A Magazine by UCU Alumni
The idea behind U-Secrets was based on the initiative PostSecret, which allows anyone to send an anonymous postcard of their own design to an address in the U.S. The postcards get published online and in print, much like we’re doing here. We received a few handmade cards, but also allowed people to enter their secrets into an online form. Please see page 22 for a more detailed account on the results of the U-Secrets project.
Post | A Magazine by the Alumni of University College Utrecht Winter 2014
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Dearest Alumni Manolada Workers Travel the World Stop Food Waste Get With the Program U-Secrets Social Skills are Survival Skills Private Conservation in Peru UCU: A School for the White & Privileged Criticism, Inclusion, and Mobilisation The Oldest Photo from Surinam Class of 2014 ½ Who? What? Where? Colophon
DEAREST ALUMNI, Winter has dawned upon us. Yes, it’s getting colder and we’re going to work and leaving for home in the dark, but fear not! We have created yet another exciting winter edition of Post for you to enjoy. Wrap yourself up in a blanket, make a nice hot cup of coffee, … actually, make the coffee first, then wrap yourself up in the blanket, then sit back (and be careful not to spill the coffee on the blanket – maybe put the mug down first, eh Einstein?) and proceed to soak up the greatness that is your alumni magazine. What to expect in this edition Tired of climbing the corporate ladder? Do we really care about wealth that much? Ever questioned UCU’s student population or educational philosophy or stopped to think about what you actually learned in your years as a UC-er? These are just a few of the topics and questions addressed in the articles of this edition. Articles range from a first-hand experience of a trainee-turned innovation entrepreneur (read Peter Clausman’s article) to what volunteer work can mean in your very own city (see Nienke de Pauw’s article) to the hardships endured by Bangladeshi strawberry pickers in Manolada (see Tamara van der Putten’s article). Also, make sure not to miss the article that casts UCU in a different light than many of us probably have imagined it (Bryan Miranda’s article), nor the accompanying response on criticism and responsibility (by Omri Preiss). In any case, we’re happy to present you some thought-provoking pieces in this edition. Should you have any comments, questions, or topics to spark some discussion, don’t hesitate to visit www.talkingpost.org.
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Time to confess: do you still have cutlery from Dining Hall? As you know, with most editions of Post, we turn to our trusty readers for input: you! During the weeks leading up to publication, we’ve asked fellow alumni to share their deepest, darkest secrets from their time at UCU. See if you can identify with those that were sent in. Join us! We are on the lookout for people who want to help out planning, editing, illustrating, designing and generally awesomizing Post Magazine. Always been a doodler? Always correcting you’re friends’ grammar? Like it when things are lined up? Think fonts and colors are pretty cool? Treat yo’self! Get in touch at info@ucaa.nl and become a part of what we ominously like to call “The Post Experience”. We’re already thinking about what to do with the next edition and we need you for that! Speaking of the next edition… Up until now, Post has been made twice a year. However! The UCAA are no longer receiving funding for two print editions of Post per year, so we’ve been needing to turn elsewhere. If you have any bright ideas or are feeling the holiday generosity come over you, please get in touch to help raise some monays or donate.
Happy reading! Yours wrapped-uppedly, The Post Editorial Board www.ucaa.nl info@ucaa.nl www.talkingpost.org
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Manolada workers: "no Greek would want this job any way" Tamara van der Putten’s worrying account of abuse, extortion and violence in Manolada, Greece. Photography by Piet den Blanken.
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n the small Greek town of Nea Manolada, the smell of strawberries fills the air. Located in the region of Ilia in the western Peloponnese, a large number of enterprises occupy hundreds of hectares of land for intensive greenhouse cultivation. With a turnover of more than 90 million euros, strawberry production covers the largest part (up to 95%) of the Greek market, while 70% is exported to countries such as Russia, Germany and the UK, among others. Idyllic posters of the plump red fruit can be found on every street corner, and spotting excessively luxurious villas is not a difficult task. In 2011, in the midst of Greece’s
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sagging economy, former “Socialist” Prime Minister George Papandreou praised farm owners for their bold entrepreneurial spirit and agricultural innovation. But at what — and most importantly at whose — cost is the so-called Manolada “miracle” sustained? Inside a hot and stuffy tent, twenty-yearold Murad Alemir is wearing a towel around his waist, preventing a swarm of flies from sticking to his sweaty chest. The young migrant worker joins a crowd of ten others on the floor. Most of them are sleeping; others are eating strawberries. Like a sardine in a can, another man is lying on his side struggling to type on his phone. This is a
typical Manolada shelter — a 30 square meters makeshift tent made out of plastic, cardboard boxes and bamboo sticks. Lodging up to 25 strawberry pickers, temperatures in the tent rise up to 40 degrees in summer. There is no electricity, nor a sewage system. Three months a year, they shower and clean their clothes in a stream located behind the nearest gas station. The rest of the season, they use a hose that only functions two days a week. More than 70 Bangladeshi workers live in this particular camp. There are about 25 similar camps, all close to the greenhouses where the men toil under conditions highly hazardous for their health. Following a fire breakout in one of the shacks in 2006, and statements by the regional fire brigade that characterized the workers’ accommodation as a “human rubbish dump”, labor and health inspections have been conducted several times — but nothing has changed since then.
Still, the workers do not wallow in self-pity. “It only took us four days to build it,” Murad says proudly of the camp. He guides us around the storage areas, “toilets” (simply a hole in the ground), their vegetable garden, and even a small praying space. As he kneels down, I notice buckshot scars all over his legs. Indeed, Murad is one of the survivors of a brutal shooting that took place last year. That, and nothing else, is the Manolada miracle. Exploitation, blood and impunity perhaps best describe the grim reality behind the fruit fields. On April 17, 2013, three foremen of the area’s largest strawberry company opened fire on a crowd of striking Bangladeshi workers, leaving 35 wounded and several in critical condition, after the men demanded six months’ worth in outstanding wages. The three shooters and their employer, Nicos Vangelatos, were arrested on charges of labor trafficking, illegal possession of firearms, and breaches of employment laws. On June 6, a
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court in Patras finally opened the case, with an elite group of the nation’s most notorious criminal lawyers representing Vangelatos and his foremen. In the public debate surrounding the case, the shooters were quickly denounced as members of Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party that — despite a recent government crackdown — garnered the third largest vote in the recent European Parliamentary elections. In light of the shooting however, Golden Dawn denied any involvement. Instead, the party leadership condemned the shooters for “employ[ing] illegal immigrants, depriving a living from thousands Greek families.” As it turns out, anti-immigrant sentiment is prevalent in the surrounding area: just a 1o-minute drive from Manolada, a familyrun hotel hands out swastika key chains to its customers. Many here are quite explicit in their views — even if they often present them with a twist. “I don’t have a problem
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with the migrants,” a young local from a nearby village says, ”as long as they don’t come near me.” Taking a casual drag on his cigarette, he adds: “They have diseases, you see, because they live with a lot of men.” Manolada itself, a small town of around 2.000 Greek residents, is also home to some 4.000 migrants — mainly from Bangladesh and Pakistan, but also first-wave immigrants from Albania, Romania and Bulgaria. Most of them are undocumented, and they are either seasonal workers or reside there permanently. As in much of Europe, Greece’s agriculture relies heavily on cheap migrant labor, and many here are employed under appalling conditions for measly wages (22 euros a day) — that is, when they do get paid. As shocking videos and witness accounts of the aftermath revealed truly degrading conditions akin to modern slavery, calls for a boycott of the “blood strawberries” soon began circulating online.
