45 professors from different faculties together wrote a letter to rector Mark Waer, in which they request to revise the concept note on the reorganisation of the management structure of our university.

Analogous with the troubled waters in which Belgium currently finds itself, the issue at stake at K.U.Leuven is also truly institutional: the reform of the university’s management structure. Two days before the Easter break the rector sent out his conceptual note to the entire academic community. Until the 15th of April people could give their thoughts upon the matters presented. However, nobody expected to get a serious answer. Least of all from 45 anxious professors, who took the trouble to write a six-page document, expressing their worries on the future management of the university.

Among the writers are both professors who actively supported for Waer’s candidature as rector and professors who used to support competitor Koen Geens. They criticize Waer’s plans, accusing him of wanting to push through with fundamental organisational changes that the academic community has explicitly rejected back in 2004. A couple of proposals would moreover be the total opposite of what Waer proposed during his election campaign last year. However, the professors are most critical of the planned power shift to the non-democratically chosen Council of Administration, which will be given more responsibilities. Furthermore, the decisive powers of the rector himself will be limited, something that also runs up against opposition from the professors. They fear that the K.U.Leuven will become an ‘enterprise’ with a top-down-structure where the rector is degraded to a puppet that will do what invisible managers in back-rooms tell him to do, without the possibility for professors or students to interfere.

In a reaction Mark Waer and his team state that K.U.Leuven is an institution with a 1.7 billion euro budget and 18,000 employees and that its management should not be left to one single elected rector.All foreign top-universities work with a management team next to the rector. Waer already sent an answer to the professors saying that “there are many misunderstandings” and that he regrets that his note apparently has “left a wrong impression”. He emphasized that the concept note is not a final version, but only a work in progress, to which amendments can be made. The professors however refused his offer, claiming that their objections are of such fundamental nature that they cannot be negotiated. However it may be, in a more recent email the rector announced that “the new management structure will be officially effective as of the first of August 2010.” |