Science - March 10, 2005

Rabbinge can teach again

If the rector gets his way, University Professor Rudy Rabbinge will soon be giving lectures again. Professor Bert Speelman plans to give him his own chair group so that the examinations regulations are complied with.

Examinations committees last year indicated that Rabbinge was a professor without a teaching assignment and therefore could not assume responsibility for giving education. The series of courses on academic education and sustainability that Rabbinge was going to give together with Studium Generale was therefore scrapped.

By giving Rabbinge a ‘teaching assignment’ and also a ‘chair group’ the executive board has made it possible for Rabbinge to teach again. Speelman: ‘What we are doing really is adjusting the law to reality. Rabbinge will be able to do again what he has been doing for years: teaching. At the moment students are being denied the opportunity to learn from his expertise.’

Rabbinge’s teaching assignment will have the same title as he used during his inaugural lecture: sustainable development and system innovation. ‘It’s all embracing,’ explains Rabbinge. ‘I’m directly linked to the executive board. I won’t have a real chair group so I don’t fall under a sciences group, and I only get minimal support.’ Nevertheless Rabbinge is satisfied with the solution: ‘It is fine like this, and it’s got rid of all the fuss we have had in the last few years. It’s a bit childish, but it seems to have been necessary.’

It will be a while before everything has been organised formally. The Representative Council first has to agree to the change in the chair group plan. / JH