On a rainy afternoon in early June, just a few weeks away from their hard-earned summer break, faculty members from the Free University of Amsterdam’s psychology department logged on to an online meeting to process some disconcerting news.
The newly formed and largely right-wing Dutch government was planning one of the largest cuts the education sector had ever seen. The Netherlands, a leader in innovative research, was on the brink of losing over 5,000 jobs in academia.
“The mood in our office was somber,” Katharina Diehl, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology who attended the Teams app meeting, told New Lines. “We were asking ourselves: What’s going to happen to the quality of education? But also: Why is cutting our funding the first thing these politicians do now that they have come to power?”
In a preliminary agreement published in May, the Dutch government — led by a coalition constructed around populist politician Geert Wilders and his electorally triumphant Party for Freedom (PVV) — announced that it was planning to cut the state budget for higher education by more than $235 million per year, plus an annual $165 million slashed from university-affiliated research institutes. According to Hogeschool van Amsterdam campus magazine Hvana, this means that between 2024 and 2027, the country’s 14 public universities will have to collectively save nearly $500 million on faculty, facilities, coursework and student services. (While the total budget for these institutions is unknown, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science reported that, in 2022, the Dutch government spent more than $60 billion on education as a whole, from elementary schools to doctoral programs and research institutes.)
In addition to nullifying investments from the previous government, implemented by renowned physicist and then-Minister of Education Robert Dijkgraaf to help universities accommodate their steadily growing student bodies and allow the Netherlands to retain its international standing, the budget cuts are expected to eliminate jobs mostly occupied by young and freshly appointed academics and researchers, according to an open letter from Dutch universities addressed to the government published in June.
How much the subsidies for each university will shrink depends on the size of their student bodies. According to campus newspaper Ad Valvas, the Free University — one of the country’s largest — is preparing to lose as much as 16%, a number met with dread, disbelief and a certain air of defeat.
“They told us their goal is to avoid reorganization,” Diehl said. “But they also said they are very pessimistic that we will be able to do so.”
While academics were lamenting the budget cuts, some right-wing politicians celebrated what they saw as a victory in their campaign against institutions they view as elitist, internationalist and woke.
“Our universities must now reconsider their priorities,” PVV representative Reinder Blaauw said during a legislative meeting in June 2024, shortly after a “Free Palestine” protest at the University of Amsterdam resulted in substantial property damage. “What’s going to be on the menu — political activism or actual education?”
While it’s still ambiguous whether the incoming budget cuts were imposed mainly for economic or ideological reasons (press contacts from the PVV, People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), New Social Contract (NSC) and the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) — the parties in the current ruling coalition — did not respond to repeated requests for comment), remarks like Blaauw’s leave little doubt that the Netherlands’ biggest political party regards the education system as a political opponent. More pressingly, both the cuts and discourse surrounding them risk interfering with structural reforms proposed by Dijkgraaf in late 2023 to ease workloads and improve quality, adding populist undertones to what started out — and should continue to be seen as — a bipartisan and decidedly antipopulist concern: the economic, cultural and indeed educational need to limit the outsized degree of English-language instruction currently taking place inside Dutch classrooms.
For academics, the budget cuts are but the latest in a long series of problems plaguing the education system, chief among them language. English instruction at Dutch universities has been expanding continually since the early 2000s. But starting in 2017, the ratio between English and Dutch-language courses has been tipping ever more in favor of the former. According to Keuzegids, an independent consumer guide for higher education programs, an estimated 47% of undergraduate and 77% of master’s programs, from psychology to political science, are currently being taught in English, numbers that grow bigger still when you take into account bilingual studies that, in practice, tend to involve little to no Dutch.
Proponents of English-language instruction cite the economic and practical benefits involved. The Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, is a small, ethnographically diverse country filled with multinational businesses from beer brewer Heineken to oil and consumer manufacturing giants Shell and Unilever. For better or worse, English has become the lingua franca of the Western world, dominating global business conferences and leading scientific journals, and Dutch students — or other non-native English speakers studying in the Netherlands, for that matter — should adapt to this reality, they say.
But not everyone is happy with the seemingly unstoppable anglicization of Dutch higher education. At a 2022 talk at the University of Maastricht, Lotte Jensen, a professor of Dutch cultural and literary history at Radboud University in Nijmegen, pointed to one of her master’s students who was required to write her dissertation on the 17th-century Dutch playwright and poet Joost van den Vondel — the namesake of Amsterdam’s Vondelpark — in English.
“It’s gotten to the point that I cannot teach my own specialty at the highest level because the language requirements for higher education are incompatible with the content of the research,” she said.
In addition to marginalizing Dutch language and culture — Jensen points to the replacement of Dutch building and traffic signs, Universiteit Maastricht being renamed Maastricht University and campus cafes advertising “early bird discounts” instead of their Dutch language equivalent, “vroegevogelkorting” — the extensive anglicization of higher education has also affected its quality. While the number of students studying in the Netherlands — including those who are not Dutch — has increased significantly in recent years, the budgets necessary to house and instruct them have not, forcing universities to distribute their funds over an ever-growing number of people.
Now that budgets are set to shrink even further, resources will be spread thinner still. Paradoxically, says Roderik Rekker, a political scientist who examines political polarization at Radboud, “the cuts could stimulate universities to attract even more students from abroad in order to enlarge their share of the national budget pie, which is allocated based on size.” He says this is one of the reasons so many courses are taught in English in the first place, even though this is in conflict with the law, which states that education should be offered in Dutch, with some exceptions. However, the criteria for these exceptions, including their importance to the Dutch economy, “are so broad that, at some universities, they apply to virtually every course and every subject.”
