03/12/2017, 11)40 Pleasure Studies? University as creative and thinking space | diggit magazine Page 1 of 3 https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/pleasure-studies-university-creative-and-thinking-space The appointment of Pieter Duisenberg as the new director of the VSNU (the Association of Dutch Universities) is critiqued by quite some academics, because of his policy to cut down ‘pretstudies’ (pleasure studies or soft studies is the best equivalent). The idea is that these Humanities (Literary Studies, Philosophy) and Social Sciences (Psychology, Leisure Studies) programmes do not lead to jobs. The future is in technical studies. But is job perspective the main argument for spending 4 years of your life at university? It was Pieter Jacob Duisenberg, the coming director of the VSNU, who proposed last year – when he still was member of parliament for the VVD liberal-conservative party – to cut down on ‘pleasure studies’. Now that serious job possibilities at the UWV (the national Employee Insurance Agency) increase, we have to stimulate job participation, Duisenberg stated. His idea being that after having done a pleasure study it is not foreseeable that one has the appropriate qualifications for the current job market. Duisenberg claimed that a lack of information is the reason why these ‘bad studies’ are so popular: students do not get the right info beforehand. His suggestion is that recruiters are too positive about job perspectives in order to attract more students to their non-sensible programmes.[i] It is alarming that a main representative of Dutch Universities – who, for that matter, has no teaching experience in academia himself - distributes this type of ideas, and uses an old-fashioned dichotomy of seriousness versus pleasure, which immediately refers to other oppositional pairs: hard versus soft, natural sciences versus human sciences, quantitative versus qualitative research, objective versus subjective statements, and so on. Obviously, the first part of the pair is considered far more relevant than the second, even if we know since Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) that the oppositions can be brought down to the distinction between two forms of epistemology (that is, forms of knowledge): erklären and verstehen.[ii] The idea that a university programme should be profitable - that is: is all about getting a job - is becoming the ultimate goal. This is worrisome in the context of thinking what a university, what a society, and what a life is about. Having a job and making money is fantastic, and we do need people as tax payers in a civic society, but the COLUMN Odile Heynders 15/09/2017 Pleasure Studies? University as creative and thinking space 4 minutes to read