Manolada itself, a small town of around 2.000 Greek residents, is also home to some 4.000 migrants. The ruling on July 30 2014, however, exposed the true side of Greek justice. The court in Patras acquitted two of the accused — including Vangelatos, the employer — while the charges of labor trafficking were dropped. The two other men, the actual shooters, received initial sentences of over 14 and 8 years, but they were both conditionally released after appealing against the verdict, with the option of paying a five-euro fine per day instead. Outside the courthouse, scores of migrants were seen crying in shock and disbelief at
the ruling. “I’m ashamed to be Greek,” the migrants’ lawyer Moises Karabeyidis told the assembled media. But unfortunately, in a country already marked by rising xenophobia and impunity for perpetrators of racist attacks, the court’s decision does not come as a surprise. Last year, government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou still denounced the shooting as an “unprecedented and shameful act [that] is foreign to Greek ethics.” Needless to say, these are the same “ethics” that drive Greece’s conservative-run government to violently crack down on immigrants: from the massive police sweep operation launched in 2012 — euphemistically named Xenios Zeus, after the ancient Greek God of hospitality — in which tens of thousands of undocumented migrants have been rounded up for abusive identity checks, to the subsequent detention of around 7.000 people in so-called “hospitality centers”, where they face up
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to 18 months in truly inhumane conditions (a recent law allows for this period to be extended indefinitely). These are also the same ethics that drove the Minister of Public Order, Nikos Dendias, to complain about the “invasion” and “low quality” of migrants arriving to the country. When confronted with the Manolada case, however, Dendias promptly stated that “the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings is not acceptable.” According to the establishment logic, then, the exploitation of migrant workers is only deemed unethical and contrary to Greek moral standards when it reaches the most extreme level of attempted murder. Such overt crimes obviously need to be condemned. At the end of the day, however, these empty words are not enough to secure justice for the actual victims of abuse. Once again, the ones responsible for such shameful acts manage to get away with shocking
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complicity from the authorities. The Manolada shooting is only the latest instance in a long history of racist violence against the area’s migrant workers. The most recent reported incident dates from 2012, when two farmers – one of whom is last year’s shooter – beat up a 30-year-old Egyptian, stuck his head in a car window and dragged him around for one kilometer. A similar attack took place in 2009, when two Greeks allegedly tied two Bangladeshi workers to a motorcycle and hauled them through the central square. On two separate occasions in 2008 and 2011, journalists were viciously attacked and threatened by local farmers as they sought to report on the conditions of uncontrolled exploitation. As Dina Daskalopoulou, one of the journalists who broke the story, told the New Statesman: When the owners picked up on our presence and what we were doing, they
ganged up around us, started pushing us and yelling at us […] I was called “an enemy of the Greeks,” an “antiChristian” and much more. The police, despite having full knowledge of the incidents there, did nothing. No district attorney took action, nothing, even when I was getting anonymous calls telling me “2.000 euros are enough to have you killed around here.” The outrageous court verdict and the resulting impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of racist violence has been described by many as a black day for justice in Greece. Meanwhile, the migrant workers who truly sustain the so-called Manolada “miracle” remain powerless in the face of economic exploitation, physical abuse and institutional racism. Their rights and dignity denied by the economic and legal system, the migrants’ only value to Greek society appears
to be their unremunerated labor power. Back in the camp, Murad discusses the pervasive sense of injustice the strawberry pickers face on a day-to-day basis. “They can easily come and arrest us,” he says of the local authorities, which have consistently closed an eye to the highly profitable illegal labor practices in the area. “They don’t disturb us because they know they need us.” Looking down at the bullet wound scars on his legs, he adds: “No Greek would want this job anyway.” After UCU, Tamara van der Putten (‘10) studied Medical Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and moved to Greece to volunteer at the Greek Council for Refugees in Athens. She is currently based in Jerusalem working in an NGO for the protection of Palestinian and migrant workers’ rights. This article was previously published on www.roarmag.org on August 1st, and has been reprinted here with permission from the author.
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Travel the world within a few hours after work
Nienke de Pauw is on an extended holiday in Rotterdam. Let her explain.
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housands of people love travelling to faraway countries. What is it about travel that people love so much? People answer that we want to meet interesting people, experience different cultures, eat exotic foods or learn a new language, for example. These answers suggest that travelling is mostly about experiencing the new and the different. Through travelling, we meet people who have a different story to tell than your colleague at work, or the friend you meet at the gym twice a week. For similar reasons, volunteer tourism has turned into a booming business over the past decades. More and more young Western people spend some time in a developing country, trying to help out those with fewer opportunities. This type of tourism does not only involve the new and the different, but also gives tourists the feeling that they can actually give something back to the locals. However, long-term consequences of this type of tourism or voluntary work are in
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some cases more harmful than we would expect. While these travellers seek a special experience, I believe that what they are looking for can be found much closer to home. When you discover your own city, you may find that it can be just as exciting as when travelling far away, while the risk of doing harm without realising it, is much smaller. Recently, the debate on volunteer tourism in developing countries has flared up strongly. UNICEF even started a campaign against some types of volunteer tourism1. In March of this year, the Dutch television program Brandpunt broadcasted a documentary on orphanages in Cambodia2. It turned out that the ‘orphanage business’ is so attractive for making money, that middlemen recruit children in order to act like they are orphans. However, the families do not receive any part of the donations from the Western volunteers, and the children often end up with missed education and psychological
lots of interesting people from different cultures lately, who live a life completely different to mine. They invited me to join activities I would normally never do, in places I would normally never go. People of all ages, backgrounds and wealth share their life and travel stories, and show interest in mine. I feel like I’m travelling the world every day.
traumas. In order to draw international attention to the issues in Cambodia and many other countries, UNICEF and FriendsInternational recently launched a campaign called ‘Children are no tourist attractions’3. This is only one of the many examples in which volunteers think they are doing a good thing, while the results of their actions may be much more harmful than they would ever realise. Personally, I believe that people can find the experience they are looking for in travelling much closer to home, without the risk of doing any unexpected harm. Without having to get on a plane first, I have been meeting
You may wonder where I’ve been? In Rotterdam, my hometown. I am working for Rotterdam Cares, which is an NGO under the umbrella of Nederland Cares. We facilitate flexible and non-binding volunteer opportunities for young professionals, individually or in groups. The target groups for whom we work are the elderly, homeless people, mentally or physically disabled people, immigrants and children from deprived families. The key goal is to stimulate an inspiring meeting between a young professional and an underprivileged co-citizen in need of some help or human contact. The unexpected happens when you get to meet people from your own city, with whom you would normally never speak. It is inspiring to meet people who live in poverty, but who still make the best of life with what they have access to. I will provide you with an example of such an event. A few weeks ago our NGO organised a game night at the Pauluskerk, which is a well-known institute that helps out refugees and homeless people in various ways. These people were invited
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to play games with our volunteers and win lottery tickets for a raffle at the end of the night. Beforehand, the homeless people and refugees had been asked what exactly they would like to win. Shampoo, deodorant, a scarf or a hat turned out to be their biggest wishes and needs. The volunteering young professionals and me were extremely surprised how these people leapt for joy after having won a bottle of shampoo. I also had an amusing conversation with a funny looking guy – with bicycle bells fixed on his gloves – that I often see walking around in town, but would never approach for a chat. How often do you speak to a homeless person for more than a ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’? During this event it turned out that young professionals and homeless people can actually have a great night together, laughing, but also engaging in more serious conversation. You would be surprised to hear what all these people have been through before ending up in your city, being at the exact same place as where you are yourself, but in a completely different position. At events like this, I have seen volunteers and target groups exchange contact details to stay in touch, just like you would when meeting people on a trip far away. What I like about travelling, I find in my own city: new experiences, interesting people, different languages, cultures, and even a different surrounding. I have seen more of my own city in the two months of doing this job, than in the two years of living here before that. Doing a volunteering activity is a challenge that always brings me more than I would expect before going there. Since I’ve been doing this, there is no need for me to go to Africa, Asia or somewhere else far away.
