SpeakEasy Open Salon (SOS)

 

Date: Friday, 21 September 2018

Time: 16 hrs

Place: VOX-POP, Binnengasthuisterrein, UvA

 

Let us talk!

More than three years after the Maagdenhuis occupation the problems of higher education have not diminished, not in the Netherlands in general, nor at the UvA in particular. Ever ongoing budget cuts and increasing workloads, competition for research money, top-down decision making, various forms of micro-managing but also student fees, unaffordable housing, high stress levels and much, much more constantly create pressures that are not easy to live and work with. While we, teachers and students, go to the university every day because we cherish the possibility to learn, teach, explore the world through research and be part of an academic community, our current working conditions more often than not pose a challenge to truly fulfill these promises of the university. At the same time, these same challenges and structures have a tendency to isolate us. They make it difficult to come together, exchange experiences, stories and strategies and figure out together how to deal with all of these challenges.

 

SpeakEasy Open Salon (SOS) is a new initiative by a group of teachers and students who want to enable precisely this kind of conversation about the university on a regular basis. Our aim is to create a space in which we can have difficult conversations, in which we can meet both as engaged academic citizens and as complex human beings. A place outside of the pressures of the system.

The first open salon is meant to focus on the theme of budget cuts, increased workload and the consequences for teachers and students, but there will be enough space to bring in other topics.

 

Organization: A group of engaged academic citizens (students and teachers) hoping to be joined by others.

Voertaal: pragmatisch mengsel van Engels en Nederlands.

 

Please share this invitation as widely as possible with students and colleagues!