OPINION - The university has greatly invested in a global campus during the last couple of years. But now a change of direction has been brought forward by the Executive Board, who has announced that they won’t help international students find a room anymore. ‘Do practical constraints regarding student housing prevail over the ambition to be an internationally oriented, globally relevant university?’, assistant professor Dorian Schaap wonders.

The housing shortage is a well-known problem in Nijmegen. New students have had the greatest trouble finding decent accommodation for years. This holds especially true for international students, who don’t master the language, don’t have a network, can’t commute to their family home, and often need furnished rooms. These are reasons why they are assisted by the university by means of room mediation.

‘Strategic choice’

Yet, this mediation is now coming to an end: the Executive Board wrote a letter to the Central Participation Council with the message that ‘a different approach [is] needed for a better deployment of the available student housing’. This means that international bachelor and premaster students won’t receive help anymore and that they ‘are referred to the regular market’, where it is unclear what the chances are for international students to get a room.

While international masters and exchange students will still receive help, it is expected that the number of international students will decrease. According to the Board, this is ‘a strategic choice and it is consistent with the differentiated growth strategy of Radboud University’.

‘It is expected that the number of international students will decrease’

This choice is however not as strategic as it is claimed. In the last decades, there has been greatly invested in a global campus. Welcoming more international students is an important pillar to achieve this. It would help improve the quality of education, give rise to a more open campus culture, lead to more creativity and diversity, and contribute to an international academic community.

Although it is plausible that not all goals were always achieved (for example, think of the ongoing discussions on the quality of English-taught education), there was still a coherent strategy with a positive, and for many, appealing underlying vision.

Admission of weakness

With a stroke of the pen, this vision is now abandoned, purely for the sake of ‘a better deployment of the available student housing’. By no longer assisting the international students, it seems like, notwithstanding the hard work of Student Life and International Mobility employees, this is no longer a strategy, but rather an admission of weakness. It seems like the university refuses to invest in the assistance of international students, or is simply unable to do so, and therefore holds them off or even turns them away.

‘Were all the efforts to internationalise a mistake?’

This raises fundamental questions about what the university actually stands for. Were all the efforts to internationalise a mistake? Do practical constraints regarding student housing prevail over the ambition to be an internationally oriented, globally relevant university? Or is there an underlying, stealthy change where Radboud University is heading to? If so, then we should have a discussion in these notions.

Either way, the choice to no longer help international students with student housing seems to symbolise a more introverted, parochial Radboud University. With this, a bleak wind is blowing over our global campus.

Dorian Schaap is an assistant professor of Public Administration and a member of the Works Council (fraction AUB).