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I believe volunteering work is great for getting you out of your comfort zone and giving something back to society. However, the impact of the work on the target groups should always be evaluated first. Volunteering work in the Netherlands is organised very well and does not do any harm to our fragile groups. I can tell the activities and the devotion of the volunteers really mean something to the elderly, the children, the immigrants, and the homeless people I meet, as they literally tell me so. It does not matter what type of job you have or kind of studies you are doing, how busy you are, or who you want to be professionally. The other world is just around the corner. You can meet the new and different without having to travel intercontinentally. You don’t need to take three weeks off either. A few hours after work or on weekends is enough. You will probably come home with a feeling of surprise and relief, never having expected to have such a fun night, meet interesting people and be able to help someone else at the same time. And in case you don’t, it will probably still be an interesting learning experience: travelling is not always fun either. Nienke de Pauw (‘09) obtained her MSc in International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Amongst other endeavors, she worked on a crowdsouring project on sustainable development and participated in De Nationale Denktank 2011, before she became the city manager of RotterdamCares. Sources http://www.friends-international.org/childsafe/ childsafecampaigns.asp?mm=cs&sm=ccam 2 http://brandpunt.kro.nl/seizoenen/2014/ afleveringen/02-03-2014/fragmenten/de-weeshuisindustrie/ 3 http://www.friends-international.org/childsafe/ childsafecampaigns.asp?mm=cs&sm=ccam 1
STOP Food Waste Selma Seddik rescues food from supermarkets and puts it up for adoption at her brand new restaurant. Delicious adoption.
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n 2014 the European Parliament called for action to halve food waste by 2025. More than one third of all food in the world is wasted. Considering we need to feed more people in the future with fewer resources it really is time to take action. There are various ways to approach this issue. We see that politicians, farmers, producers, retailers, small entrepreneurs and civilians start various anti-food waste campaigns or initiatives. Still the question remains; how can actors in the food chain efficiently cooperate to accelerate the battle against food waste? In this article we will have a look at Restaurant Instock; the first restaurant in the Netherlands where the chefs cook with the food surplus from
Albert Heijn and its strategic partners. Facts on food waste As stated above, more than one third of all food in the world is wasted. A study by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) shows that on an annual basis 1.3 billion tons of food are lost worldwide. Food waste creates multiple negative externalities. It annually costs 4.4 billion euro in the Netherlands. Three quarters of Dutch land surface could be won back from farming with a food waste reduction of 40 percent in Europe. Moreover, the energy spent on packaging, transporting, cooling and preparing the food is also wasted.
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FooD Waste: Who is responsible?
5%
Super markets
42%
consumers
14%
Restaurants & Hotels
39%
Producers
If we take a closer look at who is responsible for the waste in the food chain food, we see the following: 5 percent is wasted by supermarkets, 14 percents by restaurants and hotels, 39 percent by farmers and producers and the largest amount, of 42 percent, by us, the consumers. (European Commission 2010) Current initiatives Innovations against food waste occur constantly in the food chain. Farmers are working on methods to reduce yield loss. The government is trying to create more awareness around expiration dates. Producers and supermarkets are constantly innovating their packaging to increase the product life. Besides these measures, there is big trend of grass root initiatives such as Kromkommer in the Netherlands. They use the yields from
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farmers that they cannot sell in the regular channels and produce products such as soup. Another initiative is Damn Food Waste; they managed to prepare a lunch for five thousand people on Museum Square in Amsterdam. Their goal is to create more awareness among consumers on the scale of the problem. Kliek&CO is an initiative focussed on changing customer behavior. And last but not least, Instock; the first restaurant in the Netherlands which cooks with the surplus from the food chain. Instock Merel Laarman, Bart Roetert, Freke van Nimwegen and I started our careers at Ahold, the largest retailer in the Netherlands. We shared a common interest in the theme of food waste. And while we worked in an Albert Heijn store we were confronted with the issue of food waste on a daily basis. The following chart shows the proportional distribution of food waste in the food chain. Even though supermarkets only contribute
Photo by Julien Balmer
for five percent of the overall amount waste, they can influence their suppliers and customers. We joined an innovation competition at Ahold called ‘the Best Idea of Young Ahold’ and won. This equipped us with the funds to start the Instock foundation of which the pop-up restaurant on the Westergasterrein in Amsterdam is our first project. The goal of the foundation is to stop food waste and create more awareness around the issue. At Instock the chefs cook the meals with the ‘yield of the day’. The menu is different every day. The food is collected from different Albert Heijns in Amsterdam in the electrical rescue car. From the stores, the chefs can use fruits, vegetables and bread. With the choice of these products Instock avoids legal issues concerning expiration dates. Bread has has a packaging date and customers often times choose the nicer looking fruits and vegetables, leaving the others becoming waste. Meat comes from the suppliers of Albert Heijn. In the case where production does not exactly meet the forecasts a small percentage of overproduction can be used in the restaurant.
Cooperation There are various NGO’s that are concerned with the food waste topic. For example, the Youth Food Movement (YFM), this organisation for young people from the argo-food sector yearly organises an academy where 25 people from the sector meet to learn more about our food system. FUSIONS (Food Use For Social Innovation by Optimising Waste Prevention Strategies) a European project funded by the European Commision. They are establishing a multistakeholder platform and can provide funds. Or the Food Surplus Entrepreneurs (FSE) Network, a platform specifically focussed on food waste issues from an entrepreneurial view. These NGO’s can help change public opinion, help people learn from the best practices and change the level playing field of large corporations. After UCU, Selma Seddik (‘09) obtained her master’s in International Management from King’s College, London in 2011. She appropriately became an International Management Trainee at Ahold Europe, initially in the corporate responsibility department. After that she managed a supermarket for a year and, in May of this year, co-founded restaurant Instock in Amsterdam.
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Get with the program Peter Clausman came up with a good idea: a framework for his company to listen to employees with good ideas. They didn’t listen to him. So he quit and started his own school.
“W
e need people like you! We need a young impulse, new ideas to stir up our organization. We are moving in a new direction, and your fresh input is essential.” That was what the recruiter woman said when they hired me, and I believed her. So in 2007 I started a Rabobank Corporate Management Traineeship and after a happy year seeing all different aspects of the company, I started in a sales position. After a few years (I had since moved on to the strategy & innovation), I realized the recruiter lady had made it sound better than it was in reality. They didn’t know what to do with mavericks. To be honest, I had a hard time adapting to the logic of the company. Sometimes in the morning I’d tell my girlfriend: “Today I’m playing Mr. Banker again”. But I hadn’t figured out what else I wanted to do, so I just stayed put to get more experience in the banking system. Funny story: Remember the beginning of this crisis? Started off by structured financial products, right? I was a trainee and had just
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learned how these ingeniously structured financial timebombs were supposed to work, when I saw it break down in real life. I saw the whole dealing room stressing out and the ECB intervening by pouring billions of dollars into the imploding financial system. I had a deep feeling that change was needed, but I didn’t know how to approach it. In 2011 I did the best thing I could have done. My fiancée and I left for a three-month trip that gave me enough space to break free from it all. I vowed that when I got back I would stay true to my intuition and stand up for the things I believed in. Some time after I returned from the trip I had the chance to temporarily join the Strategy and Innovation team. I was on a roll. Next to my ‘regular’ innovation job, one of my most far out initiatives was the Commission Grundsatzfrage: younger employees asking management fundamental questions. We got a lot of following, even from the Board of Directors. But after my sponsor in the board retired, it all came
During times of crisis, the preferences and values of consumers tend to change.
back like a boomerang when my director made clear to me to ‘quit this silly hobby, and get on with your real job’. Get with the program. I thought this was funny, since my job responsibilities entailed strategy and innovation; questioning the current way and changing direction. Of course the whole Grundsatz thing was a bit outrageous, but seeing the best game changing ideas end up nowhere, it was clear that no one in management position knew what to do with these disrupting fresh ideas. When I left a lot of people said: “What a shame, we need more people like you”. This is exactly the real dilemma, organizations need independent-minded people, but cannot integrate them and their innovative ways into their way of working. Same old story Does this little story sound familiar? It
could, because I see it happening a lot. Organizations that have the need to change recruit promising freethinking people, who then get stuck in a tough, old culture. It’s not only the new hires. There are many people within organizations who have worked there for decades, who are inspired, have a promising vision for the future of that organization and want to make a change. But this potential stays mainly untapped. It seems that companies would rather have you be a nice fitting cog in the wheel than that you address looming shortcomings with good solutions. It hurts the companies Many industries struggle because their business is being disrupted, and if you believe Clayton M. Christensen and his book, The Innovators Dilemma, we live in a society where the pace of change is ever
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so the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow, at the ECB building? View of the European Central Bank from the Frankfurt Office of Rabobank where I took this picture.
