Still little insight into professors' side jobs
The mandatory registration of ancillary positions and interests of professors is incomplete and chaotic, TV program Nieuwsuur reports. Minister Dijkgraaf finds this "disturbing" and the universities promise to improve.
Picture: Type tank
After two years of asking and even litigating, the editors of News hour access to the side job registers of 14 universities and 7 university medical centers. Only 4.200 professors were included in this, while the Netherlands is said to have almost 7.000 professors.
Deprecated
Do the missing professors sometimes not have part-time jobs? Some of them do, according to a sample. And data that are in the registers often turn out to be outdated, incomplete or incorrect. The registration of side jobs and interests is mandatory to prevent scientific integrity from being compromised.
Information that is in the registers often turns out to be outdated, incomplete or incorrect
Smaller institutions such as the Open University, University of Twente and Tilburg University register the ancillary activities of their professors better than the large ones. At the University of Groningen, more than half of the side job register contains errors and incompleteness. A register of professors in the Groningen academic hospital is even completely missing.
Utrecht University also does not have a register. The university can only provide information about the side jobs that the professors themselves list on their public page.
Shocked
University Association UNL, which News hour helped collect registers, reacts startled. "This is not possible. We have to do something about this," says chairman Pieter Duisenberg. “Transparency is the cornerstone. So if you use your expertise, everyone should be able to weigh up whether you are dependent.”
Pieter Duisenberg (UNL): 'This is not possible. We have to do something about this'
The association's website still states that the universities have made considerable progress in this area. At the beginning of 2021, the ancillary activities of 95 percent of all professors would be online, compared to 87 percent in 2017.
D66 education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf calls the outcome of the investigation disturbing. “Science cannot connect with society if it is not 100 percent transparent at the same time. I am going to talk to the universities, because I would like to hear what will be done.”
Minister Dijkgraaf: 'I will talk to the universities, because I would like to hear what will be done'
Former ministers
Even university administrators and former ministers such as Jet Bussemaker and Jan Peter Balkenende do not have their data in order. The same applies to former minister Ronald Plasterk.
The latter is striking: under his rule it was specifically determined that the additional positions of professors must be public. That was in 2008. At the time, the university association was against it, while the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences was in favor.
Since then, it has regularly been in the news that the ancillary positions of professors are not properly registered, with all the indignation that entails. The HOP looked at the situation in 2009. Not good, was the conclusion. In 2011, the then cabinet again said that the additional positions should in principle be public. The Green Amsterdammer wrote about it in 2014.
In 2013, Minister Jet Bussemaker refused to set up a national register and in 2015 she put the problem into perspective: some things were private, so they did not need to be registered.
There have been various signals in recent years that professors' additional positions lead to integrity violations. Recently Wrote de Volkskrant en Folia articles about the double hats of professors of tax law and fiscal economics. Previous research by News hour to the Groningen 'passport professor' Dimitry Kochenov resulted in this follow-up study.
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