Meanwhile, discourse about the budget cuts and their potential motivations could make it harder for educators to promote the kind of structural reforms needed to improve and maintain educational standards. During her talk, Jensen noted that arguments to reduce English and expand Dutch-language instruction were — despite their bipartisan support — frequently labeled as nationalistic and populistic by the press, labels which, regardless of their inaccuracy, have proven harder to shake off as time goes on, especially now that PVV leaders are heralding budget cuts as a means to stick it to an in their eyes insufficiently patriotic, overly international student body.
But while Wilders a few years ago retweeted one of Jensen’s articles mentioning the Vondel dissertation, this doesn’t mean their ideas and opinions are in any way connected or overlapping. Both may support reestablishing Dutch as the country’s dominant language of instruction in higher education at the expense of English. But where the former is staunchly anti-immigration and anti-European, Jensen favors internationalization — just not necessarily the kind we have been seeing. As she explained, internationalization shouldn’t give way to anglicization but multiculturalism.
Why change a sign that says “bibliotheek” to “library,” she asks, when small yet meaningful gestures like these can be used as an opportunity to help international students pick up basic Dutch lingo?
If asking such questions was difficult before, it is becoming even more so today.
“In political circles, discussions about internationalization in higher education are often reduced to the prevalence of English language,” Jensen told New Lines, “when we really should ask: what is internationalization exactly?” Internationalization, she said, isn’t offering as many courses in English as possible. It doesn’t contribute to the accessibility or quality of higher education in the Netherlands.
“Unfortunately, having a serious and productive discussion about internationalization has become more challenging following these budget cuts, because populistic arguments are getting involved when they don’t have anything to do with the issue at hand.”
After seeing their pleas fall on deaf ears, Jensen and others finally found an ally in Dijkgraaf who, during his recently concluded tenure as minister of education, put together a bill that would dial back the ratio of English university courses, reducing the number of university students and improving quality of education in the process. Whether this bill will end up being signed into law, however, remains to be seen. In addition to potentially motivating universities to admit more international students requiring English-language instruction (specifically students from outside the European Union, who by European law can be charged higher tuition fees), the budget cuts present an obstacle to plans to develop more Dutch-language programs and employ the necessary faculty, which is currently in short supply. Indeed, since subsidies are distributed based on a university’s size, educational institutions may be incentivized to admit more students in order to increase their funding, at the cost of lowering the amount of money available for each student.
Dutch academics expected trouble the moment the PVV won its landslide victory in last year’s election. Edward Koning, a Dutch professor of political science at the University of Guelph in Canada and author of “Immigration and the Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Selective Solidarity in Western Democracies,” told New Lines that “the current situation, while extreme, is not necessarily surprising.” Past research, he said, “has demonstrated that spending on education tends to be lower when right-wing parties are in power compared to left-leaning ones. Right-wing populism typically entails a rejection of ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ and a championing of common sense of the common people. Right-wing populists, therefore, tend to depict universities as propaganda machines of liberal or even socialist ideology,” patterns that show up throughout the Western world, from Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, where students and teachers have protested against plans to determine funding for public education based on a particular insitution’s “merit,” to Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where management of many prominent universities long ago passed into the hands of government loyalists.
Annette Freiburg-Inan, who teaches political economy and transnational governance at the University of Amsterdam, points to the irony of such positioning by right-wing parties and movements. “Notably, this rhetoric is also used by politicians who themselves studied at those universities, so you might say they are proving themselves wrong.” While not against education in general, right-wing movements oppose “what they see as the domination of higher education by their political enemies. They try to rearrange the higher education landscape and minimize sectors they particularly dislike, such as gender and sexuality studies, as we have seen in Hungary or Poland, but will be gentle on sectors they have no problem with, like engineering or business.”
Physics, chemistry, biology and medicine also come under suspicion, as shown in the U.S. administration under then-President Donald Trump during the COVID pandemic. In their open letter to the government, Dutch universities similarly bemoaned what they saw as an “enormous breach of trust” between politics and science.
But while certain Dutch journalists and policymakers, Dijkgraaf included, have been quick to characterize the budget cuts as conservative revanchism fueled by ongoing and highly publicized campus protests as well as long-standing dissatisfaction over the growing presence of international students and immigrants in general, the government’s true motivations remain — for the time being — unclear. For all his chest-beating, Blaauw wasn’t directly involved with the creation of the preliminary agreement, and those who were have yet to reveal their reasoning in detail. What is certain is that the budget cuts were proposed after the current government came into power and that the campus protests are now being used as a defense and justification for the proposal.
The resulting situation, notes Rekker, the political scientist, is one of Orwellian doublespeak, where politicians like Blaauw and Wilders are able to take credit for policies created by others and for reasons different from their own.
“The current government does not speak with the sole voice of the PVV,” he explained. “Still, we’ve come to a place where the government as a whole can give one explanation and Wilders another. It’s possible the budget cuts are indeed populist policymaking, whitewashed by the rest of the cabinet. But it could also be the opposite: that they were implemented for different reasons, and that the PVV is passing them off as the realization of their own populist agenda.”
While Rekker himself leans towards the latter — many previous governments have implemented similar budget cuts, and it’s “not like in Sweden where, in June 2023, the government suddenly decided to stop funding any and all development research” for evidently ideological reasons — he simultaneously suggests that it doesn’t really matter who does what, or why. Regardless of whether the PVV played a leading role in implementing the budget cuts, the cuts bring them closer to achieving their policy goals.
Although the cuts outlined in the preliminary agreement have yet to be finalized, universities are already acting under the assumption that they are unlikely to be adjusted, no matter the number of open letters and demonstrations.
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