Exploring the maze of Power in Dutch Higher Education
Authored by: A Multifield Researcher with a Critical, Dissident Lens
This is an analysis of power. It’s a map of how the Dutch higher education system is engineered, who it is designed for, and who it systematically filters out. Using a model (A) Dutch research University with centralized nested structure as a starting point, we will trace the three primary flows that animate this structure: the flow of funds, the flow of policy, and the flow of people. We will see how these flows merge into a single, powerful current that directs knowledge production toward certain ends and away from others. Furthermore, we will follow the path to a hypothetical post-doctoral position, witnessing how intersectional marginalization creates a compounding web of hurdles that makes this path a near-impossibility for many.
The Nested Structure and Its Three Lifebloods
Dutch universities are not monoliths; they are a set of nested structures. A research project within a faculty mirrors the structure of its department, which in turn reflects the architecture of the entire university. This self-similar pattern means that the logic of the whole is replicated in its smallest parts.
To set up any research project, three things are needed: money, rules, and personnel. These are the three flows.
The Flow of Funds:
Money is the primary driver. It can come from internal faculty budgets, but more significantly, from external bodies like the Dutch Research Council (NWO – Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek), which receives its budget from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The NWO sets research strategies based on what it deems public needs. If your research aligns with these state-sanctioned priorities, you can “tap into” that cash. Other sources include philanthropic foundations, NGOs, and corporate-linked institutes. In every case, the funder’s strategy dictates the direction of research. The flow of funds is never neutral; it is an instrument that incentivizes and directly steers knowledge production.
The Flow of Policy:
Policy is the second flow, and it is inextricably intertwined with funding. To receive money, you must follow the rules. These rules are set by the government, the university, and the funders themselves. They dictate everything from the required number of PhD holders on a project to, increasingly, Dutch language requirements—even for research conducted entirely in English. This merger of policy and funding defines who is even eligible to fill a role, often filtering out capable individuals from the start based on criteria irrelevant to the research itself.
The Flow of People:
Finally, you need personnel. The Principal Investigator (PI), constrained by the fabric of funds and policy, must recruit a team. They decide on contracts (full-time, part-time, precarious), work arrangements, and navigate a labyrinth of university services: the Data Management Office, Ethical Approval boards, ICT, and legal services for payroll. There is a semblance of autonomy here, but it is autonomy within a tightly controlled cage.
The Recruitment Filter and the “Ideal” Candidate
Now, let’s examine the recruitment process for our hypothetical post-doc. Where and how you advertise, and what competencies you list, creates a powerful filter.
If you require the Dutch language, you automatically freeze out international scholars. If you advertise only on university platforms or in publications already plugged into the system, you target people who are already inside the ivory tower. Algorithms on platforms like LinkedIn further reinforce these insular networks.
“Ideal”!
So, who is the “ideal” candidate for this three-year, temporary contract? It is a white, middle-class, cisgender, heteronormative, Dutch man who studied in the Netherlands and has a record of international publications. He is already plugged into the system. He sees the advertisement first, meets all the competencies, and has the financial safety net and social stability to withstand the precarity of a temporary contract.
This is the baseline. Now, let’s add layers of intersectionality and observe how the hurdles compound.
The Compounding Hurdles of Intersectionality
Class:
A first-generation graduate from a rural background, or a generational blue collar background, even if white and Dutch, lacks the financial safety net and the ingrained social capital of their middle-class urban counterparts. This is one extra hurdle.
Gender:
A woman who matches the “ideal” candidate in every other way faces the enduring burden of social and biological gender roles. The physical and mental toll of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, alongside societal expectations of caregiving, constitutes a significant extra cost that her male colleagues do not bear.
Race and Migration Status:
A PhD holder of color, even a Dutch citizen, faces racism that affects their networking opportunities. On average, they come from backgrounds with greater financial precarity and are more likely to be offered temporary, precarious contracts. The chronic stress of a contract ending is a constant burden. If they are a non-Western immigrant or expat, the hurdles multiply: mandatory Dutch language certification, exclusion from networks, and the devaluation of their academic credentials from their home country, regardless of their rigor.
