In response to the letter to parliament from, now outgoing, Minister Dijkgraaf of Friday 21 April last, regarding 'managing international student flows in higher education', we, as a student body of Tilburg University, have gone into deliberation. This is because we believe that the student perspective is underexposed in this debate and is politicising this conversation too much. For this reason, we chose to write a letter to the House of Representatives to make the Tilburg sound heard. Our sound focused on the mandatory language policy,
namely the "Dutchification" of studies to which international students and lecturers just have to adapt. We believe this is not conducive to the quality of education. However, this does not detract from the fact that as a university, we do need to review where linguisticisation is desirable in the curriculum and where it does not add value. Overall, our biggest criticism was that it imposes an obligation, thus interfering with the university's autonomy regarding this policy. Especially in this case, universities are very diverse when looking at the numbers of international students or lecturers, so this policy should be created by universities themselves.
You can read the letter below!