I won’t repeat everything I’ve already shared with the board in the past, and I agree with what our colleagues have just said, but I want to reiterate my position. While I like the original vision of the smart academic year, I am not convinced that I see the main benefits in the current proposal, with its slightly longer summer break and a long dark tea time for the soul in winter, wedged in our usual block structure.

As discussed in the O&O committee, a mild improvement to this would be to allow very limited exceptions for programs with specific needs. We already do this for Medical Sciences. We should allow similar, limited leeway for other programs, like the Marine Biology master, where specificities, like field trips, make it more effective to work differently. These points of excellence should be valued, not harmed.

I believe we can manage to do this without harming the harmonization. We could let faculties decide on this "wiggle room" this year on their own and evaluate the specific cases next year. In this way, if the flexibility is abused, we could take notice and remove it.

Finally, looking at the bigger picture, a broader harmonization awaits us. If we want to keep staff morale high, we really need to learn from the mistakes made in the process that led to this proposal: lack of communication and transparency below the management layer, omission of criticism from the report and possibly a lack of creativity in seeking opportunities.

Stakeholders on the work floor need to be involved better and more, and criticism needs to be addressed openly in the reports, and not remain hidden. This is a point that needs attention also within faculties where often the information flow breaks and urgency evaporates until it is too late.

As a final remark, I would have preferred some bolder and more ambitious experiment, looking outside the usual constraints rather than just accepting them, with an open justification in the report of why this was not successful, or even not possible. For instance, I only learned a few days ago that one of the main reasons we aimed to stick to the structure of blocks is to keep our teaching aligned with Hanze. Which is a reasonable choice, but could have been made explicit to the staff months ago…

I understand there is support for the current compromise, and the proposal will likely go on almost unmodified, but I really hope we don’t see it as "all sunshine and roses" and use it as a learning opportunity to avoid the same mistakes in the future.