TU Delft "neglects" and "mismanages" social safety: Education Inspectorate

The board of TU Delf “neglects” the care of its employees, and that leads to an “increased risk of social insecurity for all employees,” the Education Inspectorate said on Friday after investigating several reports of transgressive behavior from TU Delft staff, the Volkskrant reports. According to the Inspectorate, the problems are serious enough to speak of “mismanagement” - a judgment severe enough to prompt government intervention.

The Inspectorate investigated 148 reports about intimidation, shouting, sexually suggestive comments, racism, fear of reporting abuses, and managers who sided with the person responsible for the unsafe situation, among other things. The people responsible are “nearly all people with a higher position, for example, professors or people in management,” while the victims are usually lower in the hierarchy, like PhD students. Managers are judged to not step in enough and sometimes worsen the situation.

It found that women and Ph.D. students experience this type of social insecurity “disproportionately more often.” Over half of the reports it received were from women, while “only 37.5 percent of the TU Delft workforce are women.”

The Inspectorate also noted “several incidents” in which an employee felt intimidated or threatened by (former) directors and a supervisor. The supervisory board appears to have “in several cases had insufficient insight into the social safety of those in the immediate vicinity of the Executive Board,” the Inspectorate said.

The Inspectorate also noted a difference between the experience of executives and other employees. “Many employees with administrative positions indicated that a lot has changed at TU Delft compared to the past and that it is no longer the somewhat student-like male stronghold that it once was. Reporters saw their cases as part or expression of a larger problem in the organization. In contrast, the board of TU Delft saw social safety and the problems that arise from it as incidents inherent to an organization with so many people.”

In response to the Inspectorate’s report, the TU Delft Executive Board and Supervisory Board said in a joint statement: “We face the important task of further strengthening social safety within TU Delft and ensuring that everyone, including the recent reporters to the Education Inspectorate, feels safe at TU Delft.”

The university top also described the research as “inadequate and disappointing,” according to the newspaper. “The report only damages groups of employees or individual employees and TU Delft as an organization, while even the simplest hearing and rebuttal on allegations is missing. The report points to the guilty, while the intention is for us all to learn and thus improve.”

TU Delft plans to go to court to challenge the Inspectorate’s research and conclusions. It invited all employees to a meeting on Friday to inform them about the Inspectorate’s findings and their own views on them.

The Delft University of Technology scored really well in the university rankings last year. It topped the list of Dutch universities in the Times Higher Education 2024 ranking and the QS World University ranking. The university made it into the top 50 on both - the only Dutch university to do so.