Leiden was “a fantastic university; the problems there are fantastic too” - a challenge he was keen to sink his teeth into.