Publish and Yet Perish: Dutch Universities During the Last 30 Years

Dutch universities have gone through a terrible turmoil during the last 30 years. In retrospect it seems that the financial aspect has led the way of the changes. As far as administration goes, there was a change from a professorial dictatorship to a wholesale democracy and back again to a dictatorship, but now run by non-academic professionals. For the students, there was an increasing restriction of freedom, and for the researchers there were new regulations and requirements to be met every three or four years. During these years there has been a shameless and systematic attack on the quality of the university by the government to justify its financial treatment of the universities.