increasing. Last century, companies could exploit one business model for more than 30 years. Once a company hit the fortune 500, it stayed there for an average of 30 years. This number is now declining very quickly, meaning business models have increasingly shorter lifespans. Companies need to be more adaptive to new trends in order to stay on top. So what to do? How can a bank or any other large organization innovate? I believe the essential key for sustainable change is keeping independent thinking alive, by keeping these mavericks on board and integrating them into the organization. I believe that responsibility for the first step lies with the individual. The organization doesn’t change unless someone makes a stand. Of course there is a lot organizations can do, but in this article I’ll focus on what the maverick can do. For starters, getting the right mindset and setting the right goals is crucial for a maverick. For the right mindset you need to
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understand what the (real) purpose of the organization is, and align your efforts with it. If you cannot align your efforts with the underlying purpose of that organization, you might question what you are doing there anyway. The other part of the mindset is understanding that you are part of the whole system and not someone merely who observes it, and therefore judging it is judging yourself as well. This means you are as much responsible for and capable of change as any other person. It is not only the chairman’s or CEO’s job to invoke change. He will need following and most of the time he will not change course until he feels supported enough to do so. You need to support him in feeling secure to change. Once you get the right mindset, it is time to formulate your goals and make them clear for everybody to understand. Even for people who might oppose. You need to take a clear, but not necessarily provoking stance. You want to help your organization to adapt to
a new reality, to a new business model, to survive and stay relevant. This will be only provoking for people who do not want to face the new reality. In formulating your goal, focus on the need you are solving. If there is no clear urgency, there will be no change. Do it openly so people can join you. You’ll discover you might make some enemies, but you’ll have a lot more allies than you dared to dream. And you will need them. Next comes proving and testing, making sure you have room to experiment. Be very clear what you want to accomplish in your experiments: These are necessary tests, not a failsafe way to ensure turnover. You’re discovering uncharted terrain and you want prove that there is another way. Your goal is to secure budget for the next phase: more testing and discovering. Make the first project is as small as possible and make sure that it proves to the board of directors that you need space and a budget. Nowadays you hear a lot about intrapreneurship: behaving like an entrepreneur within an organization. Within companies, everybody is excited about Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, Design thinking, Rapid Prototyping etc. These are very efficient tools, but only if you know how to use and embed them. If you do not operate strategically and tactically you might as well not implement these tools. No one will listen to your proof, if you’re not highlighting the right motivation, using the right language, and having the right people vouch for you. Also, your timing has to be right.
In order to convince your board, you need to speak their language and know their interest and challenges better than they know them. I’ve seen that the most successful mavericks put a lot of effort in mapping the needs and language of the organization that they wanted to change. They listened a lot, and they listened well. These mavericks understood the challenges of people with other interests so well, they were able to describe these people’s challenges better than they themselves could. These are just some of the things I found out are best to do as a maverick. But if you do them, things will change, albeit slowly. Perseverance is no luxury in the ways of a maverick, because change happens slowly and mostly when you don’t expect it anymore. And when you do expect change to happen, there are almost always events that turn everything around and leaves you just where you started. So in the future the recruiter lady can say: “We need people like you! We need a young impulse, new ideas to stir up our organization. We have a special platform for critical thinkers and a program to test, integrate and execute game-changing ideas. We have proven to be truly innovative in a sustainable way.” Wouldn’t that be something? I think it would, so that is what one of the things I want to achieve with the School of Mavericks. Peter Clausman (‘01) studied Law for a year and then obtained a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam. He started working for Rabobank in 2007, initially as Corporate Management Trainee, eventually as Strategy and Innovation Manager. He left at the end of last year in order to found School of Mavericks to help people innovate within large organizations.
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“W
hat’s your biggest UCU secret?” we asked you on the book of faces. “Tell us something juicy,” we implored. Oh boy, should we have kept our stupid mouths shut! We thought we were asking about nighttime fridge raids and clandestine dryer turds (seriously, who does that?) But no. At least not only. Turns out we were also upturning a dark and heavy stone. Bad idea. Some monsters are best left unfondled, you see? We didn’t suspect that you’d tell us things that would actually make us worried, or sad, or both.
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Someone wrote a long entry about becoming depressed at UCU due to peer and study pressure, and how it affected their grades and their opportunities after college. “Depression is such a taboo (in society and UCU),” they wrote, “you think no one is suffering from it when really a lot of the students are. [They] are afraid to talk about it in the fear of seeming ‘weak’ to their fellow students/their competition.” Valid observations of course, and deserving of more elaboration than we have room for here, now. After reading that, we looked at each other thinking: That was a fluke. Someone is bound to
have unhappy memories and post them here. The next one will be funfunfun, just wait. “I am worried that no one would come to my funeral if I were to die,” the next one posted. Ah. “Then don’t die!” we wanted to shout back. But we couldn’t, because you were all anonymous. Of course, there was also cheerful, fun stuff. “I sat next to the same person the entire semester in a class. I never knew their name,” wrote every single one of us. And: “One drunken evening, some friends and I flipped all the bikes on campus upside down.” You’ll
find many of these happier entries throughout the pages of this edition. We weren’t able to design and publish them all unfortunately, please don’t be mad! So, in the end we realized that this wasn’t a bad idea at all, just with a partial outcome we hadn’t expected. But now that we’ve peeked under that heavy stone, we want to hear more from all of you who have something to say that isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. So we made another form: bit.do/backatucu. Go here to tell us more, anonymously or not, about anything you’d like. We’ll try to say something more helpful next time around. In the meantime, take care!
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Social Skills are Survival Skills Caspar van Lissa makes a case for more empathy in the world. Try to put yourself in his shoes and see what he is talking about.
T
he promise of academic excellence has lured many prospective students onto University College’s historical campus. If you make the cut, you’re rewarded with three years of cramming and the level of teacherstudent interaction that others daydream about when they doze off in their college amphitheater. Between these walls, young minds are groomed for success – or so we’re led to believe. But how do we define success? Every recent graduate is bound to realize soon after emerging from UCU’s brick cocoon that, in the real world, success is not an academic concept. There are no grades or retakes for the challenges you will face in life. In our present cultural context, the economic definition of success seems paramount. Your bank balance offers the same convenience of quantification, free from the restrictions in range that constrained your grades in school.
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The sky is the limit! But one might wonder how sensible, or sustainable, an economic definition of success is, particularly in the context of global recession. How central is wealth to our well-being? Psychological research shows that wealth matters far less than we think. Particularly once people exceed the level of subsistence, wealth hardly predicts life satisfaction. Instead, research suggests that the need to belong – a desire for connection and caring relationships – may be the most fundamental and psychological human need. This would suggest that what matters most is not the money we make, but the quality of our relationships with others. Of course, we all experience moments of personal victory, and some of us strive for that feeling of achievement. But what would be the pleasure
DOLLAZ 4 LIFE
FO SHO
The connections we make with others are fundamental to our wellbeing, and necessary for the achievement and the enjoyment of success.
