Participation

The participation rights of students and staff in the University’s management were laid down University Governance Modernization Act (MUB) from 1995. The university participation structure has three layers: a university council at the overarching level, faculty councils and program committees at the faculty (or school) level and services councils and division committees for the non-academic staff. After the University Governance Reform Act (WUB) was introduced in 1970, Dutch universities gained a fairly extensive body of participation rights. Before that, administration of the Tilburg University had been in the hands of a curatorium and a senate, in which neither students nor staff were represented. Thanks to the WUB, the university council acquired a stronger administrative position, amounting, in fact, to co-governance. This system was doing so well in Tilburg that when the MUB was introduced, which restricted participation rights to a considerable extent, there was a lot of opposition.

Following Parliamentary demands and student protests against excessive corporatization, commercialization and performance pressure, the position of university participation bodies has been strengthened since 2010. Many members of the academic community supported these protests, though they remained small-scale in Tilburg, where the participation system is functioning just fine. This was shown by the “Cool Dude (Toffe Peer) Award” for best functioning participation system being awarded to Tilburg both in 2014 and in 2015.