The team managers posit that the arguments which the Executive Board (CvB) gives for making administrative grants available for study associations and certain student and sport associations hold equally well for the student teams: after all, they too make a positive contribution to the ‘cultural ecosystem of Eindhoven and of TU/e’. In the teams, the students concerned get the opportunity to develop and the teams also provide opportunities to gather credits in the form of bachelor final projects and graduation projects. In addition, the teams generate a great deal of positive publicity for TU/e.

Another argument mentioned in the letter by the students is that due to the basic grant being lost the financial fallout of a full-time membership of a student team has become very substantial indeed. “Given an average working week spanning sixty hours, there is hardly any or no time to restrict the loan through a sideline. The fact that a tuition fee needs to be paid as well, when in many cases almost no lectures are attended at all in connection with time pressure, raises an extra financial barrier.” In the opinion of the team managers full-time members are indispensable for the survival of the teams, though.

Talks

The letter has been drafted by the team managers of student teams Team FAST, Blue Jay, URE, Solar Team Eindhoven, Team VIRTUe, InMotion, iGEM, TU/ecomotive, ATeam and TEST. Thomas Stroes, active in Team FAST himself, estimates that at least seventy students are devoting themselves full-time to one of the student teams. He says he hopes that the Executive Board will reply in a letter in which they deal with the student teams’ arguments in detail. “Recently they indicated that the university is allotting enough money for the teams already, but that is spent entirely on parts: no money is left at all. I hope that this letter will be a reason for the CvB to start talks with us.”

Executive Board spokesman Barend Pelgrim informs us that TU/e Executive Board member Jo van Ham cannot react to the letter yet due to a visit abroad. In a previous University Council (on March 12) Van Ham suggested, for that matter, that the student teams go into conclave with the associations for grants. “On an annual basis the university is already spending half a million euros on the student teams. We think that’s enough. If the student umbrella organizations want to organize things in such a way that grants should be made available for the teams also, they will have to arrange that among themselves.”

Photo | Bart van Overbeeke