of success if we had no one to celebrate with? Would your achievement have been possible without the many who came before you? What would be the value of your work if no one could enjoy its benefits, or be inspired by your ideas and carry on your work after you? Success is inherently social in nature. The connections we make with others are fundamental to our wellbeing, and necessary for the achievement and the enjoyment of success. Moreover, relationships are free, healthy, ecologically friendly and sustainable. In a world with limited resources and 7 billion human inhabitants, our lives are inextricably linked. Even at the molecular level, we’re all part of the cycle of life. We breathe the same air, drink the same water. The molecules that make up the food that we eat become part of us, and they have been part of something – or even someone
– else before that. Yet our culture would have us believe that we are individuals, only responsible for shaping our own life, and for that we are competing with the other 6,999,999,999 human inhabitants of the earth. In this race for success we pollute the air we breathe, and poison the food and water. For better or for worse, the future of our world will be the joint product of the small, everyday actions of billions of people. The relevance of our ability to connect and coordinate is especially pertinent now, when the world we live in is facing major challenges in the realms of ecological
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disaster, economic injustice, and peace and security. The key question is whether the awe-inspiring power of coordinated human effort can be harnessed to tackle the global crises we face today. The way in which we can individually contribute to this effort is not self-evident. Of course you could dive in headfirst and dedicate your entire life to reversing climate change, combating economic inequality, or promoting global peace. But this requires a tremendous leap of faith, and if you are anything like me, you are probably not chomping at the bit. You have places to go, people to see. But I know one man who jumped in head first: My grandfather, Edy Korthals Altes, who was a whistleblower during the Cold War. He devoted the better part of his life to the promotion of peace and cooperation between religions and science. From a young age, I was instilled with a deep sense of responsibility to contribute to a sustainable future. This was primarily a consequence of his fiery dinner table speeches (sermons). But I am an academic at heart, and (as my contemporaries at UCU can attest) definitely not cut out for politics. So for a long time, I struggled with the question
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how I could contribute to this vision of a more interdependent, sustainable future. I discovered the answer to that question during my time at University College. I was always interested in understanding and connecting with people from all walks of life: To see the world from their perspective. As a young student, this fascination drew me to psychology. At UCU, I was particularly inspired by the late Professor Willem Wagenaar, who spoke passionately about the way he used psychological science to fight injustice in the courtroom. In his honor, I still wear a bow tie when lecturing. He demonstrated that psychology can improve the quality of people’s lives. My own interest, however, was not in the courtroom, but in the field of relationships. I used to read my textbooks as instruction manuals, and engaged in social experimentation to understand and improve the way I relate and connect with others. It is no coincidence that for my PhD I’m studying empathy, the social glue that binds us together as a species. Empathy refers to mutual understanding and shared emotion. When people empathize, there is a shared representation of the self and the other on a neurological level. People
Empathy is what makes us so uniquely capable to connect, to work together and achieve astonishing results. can engage in cognitive perspective taking to see matters from another person’s point of view, and they can experience an emotional caring response, or feel others’ emotion as if they were their own. Empathy is what makes us so uniquely capable to connect, to work together and achieve astonishing results. By exercising empathy, we can harness the power of coordinated human effort. I believe that the key to our survival lies in our ability to connect. We depend on other people; for our wellbeing, our success, and for overcoming the challenges we face on a global level. In a highly interdependent world, social skills are survival skills. With this vision in mind, I co-founded an institute called Social Excellence. Through coaching and team building, we promote the social skills that help people connect, create synergy, and prosper together. Success is social in nature, and relationships, businesses, and humanity as a whole will flourish if we work together towards our mutual benefit. One main conclusion from my research on empathy is that perspective taking is the key to overcoming conflict and differences of opinion. Just asking adolescents to pay more attention to
their mother’s point of view helped them reach more mutually beneficial outcomes in conflicts. The same principle applies on different levels, whether in the family systems that I study, in a corporate setting, or between nations. But I believe that an even higher level of perspective taking is required to address the challenges that we face today. This tiny blue ball called earth is home to all of us. It is a beacon of life suspended in the vast emptiness of space; vibrant but fragile. It is our source of life, and we are inseparably connected to it and to each other. When taking this perspective, all of the arbitrary distinctions and differences of opinion that divide us are blown out of the water. This clears the way for a new dialogue, a coordinated human effort, to move towards a more interdependent, sustainable future. Caspar van Lissa (‘07) obtained his research master’s in Social Psychology from VU University, after which he started his PhD project on the role of empathy in adolescent-parent conflict resolution. He is co-founder of Social Excellence Coaching, and appeared as a coach on national TV in “Casanova Bootcamp”.
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Private conservation in Peru Christel Scheske isn’t too positive about the state of nature conservation efforts. However, there is a light that shines through the canopy. We’re screwed. That was my conclusion after turning my back on an academic career in social psychology (incidentally, I can trace that career choice directly back to an excellent Introduction to Psychology course at UCU... without doubt, I’m not the only one). I realized that what I really wanted to do was environmental conservation, and before I knew it, I had found my way into the field, armed to the teeth with naiveté. It turns out, trying to save the planet can easily lead you to give up on humanity altogether. Countless reports and journal articles provide unquestionable proof that we, as a species, took a very wrong turn somewhere in our evolutionary history. Conservation conferences are packed with
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frazzled researchers and activists trying to get people to care about humanity’s impending doom - on offer is a veritable buffet of cataclysms: climate change, mass extinction of species, ocean acidification and so on. The international community has set ambitious goals to curb biodiversity loss by, for instance, placing 17% of global terrestrial and freshwater areas under protection by 2020, and 10% of all marine and coastal areas. These and other goals are contained in the Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Sadly, this year’s interim report, Global Biodiversity Outlook 4, shows that although there has been some progress so far, we are not doing near enough to curb the rapid disappearance of species.
Had I landed myself in the most depressing of all disciplines? My source of hope, I was to discover, lies not in the conference halls, but in the details; in the grassroots heroics of individuals and communities that I never even knew existed. Just as my newfound pessimism peaked, I moved to Peru. Up until then, I had thought that conservation lay in the hands of governments and international NGOs like the WWF, and to a large part it does, with a particular focus on the creation of national protected areas; the holy grail of conservation. But in Lima, I began working with an initiative called “Conservamos por Naturaleza� from the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, a long-standing and respected Peruvian conservation NGO. The target of Conservamos is a group often forgotten by the international conservation community: ordinary citizens running privately protected areas. How does that work? As private land owners, people can
have their lands officially declared Private Conservation Areas, or, if they want to conserve a piece of land that is state-owned, they can apply for a concession. In Peru, over 260,000 hectares are currently being conserved on private land, with the ecosystems under protection ranging from coastal dry forests to Andean highlands and lowland rainforests. The private owners of these protected areas are equally diverse, and include native communities, wealthy citizens from Lima, local families and others. Some bought land specifically for conservation, others are farmers or livestock owners and decided to change their practices, some inherited land from their parents and made a promise to protect it. Some are driven by a romantic dream of protecting pristine nature, others have more pragmatic reasons, for instance when their community’s water
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Together with her family, Leyda protects around 170 hectares of cloud forest in a remote corner in the north-west of the country. supply disappeared when surrounding forests were chopped down to create pastures. This heterogeneity makes it on the one hand difficult to find policy solutions that suit them all, on the other hand, it shows that environmental conservation can be approached from a multitude of angles - and still achieve results. What they have in common is a powerful ability to face challenges on their own, because unfortunately, the Peruvian government provides them with few incentives. Peru is not alone in this: privately conserved areas are largely ignored, and are currently not even counted as part of the 17% protected area goal for 2020. Conservamos por Naturaleza supports these initiatives, and our first and foremost goal is to give them something that most have never received before: recognition.
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I learned just how strong a motivator simple recognition can be when I met Leyda RimarachĂn, who manages the Bosque BerlĂn private conservation area in the Amazonas Region of Peru. Together with her family, Leyda protects around 170 hectares of cloud forest in a remote corner in the north-west of the country - a legacy of her father, who years ago went against the trend and left the forest standing rather than converting it to pasture. Now this forest is the source of water for three surrounding communities. The forest is the kind of place you’d think no longer exists in this world: filled with hidden waterfalls, boulders covered in moss, towering trees hung with orchids and lichen. It is home to colorful birds and rare monkeys, but unlike in its cousin, the lowland rainforest, the air at this altitude is cool and the vicious biting and stinging insects are notably absent.
