Since it started in 2021, the project has grown to include over a hundred one-hour interviews on YouTube. In these videos, emeritus professors look back on their careers. To mark the 50th anniversary of Maastricht University, interviews have recently been added with Wim Riedel (emeritus professor of Experimental Psychopharmacology), work & organisational psychologist Fred Zijlstra and Louis Boon, co-founder of the faculty. Earlier interviews featured prominent FPN figures such as Gerjo Kok, the late former dean, and neuroscientist Bea de Gelder.
Own fault
In his interview, Boon describes working with young people as “a mixed blessing”. Having worked at various faculties himself, he describes psychologists as “second only to historians in being terribly self-important. If you haven’t studied psychology, you count for nothing in this field. Which, of course, is complete nonsense.”
When asked about the most important lesson he learnt, Boon admits his own fault: “My demotion at Psychology [Boon was removed as dean] was due to overconfidence. I was so annoyed that some people did nothing and were easy to push around. I got carried away. Bullying, harassment – eventually, it catches up with you.”
Niche
Zijlstra recalls the early days at UM – he had been brought in to help set up what would eventually become the Department of Work and Organisational Psychology – when Gerjo Kok, the dean at the time, asked if they could do something with aviation psychology. “The UM psychology programme was only approved because it was very different [from existing psychology programmes in the Netherlands]; experimental and cognitive.” When they wanted to add applied research, it had to be “something completely new, a niche that didn’t exist yet.”
Recreational neuroscientist
Kok even went ahead and hired someone with a helicopter pilot’s licence, but the plan never came to fruition. Riedel, a hobby pilot himself, did conduct research on pilots’ performance after taking sleeping pills, using a flight simulator at Beek Airport (now Maastricht Aachen Airport). It was an interesting study, but not what he considers his proudest achievement. That, says the man who today calls himself a “recreational neuroscientist” (“I keep up to date with the literature, but there’s no pressure”), is the research master’s programme in Drug Development and Neurohealth. Laughing, he adds, “At first, we wanted to call it Psychopharmacology, but they came up with a slightly sexier name.”