The questions submitted ranged from “Is that foul-smelling ditch a health risk to local residents?” to politically sensitive issues like “Is it economically necessary for the airport in Beek [now Maastricht Aachen Airport] to add another runway?” The idea was simple: the science shop paired a question with one or more students, who worked on it under the supervision of a lecturer or professor. It was a win-win situation – the students gained research experience, while the clients received a scientifically based answer.
Political stir
Of course, those answers didn’t always go down well. Sometimes the outcome wasn’t what the client had hoped for, but more often the people being investigated weren’t happy with the findings. Several studies, for example, concluded that the airport in Beek could do without an additional runway and more night flights. This was good news for the Federation for Nature and Environment in Limburg, which had commissioned the research, and for local residents, who would be spared more noise pollution.
“The science shop concluded that the airport in Beek could do without an additional runway and more night flights. The airport’s management team was not pleased”
But the airport’s management team, keen to expand in the mid-1990s, was far from pleased. In 1996, their displeasure reached UM President Karl Dittrich in the form of a personal note from the Queen’s Commissioner of Limburg, the head of the province’s government. Acting as a mouthpiece for the airport’s management, the commissioner accused the researchers of sloppy work on “our airport” and of “dragging the university’s name through the mud”, and asked Dittrich to rein them in. When regional newspaper De Limburger revealed the note, it caused a political stir. The university’s Executive Board stood its ground, Observant reported: the commissioner was told to take up any complaints with the science shop itself. The shop never heard another word on the matter and, later that year, celebrated its tenth anniversary.
Recipe for a slow death
All’s well that ends well? Not quite. At the end of 2002, Observant wrote that dark clouds were gathering over UM’s Science Shop. The Student Services Centre, which the shop was part of, was told by the Executive Board to cut costs and chose to do so at the science shop’s expense. People were disgruntled, not only within the shop but also in the University Council. With a total budget of €180,000, the cuts – €50,000 in the first year and €100,000 per year after that – effectively amounted to shutting down a valuable social showcase for the university, critics argued. And the University Council hadn’t even been consulted! A debate eventually took place in early February 2003, but got bogged down in procedural wrangling.
In May of that year, the University Council revisited the issue. This time, the question was not whether the cuts would be made, but how. The outcome was a “slimmed-down” version of the science shop, with some of its tasks transferred to the faculties, which would also be expected to pay for them. It was a recipe for a slow death. The science shop’s advisory board was concerned about the plan: “Everyone we’ve spoken to says they like it”, but whether faculty boards would actually cough up the money was another matter. Ultimately, they did not. The prediction at the start of the article on this second debate – “It is highly unlikely that the science shop will survive in its current form” – proved accurate in 2004.
The unofficial story
That’s it for the official story of the beginning of the end of UM’s Science Shop. But according to Maurice Evers, who ran the science shop from 1998 until its closure in 2004, there was also an unofficial version doing the rounds. When asked about it now, he explains that this story had everything to do with the airport and its management’s resentment towards the shop. Dittrich and his colleagues may have resisted political pressure, but according to Evers, the same could not necessarily be said for their successors who took office in 2002. That, he believes, may have been at the root of the fatal budget cuts. “I’m not sure”, he stresses. “But that was the feeling at the time, based on what people close to the Executive Board told us. The €100,000 wasn’t the real issue. Unfortunately, this only became clear after the closure, otherwise we would have made a lot more noise.”
Whatever the truth, Evers still clearly mourns the loss of the science shop. “Especially when you see that the university is now once again actively reaching out to citizens and organisations.”