When we first visited Leyda at Bosque Berlín, she seemed unable to believe that all we wanted was to support her. I remember her quizzical expression as we sat in her family’s house made from stones and adobe, accompanied by the squeaking of the fifty or so guinea pigs they keep for eating, her mother and sister busy preparing ‘humitas’ with corn grown on their fields and the cheese they made that morning. She tells us now that there were many moments when she was ready to give up, because she felt like she was alone in her efforts. That was two years ago. Since then, we have helped her in every way we can: raising funds for her projects, sending her volunteers, and helping her add more land to her protected area. But most importantly, we showed her that she was not alone, both by connecting her to other private conservation area managers, and telling her story to the wider public through videos, magazine articles, and social media. Since then, she has received a national award for her work, raised over USD 10,000 to protect a group of endangered yellow-tailed woolly monkeys, and is launching an environmental education project in three surrounding communities. On the side, she’s conducting research on two different monkey species, helps lead a new, regional network of private conservation areas, and continues to clamber up and down the steep inclines of her protected area in search of rare wildlife. There are others like Leyda. We search for them all across Peru, and when we find them, what begins is a mutual exchange of something that is just as endangered as the ecosystems we try to protect: hope. Hope for them by feeling like they are part of a greater community of like-minded people, and hope
for us in seeing that despite the constant barrage of dire news, some people don’t give up. So yes, we are probably screwed. But as long as there are people like Leyda, we can’t throw in the towel just yet. After obtaining her Bachelor of Arts from UCU, Christel Scheske (‘08) went on to receive a master’s in Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and a master’s in Conservation Science at Imperial College London. She now lives in Peru, where she is part of the Conservamos por Naturaleza initiative of the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law. She has a bald dog named Blue, and a hairy man named Bruno.
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Opinion
UCU: A School for
the White & Privileged Bryan Miranda argues that our beloved alma mater is too white. And alas, he’s not talking about the classroom walls or the pebbles on the quad.
S
ome of you might recognize my name. I am not your next success story, nor the face of UCU pride and accomplishment. For those who have followed some of the discussions I initiated on the alumni facebook page around race and privilege, you might know I do not honor UCU – I shame it. When last year I criticized UCU for being a school for the white and privileged, I observed its alumni morph into a homogenous collective united to silence my position. Rather than engaging with my critique, I was either personally attacked (“Don’t listen to him, he is a hater, a socialist, a racist, an anti-semite, an idiot, etc.”) or lectured on how I should express my dissent (“you are too aggressive, hostile, arrogant”). Either way, UCU alumni deflected from the contents of my critique and contained it by making me a “problem.” Clearly, this backlash meant I had troubled people’s sense of self, an inevitable consequence of disrupting unquestioned truths about UCU. Now, one year later, I return to my critique. So let’s start with the uncomfortable question: why is the overwhelming majority of UCU students white? We would have to go back to who populate
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UCU’s student body and ask: how did they get there? About 60-70% of UCU students are Dutch. While the Netherlands is composed out of a myriad of ethnic and racial groups– including Surinamese, Antilleans, Indonesians, Turks, Moroccans, Chinese and Latinos–those who are overwhelmingly represented at UCU are white. Those with an “international” profile, like myself, who bring in the brown and (rarely) black for UCU’s diversity pictures and statistics do not come from poor immigrant backgrounds. They tend to be the spoiled sons and daughters of those who “made it” and attended western(ized) international schools around the world. They compose the exoticized color of ‘difference’ that UCU can point at to affirm it’s “multicultural greatness” but who are not given the space to actually challenge western colonial ways of thinking embedded in the knowledge production of the university. They are there to further their own careers within white western institutions while affirming them (like Ban Ki-Moon as Secretary General at the UN, Obama as US President, or Ahmed Aboutaleb as Mayor of Rotterdam), at the expense of keeping the majority of other brown and black people down.
Editor,s Note: Please note that any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Even though we, the editorial board, doubt the factual nature of some of the claims made in this article, we decided to publish it anyway, as we feel the subject matter is one that should have a place on these pages. The author
are “allochtoon” (a racial cultural and administrative category to mark one’s nonnativeness), 12% of all primary schools have a non-white majority, while in the country’s largest cities 80% of non-white school kids attend the same school. This makes the Netherlands the country with the most racially segregated school systems in the West, even exceeding the US.
To understand why UCU’s Dutch students are all white, one has to go back to how the Dutch education system works. In the Netherlands, at the age of 11/12 children are given a standardized test (the “cito-toets”) which serves to align their ‘intelligence’ with the quality and number of years of education they will receive. The higher the score, the more ‘intelligent’ the child supposedly is, and therefore the more ‘able’ and ‘deserving’ one is to a better future (read: access to university and middle class jobs). The idea behind this is that it’s an “objective” measurement of one’s intellectual capacity. But this assumes intellect is something you are naturally born with rather than enabled and fostered, discouraged and inhibited by one’s socioeconomic conditions. According to this idea of objectivity, there will be no significant difference in the results scored whether you are white and from a white middle class highly educated family and neighborhood, or whether you are black or brown and from a socioeconomically marginalized, heavily policed, and stigmatized neighborhood. The reality of course, is that this does have an effect. In the Netherlands 14% of Dutch schoolkids included too many links in the text to list as sources here, but they can be found on www.talkingpost.org.
A majority of so-called “black schools” are under-funded, have high illiteracy rates and few qualified teachers. As descendants from those who migrated to the Netherlands from its (former) colonies or came from Morocco and Turkey as guest laborers in the 196070s, the kids that attend these schools are inheritors (as black and/or Muslim) of Dutch colonialism and slavery, embodiments of the racial and cultural differences that the Dutch for centuries, and still today, have tried to dominate and eradicate from Surinam to Indonesia, from the Antilles to the Schilderswijk. These kids today live in neighborhoods where unemployment is rampant (even as high as 80% in some areas) where single mothers are forced to work multiple jobs in formal and informal economies to get by, where they are constantly framed as “security problems” and “national threats” that require policing, incarceration and forced assimilation to white Dutch middle class norms and values. This is in stark contrast to white middle class Dutch kids who are assumed to naturally belong, who usually speak no other language but Dutch, who will enjoy a quality education with qualified teachers in clean orderly white neighborhoods, who are spoon-fed ideas that they are the “future leaders of tomorrow” and will get extra tutoring if they have learning difficulties because, besides having the means to do so, it will not be assumed that it’s
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“their culture” or their innate “stupidity” that holds them back. Logically, the result is that these white kids score high on standardized tests and are given quality education for a professional career of their choosing while most kids from “black schools” score low and are then trained for ‘practical’ cheap labor. The kids that come out of these schools are thus the future cheap labor force that keeps the Dutch economy running while keeping the power of the white middle class intact. This is certainly outrageous, but not that surprising. Before the cito-toets, kids that were not white and Dutch were directly sent to technical schools. So the cito-toets might present itself as an “objective” measurement of one’s intellectual capacity, but in fact it functions as a disguise to continue organizing society by race and class. It’s unsurprising then that the Dutch Social Cultural Planning Bureau (SCP) has come out to say that, to a large extent, there is an “apartheid system” in place in the Netherlands. So when a white Dutch UCU student prides herself in attending the “best bachelor program in the Netherlands” and sees herself as born exceptionally gifted, rather than born exceptionally privileged, we need to start seriously questioning that. We need to trouble those arrogant assumptions of superiority and entitlement. We need to recognize that everything – from the opportunities we have had to travel and contemplate international careers to having “broad interests” in art, literature and history – is not deserved “because we worked for it” but because they were enabled, encouraged and fostered by our privileged environments. When we acknowledge that we have been privileged by class and race to have the opportunity to go to university and end up with our “dream” jobs at the expense of keeping others
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oppressed, we can shift those stories of success from one of personal merit to wider structures of power that have historically advantaged the white Dutch middle class since racism was institutionalized as a logic of governance through slavery and colonialism. When we start to understand how privilege works, perhaps the “future global leaders” that UCU fabricates could give up on their dream to go out there and “save Africa”. Instead they could address how what sustains their privilege here perpetuates death and destruction there. Like when the Netherlands loots the African continent poor through corporate land and water grabbing, financing armed conflict to guarantee cheap access to oil, and opening up their markets to steal and deplete their resources in the name of development. Perhaps instead of going to “free” Muslim women in Iraq they would fight to oppose the very illegal wars that deprived them from any viable future to begin with (like when the Netherlands got involved in the genocidal 2003 Iraq invasion that cost the lives of one million Iraqis in order for corporations like Dutch Shell to assure its stake in the newly available oil fields). Instead of scoring a job to ‘help’ African and Syrian refugees at UNHCR camps they could fight the very EUropean border policies that criminalize their movement and assure their deaths before they can even step foot on these lands they call civilized.
