Homework done, so what?

What took my predecessor three years (and never finished!) has been done in less than one. After almost one year in the cave working with stone-age tools all departments have their own "uniform" websites. And they actually drive some traffic! Not much, but enough to be worth the effort.

The training in the Content Management System is also done and twenty people are now empowered to enter as community managers a new age. They are the first point of contact for faculty and staff members regarding all things online. And they take their task quiet literally. Equipped with the most confidential document ever created they are ready to publish content in the GX system.



In the past two weeks two meetings where of importance. Both concern the financial perspective on the schools performance and its implications for every day work. It may sound paradoxical for a company which sells more and more year by year (for the last 10 years) to "worry" about the future but exactly this is the case. And there are good reasons for it.



Like most distress is caused by factors underneath the thick cloths of conscious awareness, so are the budget cuts experienced at the school today the result of an crisis that took place in 2008. What came to be known as the Financial and later Economic crisis led to the implementation of austerity programs in all European states. One aspect of these measurements concern higher education. While in Latvia, universities have cut salaries, imposed hiring freezes, and reduced student services and programs such as sports, the measures in the Netherlands are far less drastic. But the problem is the same. How to keep up the same quality in education and research without immediately replacing the large budget cuts that have been introduced by the public sector by some other form of income? So the problem is one Buckminster Fuller summarized in "how to do more with less".

Lets look at the situation at SBE. Because of a decline in government funding UM introduces cuts of about ten million euro. For SBE this means that with 2.1 million Euro by 2013 the task is basically accomplished when cuts and a diversification of revenue streams reduce the 67% public sector funding to less than 50%. This results in a cut of 10% of the personal (in fte. as far as I know), cut back of services (f.e. I can only get tax benefits for a basic corporate fitness not a advanced one) accompanied by a restructuring process that ask for more flexibility and creativity.
The clusters which where separated just two years ago (Marketing and Communication, Business Relations and Communication) are now fused together and everybody gets new labels.

Another major cornerstone is "Valorization". Adding economic value to education and research activities and the search for new business models. Ufff.... Here we are again. Remember Journalism and its quest for a new business model? What was the result after a similar crisis has hit the profession more than ten years ago? And how did it react?

Lets keep it at this. It is fair enough to say that the speed by which skills become obsolete is rather high these days. The monopoly of knowledge which universities enjoyed until recently broke down under electronic conditions. PBL is the direct result of this loos of control of knowledge due to Xerox and the electronic media of the 70s. The new role universities put on was that of a facilitator. Whether its the changing position in terms of private-public partnerships or the changing role between student and tutor; All have to do with the increasing speedup, availability and amount of knowledge. What do students expect from a university? Books, Access to Knowledge, Quality, Truth..... When looking at the evaluation reports of HBO students the answer is easy: A high paying job. If they would only knew that I have one!