All five parties competing for seats on the University Council sent a representative to the auditorium of the administration building on Minderbroedersberg, where about seventy people gathered to attend the debate. This included DOPE, currently the largest party on the University Council with five seats, which skipped last year’s debate because they felt its setup was “biased”. The climate-focused party KAN, which was almost wiped out a year ago (retaining just one seat on one faculty council), has taken a different approach and teamed up with Volt – active in Maastricht’s municipal council and the Dutch House of Representatives – although lead candidate Clara Servais stressed that “they don’t decide what we think or do. We are collaborating only because we allign on most of our policies.” The line-up was completed by the two other parties currently holding seats on the University Council, NovUM (4 seats) and LEX-Motus (1 seat), along with newcomer Seat for Students.
There was very little actual debate. Participants largely presented their own views and only occasionally took the opportunity to ask each other questions. There was broad agreement on several points. All parties agree that it’s important for the university and the hospital to work closely together, but the current board integration plans are not good enough and were rightly rejected by the University Council. Parties also agree that the university still has a lot of work to do when it comes to artificial intelligence. DOPE and Seat for Students want clearer guidelines for AI use, while NovUM and KAN would like to see more emphasis on responsible AI use, particularly regarding sustainability. LEX also supports this idea and even calls for the introduction of a single, university-wide AI platform.
Involve students
The most hotly debated question was how to involve students more actively in participation and representation at UM. For Anna Gudimova, the sole candidate for Seat for Students, this was the main reason she founded her party. She explained that she aims to approach council work differently from the other parties, which she claimed rarely communicate after the elections. She wants to change this through her own “communication channels, where I share updates and where students can raise concerns and questions directly”. However, it remained somewhat unclear what her party actually stands for; when pressed on specific issues, Gudimova repeatedly returned to the importance of “listening to students”.
Two of KAN’s proposals to boost student involvement were met with critical questions from LEX and members of the audience. KAN suggested that student initiatives with sufficient support (5 per cent of the student population) should be discussed at University Council meetings, and proposed setting up an “ethics committee” in which any student can work “alongside professors to examine potential ethical issues at the university”. Critics pointed out that students can already raise issues during the public speaking slot, and that these proposals would effectively shift the representatives’ responsibilities onto others. KAN lead candidate Clara Servais countered that concerns carry “more weight” when backed by a large number of student signatures.
"Ghosts"
DOPE also faced tough questions from the audience. It was the only party that didn’t share its views for the faculty councils in the election paper, its website still displays last year’s manifesto and it hadn’t posted anything about the current elections on social media (until the Sunday after the debate, just one day before online voting opened). “You’re effectively ghosts”, said one KAN member in the audience. “How can you represent students if you don’t even try to reach them?” According to Eva van der Veen, who represented DOPE at the debate and is number four on the University Council list, the party is “actually quite active during the elections themselves”. Audience members also repeatedly pressed her on how exactly DOPE intends to tackle the problems it identified, including the student housing shortage. Van der Veen offered few concrete proposals, but emphasised that the party has had “big influence” across several councils for years – “and we would like to retain that influence”.