This idea, which pervades among UCU students, that we want to “make a difference” and “change the world” is intimately tied with class and white privilege, it feeds a white saviour complex that continues from colonial times, this idea that we are great and superior and need to go and civilize the helpless brown and black savage others. The intention might be innocent but this very mentality, turned into practice when we take up those diplomatic and corporate careers that pretend to “save the world”, is what exactly reproduces the structural violence we see around the world today. Rather than evading a very necessary conversation on how white and class privilege shape UCU’s student body, it’s time, and morally necessary, that we actually engage in it. I hope that we can start to question our social position when privileged by race and class, understand the university as an
institution of power, unlearn what we have been taught, and divest from the career paths and lifestyles that reproduce structural violence globally. I know that’s a lot to swallow. I know from experience that the arduous process of questioning, unlearning and ceding power is painful and deeply existential because indeed, in the words of African-American writer James Baldwin, it means “the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety... Yet it is only when a man [sic] is able, without bitterness or self pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free—he has set himself free— for higher dreams, for greater privileges.” Bryan Miranda (‘11) is a political activist and writer for such online publications as openDemocracy, Waging Nonviolence, and TruthOut. He can be followed on Twitter @BPMiranda. To react to this article, please visit Post Magazine’s online counterpart, Talking Post, at www.talkingpost.org
Opinion
Criticism, Inclusion, and Mobilisation: the shape of things to come Omri Preiss reacts to Bryan’s opinion piece.
A
t the time I arrived at UC, in January 2009, the catastrophe of the financial crisis was in full swing. What may have seemed as agitated doomsaying and fearmongering by the media a year earlier, now looked to the innocent, uninformed, bystander (the electorate at large) as a ride down the rabbit hole. What this meant was
unclear, but if after the Great Depression it took four years for Roosevelt to come out with the New Deal, then we figured, naive as we were, that by the time we graduated things should probably be on the mend. I distinctly remember how privileged and inordinately fortunate I felt at the prospect of spending years of unprecedented crisis in that
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comfortable environment, sheltered from the economic tempest without. Sheltered as it is, UC, along with many similar educational institutions, chooses to don labels like ‘excellent’ or ‘elite’, and seeks to nurture in its students a view on what those labels might mean. Lest we fall to delusions of grandeur, it is important that we question these, challenge our self-conceptions, and look for the gaps and incoherencies. The idea of ‘elite’ inherently entails exclusion to whatever extent, and must be scrutinised. Bryan, as he himself gladly acknowledges, has long been a vocal critic of these labels, and we should be grateful that voices such as his nudge us to reflect on what we meant to achieve at UC, and how it contributed to our formation, even when we do not necessarily agree. Any student that took the political theory course during their time, or international relations, introduction to philosophy or anthropology, will know that there are many ways of examining society and politics. Some instruments are blunter than others. Race and colonial heritage are doubtlessly, regrettably, and inextricably, significant elements in the socio-political landscape of the Netherlands, and of Europe, then and now. Bryan produces a myriad of facts and figures to demonstrate that structural mechanisms of exclusion are in place, operating on specific segments of society, and, Bryan claims, keep them out of UC. The accuracy or veracity of the claims I do not intend to address, but rather the assumptions and conclusions. While “whiteness” or “blackness” in this area of social criticism refer not literally to colour but political and identity categories of inclusion and exclusion, it seems dangerous to then
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The idea of ‘elite’ inherently entails exclusion to whatever extent, and must be scrutinised. apply them a priori to individuals. There seems to be a contradiction in condemning racial prejudice, and then assuming an individual to wish to be defined politically by that category, or to accuse her of privilege or opinion she may not have. Would an Indian UC student from a wealthy background be defined as ‘white’ or ‘black’? Would a Dutch student from an inner-city housing estate be defined as ‘black’ or ‘white’? Who are we to judge? This seems an unsettling and dangerous muddle, which could lead to prejudice on the side of the critic. On the other hand, the structural mechanisms of racial exclusion operate on a macro level through historical circumstance, public policy, political discourse, and economic conditions - education, housing, and social networks. To then attempt to make the accusation that UCU somehow guilty of practicing exclusion, because it is subject to the same social forces, simply does not add up. One would need to examine many more demographic and socioeconomic variables to understand why one type of person might apply to UC and another might not. Very partial and rash conclusions do more to offend than they do to clarify. During their time at UC, student are exposed to be much more ‘critical’ material, en masse, than an ordinary faculty of law, physics, or psychology. As in any community, some will notice, some will not, some will choose to be critical, or progressive, some will choose to
be conservative. All are given the opportunity to choose, perhaps more so than in other systems. If there are two elements to the UCU experience, which have appeared on every prospectus, and which are most important: the encouragement to connect and understand different ways of thinking in different fields in order to tackle a problem from different perspectives, and the life in a community which encourages active engagement, and sense of mutual responsibility. We have all heard it more often than we may have wished or cared to remember, but alas, there is no escape - UC students that have indeed taken these encouragements with them from UC will be grateful for them. Social exclusion and marginalisation, poverty, prejudice, and xenophobia have all been on the rise, and are more important to tackle head on now than ever. They are driven by elements of social class, gender, race, power relations, material incentives, or cultural practices - there is no benefit in omitting criteria from the analysis. Above all it is important to recognise the gobsmacking intransigence and immobility that have been characteristic of our current politics, and through the bursting seams of that degraded structure, dangerous distasteful currents begin to flow. Several generations of UC students have graduated, and the economic crisis does not seem like it will be going away soon.
The increase in social tension and economic inequalities in our societies is staggering. The political leadership whose responsibility it was to provide a recovery from the crisis has failed miserably. The Right has proven its ideas bankrupt, while the Left has been unable to produce a new narrative to allow it to take political and policy discourse down a new route (yet). Not many would have thought the 21st century would look like this, and having been led down to this point, our generation finds itself in a precarious situation. What we have learnt, though, is that we have responsibility. If our generation do not aim to do things drastically differently than the way they are being done, we will not be able to tackle the problems of climate change, economic stagnation, and inequality. If we do not engage, these will overtake us. Whereas criticism and reflection are key, active involvement solutions are needed. This generation needs to be one that is politically mobilised and socially engaged, willing to attempt to grasp and contend with interconnected problems. For those who spent time at UC and have taken these lessons with them can count themselves fortunate. Omri Preiss (‘12) obtained an MA in European Political and Administrative Studies at the College of Europe in Bruges. He now works as a Parliamentary Assistant for the Socialists and Democrats Group at the European Parliament.
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The Oldest Photo from Surinam Hinde Haest ponders an old daguerrotype photograph from Surinam, and its significance today.