LGBTQIA+ Status:
A Dutch white LGBTQIA+ scholar must navigate stereotypes and social biases that affect their “likeability” and networking. Humans are not rational; we are rationalizing beings influenced by salient stereotypes. This is an extra burden. If this person is also a person of color, racism compounds with homophobia or transphobia.
Asylum Seekers:
Now, consider a PhD holder who is also an asylum seeker. Their path is one of almost unimaginable hardship. They have fled their home due to extreme trauma, often suffering from PTSD. They are then subjected to the Dutch asylum process: crammed into COA (Centraal Orgaan opvang asielzoekers) camps with strangers, stripped of autonomy, and left in limbo for months or years. This environment compounds existing mental health issues and can foster violence, especially for women and LGBTQIA+ individuals. Even after receiving status, they are thrown into integration courses and face the bureaucratic nightmare of having their credentials evaluated. By the time they might apply for a post-doc, they are emerging from a years-long mental health crisis, ostracized from networks, and battling systemic racism.
Disability and Neurodivergence:
Finally, let’s intersect disability. If you have ADHD(as I do), complex PTSD (as I do), autism, or chronic pain (as I do), the academic environment is rarely accommodating. Psychological disabilities are hardly even conceptualized, let alone accommodated. The stress of a precarious contract is magnified exponentially when you are already managing pain or sensory overload. The interview process itself, a high-pressure social performance, is often inaccessible to neurodivergent people who may “seize up” or go blank. This is often misinterpreted as incompetence, marking them as “unsuitable” for academia—another form of epistemic erasure.
The Core Problem: Knowledge Policing and the Delusion of Objectivity
All these hurdles lead back to the fundamental question: What knowledge is valued?
Our system operates under a neoliberal, profit-driven logic. Knowledge that does not promise direct or indirect profit is (usually) deemed not valuable. This is a perversion of the classical academic ideal, where knowledge’s value was predicated on its veracity, rigor, and significance to people.
The Dieties of Knowledge production, At work
To justify this, we uphold a delusion: the delusion of objectivity. We have conflated value with profitability and built a myth that some people—typically those who fit the “ideal” candidate profile—can be objective. We label their output “science” and dismiss other forms of knowledge as “soft science,” “mythology,” or “local culture” often viewed through an Orientalist lens.
This is knowledge policing. It is epistemic erasure. We are erasing everything that does not conform to this narrow, profit-influenced perspective.
The truth is that knowledge production is an embodied, lived experience. All humans are innately flawed and have limited perspectives. Bias is not a dirty word; it is a condition of existence. Our evolutionary advantage as a species is our diversity. The only way to achieve a clearer picture of reality is to acknowledge our individual biases and collectively stitch together the knowledge produced from our diverse, interdependent perspectives.
The current system does the opposite. It assumes one narrow perspective is objective and dismisses the rest. This makes our knowledge environment inherently poor and incoherent, depriving humanity of the rich, multifaceted understanding we desperately need to navigate a complex world.
The keys to the kingdom are held by those who control the capital. They shape government policy through lobbying and the revolving door between corporate and political power. They endow philanthropic institutes, for the most part, to whitewash their reputation and steer research. The resultant Jedi (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) policies are often neoliberal-coded checklists—a hyper-individual approach to what is innately a collective, community-based need. It is an oxymoron.
Resistance exists. There are always researchers who appropriate funds to produce dissident knowledge, like Noam Chomsky did with Pentagon funding. But the flexibility for such resistance is shrinking as funds become more regulated and tied to specific outcomes.
The architecture of Dutch higher education, therefore, is not just a structure of exclusion for people. It is a structure of exclusion for ideas, for ways of knowing, and for the very diversity that is our collective strength. Until we dismantle the conflation of value and profit, and until we abandon the delusion of objectivity for a practice of collective, biased perspective-weaving, our universities will continue to be engines of homogeneity, producing a stunted and ultimately useless picture of the world.
Knowledge from the point of view of the unmarked is truly fantastic, distorted, and irrational. The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practiced and honored is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference. No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even.
― Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective