Harry van Bommel, member of parliament for the Socialist Party (SP), as the first speaker was adamantly in favour of increased government funding of university research and more supervision when research is contracted. He pointed to the government as the guilty party in creating the current climate of focusing on marketing in universities, and was in this hardly contradicted. Negative consequences of the involvement of businesses are according to him amongst others the 'decrease in quality of scientific research' and 'too much dependence on the funds from businesses'. This only causes our uncertainty, according to Van Bommel.
According to Peter Apers, member of the executive board, the dependence on commercial funding is not too bad if you look at the percentages. His numbers did show that government funding of higher education is falling strongly behind compared to other forms of education and compared to the GNP.
Geert Versteeg, professor process technology at Chemical Technology, made clear that it is financially impossible to do research a the UT without bringing in the business world. However, he proposed 'not contract research but contact research'. Then the university is in the driving seat and a company is only involved in sponsoring. In addition he would like to get rid of output financing, this means that a department is rewarded financially for its output, i.e., completed PhDs. 'A succesful 'output' can yield f 250,000. And other output does not count', according to Versteeg.
He stated that contract research should be abolished: 'It slows down scientific output, does not yield anything financially and devalues your reputation because you do not publish.' He concluded: 'Ouput financing should be abolished and as far as I am concerned we will have the American model in five years time.' Versteeg means by this the debate on the undergraduate-graduate-system. The idea is that large numbers of students are drawn to the university by the undergraduate-programme, or Bachelor, as happens in the United States. Most of them will choose the lease-car after three years and only the passionate scientists will stay for the master, a continuation of one to two years.
'That's exactly the reason why the BaMA-model will fail', according to someone in the audience. 'The Bachelor will have a low status in society and everyone will take a Master.' This personpredicted a merger of the Bachelor and higher vocational education. But on this too the opinions were wonderfully divided.