‘W
hat will we be, to the generations we can’t even imagine, staring at us in their futuristic museums?’ Above question was asked by Alain de Botton on a giant yellow post-it in the Rijksmuseum. The text accompanied a set of daguerreotypes, an early photographic process, displayed in dimly lit showcases. Looking at these small nineteenth-century portraits, our noses pressed against the glass, would have seemed shamelessly voyeuristic to the people in the portraits, who kept the fragile photographs in velvet-lined containers and medallions for private use. What legitimises our communal, nighdevoted staring at heirlooms from the past? What do these people mean to us who no longer know who they are? According to De Botton, fear of death is one meaning that the contemporary museum visitor might
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attribute to the daguerreotypes. ‘This is one of the saddest rooms in the museum. You might want to cry, in the half-light… The people look so present and so alive, yet we know that they are now ineluctably, definitely, dead… Images that were made to remind us of life have, unwittingly, contributed to a gallery of memento mori.’ De Botton’s interpretation was part of the Art is Therapy-intervention (April-September 2014), based on the premise that we should relate to museum objects on a personal level, as opposed to a merely art historical one. Though the sight of the beautifully immortalised deceased evokes an inevitable sense of nostalgia and evanescence, the daguerreotypes can mean much more to us than a photographic vanitas, provided we make an effort to understand their provenance. As we momentarily trade the focus on the (often favoured) personal
interpretation of a work of art for the (often avoided) historic context, we will find the reality behind the daguerreotypes to be rather fantastical. Amongst the daguerreotypes on show was an image of the Surinamese couple Maria
Louisa de Hart and Johannes Ellis, , which came to the museum from a family safe, carried in a washcloth. Though Maria Lwas half-Surinamese and Johannes Ellis’ mother was a freed slave from Ghana, they are portrayed as members of the wealthy and powerful elite. Given the daguerreotype was
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made during Dutch colonial rule in Surinam and well before the abolition of slavery, the image forces us to add another dimension to our understanding of what being of mixed descent could also entail at the time. It is exactly this discrepancy between what we see and what we think we know that makes this image more than just an old family photograph or a memento mori. What we know about nineteenth-century photographs from Surinam is that the large majority is of an ethnographic nature, aiming to classify racial ‘types’. What we see in this image is a coloured couple wealthy enough to afford elaborate costumes and to have a daguerreotype made, which was an exclusive and expensive event. This object distorts (though it does not deny) the existing image of colonial history we puzzled together. Practicing art history is combining what we see with what we know, or get to know as we follow the leads that the object throws at us. For example, the daguerreotype was dated according to newspaper ads of the few photographers who travelled to Surinam at the time. From which followed that Maria Louisa was pregnant whilst being portrayed, a salient detail to remember when looking at the museum object. Knowing her son was Abraham George Ellis, the first Dutch minister of Surinamese descent, makes the daguerreotype a tangible testimony to changing colonial power relations. Whether we see the daguerreotype as a personal family heirloom, a historic document, or a universal memento mori, it proves that the meaning of an object is volatile and can change our perspective on what we think we know. The image is no
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Practicing art history is combining what we see with what we know, or get to know as we follow the leads that the object throws at us. isolated relic from a past that no longer bears any relevance to us, but is part of a network of remains that continuously challenges how we relate to our own heritage. Besides a nostalgic memento mori to which we relate on a personal and emotional level, the image is also a very real document. Apart from ephemeral, Maria Louisa and Johannes were also one of the first Surinamese immigrants in The Netherlands, who carried with them an image that resonates the making of our own time. After UCU, Hinde Haest (‘08) obtained an MA Anthropology of Material and Visual Culture and an MSc in Development Studies, both from the University of London. She writes art reviews and critiques for Metropolis M, where she is also an editor. She currently works as a project employee at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where she most recently organized the exhibition ‘Modern Times. Photography in the 20th Century’. Sources Mattie Boom, The first photograph from Suriname: a portrait of the nineteenth-century elite in the West Indies, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam 2014) Alain de Botton, Art is Therapy, Rijksmuseum exhibition catalogue (Amsterdam 2014)
Naomi Alcaide Manthey
Vivian van Wingerden Pau Castellvi Canet Dario Vaccaro raningen Emma van B rt Ivar Kolvoo Claire Lovern Jori Jansen Leon de Boer Devi Pillay Julis Koch Kavish Bisseswar Marouan Fatti Aleksander Brodowicz Ine Alvarez van Tussenbroek Anneke Monninkhof Katharina Luckner Romain Bruyere Dean Brandt Sarah Florander Sofie Ros Miriam Retter Shahzaib Momin oni Eugenia Melissen Ferrer Clare Scally Pietro Magn Martijn Scholtemeijer Petra Zaal Shuang Tan Usman Mahar Sil Scholte Annelie ke van Tooren Orion Vienne Friederike Werner Alexander Borgstein Roeland Heerema Nina de Gruijter Mirre van Duin
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? Whwohat ?
where?
Maaike van Mourik (‘06) obtained her PhD cum laude from the University Medical Center Utrecht for her thesis on “Automating the Surveillance of Healthcare-Associated Infections”.
Nicole Huisman (‘09) graduated from Warwick medical school with an MBChB and is now working in the emergency admissions unit at a district general hospital near Bristol. On 7 June 2014, Johanne Søndergaard (‘05) and Maurits Hekking (‘05), who met on 29th of August 2002 in the UC bar (the Thursday of their introduction week), got married on a very rainy day in Glasgow, after almost 12 years together. George Saad (‘10) got a PhD position at Leiden University studying language change amongst the Abui people, a Papuan ethnic group located in eastern Indonesia.
In the summer of 2014 Caspar van den Berg (‘02), senior lecturer at the Leiden University Institute of Public Administration, was awarded a prestigious Veni grant of from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for his international comparative research on politicization of top civil servants in 14 countries in Europe, North America and East Asia. The total project budget is €310.000.
Bastiaan De Goei (‘03) got married to Yu Wen Chen. They met each other while both pursuing a PhD at Cambridge.
Yosiane White (‘13) writes: ‘Rowing for Jesus. Partying with Jesus. Living at Jesus. Studying in Jesus. College. Oxford.’
She is also very proud to announce the launch of Iran Academia: an online institute for Iranian students in Iran who do not have access to higher education. It’s the first free, online, accredited master program offered in Persian. The first group of 90 students will start their courses in January. The crowdfunding campaign for the Dutch public will be launched in March 2015. More information on www.iran-academia.com
Emily D. Melton (‘07) completed her PhD, magna cum laude, in geomicrobiology (environmental science) at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. As part of this study, she had a paper published in Nature Reviews Microbiology (Melton et al. 2014). Wietske Pijpers (‘02) writes: “On the 26th of May, Wende and Yanna became proud sisters of Danique (hence even more pink stuff is invading the house)!”
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Somaye Dehban’s (‘07) son Robert Amin was born on 15th December 2013 and is a happy healthy boy who is already rocking his bed across the bedroom. Jeso, her older son, finds his younger brother a curious creature to play and roll around with.
If you want to share your experiences in the next edition of Post magazine go to the following link: goo.gl/ZHFD62
Colophon Editorial Board Kiran Coleman (‘05) Tanya van Goch (‘12½) Laurens Hebly (‘01) Thijs van Himbergen (‘03) Leonie Hussaarts (‘08) Iris Otto (‘09) Design & illustration Laurens Hebly (’01) Thijs van Himbergen (’03) www.vanhimbergenhebly.com Additional illustrations Charlie Handsome (‘14) To see more of his work, check out the ‘Charlie Handsome’ Facebook page!
Photography Piet den Blanken Christel Scheske & Bruno Monteferri Contributors Peter Clausman (‘01) Hinde Haest (‘08) Bryan Miranda van Hulst (‘11) Caspar van Lissa (‘07) Nienke de Pauw (‘09) Tamara van der Putten (‘10) Omri Preiss (‘12) Christel Scheske (‘08) Selma Seddik (‘09)
The UCAA board Gisele de Souza Printed by Drukkerij ZuidamUithof A very special thanks to all UCAA contributors and to the UCU administration for believing in this magazine and for making the many UCAA events possible.
Many thanks to All the participants in the ‘U-Secrets’ project & ‘Who, What, Where’ contributors
Post is still looking for Peeps!
Making Post Magazine takes a lot of time, and we’re hoping to find people who’d like to help out. Do you want to develop your editorial / design / illustration / general magazine-making skills? Send us an email at: info@ucaa.nl
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