Organisation - May 26, 2011

Agreement reached on strategic plan

The central employees' council and the joint student-staff council (the GV, the university's consultative body) have approved the Strategic Plan for 2011-2014.

In March they were still withholding their approval. The executive board has promise to tackle the issue of public confidence in science. The councils are afraid that this confidence may be damaged by Wageningen UR's plans to conduct more commercially oriented research, and because outsiders do not make a distinction between DLO and the university. The GV sees it as an option to appoint an ombudsman for third parties from outside Wageningen UR who suspect a conflict of interests.
There will also be an investigation into whether a new method of evaluating courses is needed. To date, this is done through questionnaires, but the GV says this is really more of a satisfaction survey that a way of measuring didactic quality (sympathetic teachers are evaluated more positively). It works OK as a way of identifying problems in education, but it is not a good instrument for assessing the quality of the teachers (which is necessary for the Tenure Track career trajectory). It has been agreed that both improvements to the existing system and new instruments will be considered.