Willem Mulder was extremely critical when the Department Board of CE&E announced its decision to remove the five paintings by Iektje Meijer, Professor Bert Meijer’s wife, from the Jan Pieter Minckelers Room, and to replace them with two photographs and an illustration. “I consider this an insult to the artist, but also to her husband, Professor Bert Meijer, who meant and still means a lot for this department and for the university as a whole. Without his years of research, commitment, achievements and status, TU/e’s international visibility would be significantly smaller. We should be thankful that he chose Eindhoven. And that includes the people who decided to remove his wife’s paintings.”

The paintings now decorate the rooms of several professors, including Luc Brunsveld, Jan van Hest, Tom de Greef and Patricia Dankers. Mulder says they were also surprised by the Department Board’s actions. Mulder: “The Board claims everything was done in transparency, but that’s not accurate. The departmental professors were not informed and the same goes for the Executive Board.”

Iconoclasm

Mulder thinks art should be left alone, period. “No historical examples come to mind where censorship and the removal or destruction of art was the side of compassion and progress,” says the professor of Precision Medicine. “This holds true for the Protestant Iconoclasm, which was a battle between rival movements within Christianity, the Kristallnacht, a pitch-black page in history, and Mao’s purging of China’s rich history and culture. And also for the recent destruction of heritage by ISIS extremists.”

Doesn’t it go a bit far to put those historical events and the removal of the paintings side by side? Mulder: “The actions that were initiated in that meeting room at the end of August were completely inspired by the ideological movement that doesn’t judge people by their individual qualities but by their group identity, in other words their innate traits, and blames the fabric of western civilization for any inequalities. I myself saw this trend emerge at the American universities, where I worked until 2021. That’s what I’m referring to when I say these actions aren’t original. When I moved to New York in 2006, I had to work very hard – which I don’t mind doing – to set up a research group, to build a network, to bring people together. But suddenly the concept of meritocracy was deemed controversial and the principles of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) became leading. However, diversity did not refer to composing teams of people with varying skills and perspectives, which makes total sense. A team consisting solely of Willem Mulder types wouldn’t work at all. Diversity meant that teams and organizations needed to consist of people with different group identities, which effectively reduces them to that identity and ignores their individual qualities. Having said that, my team in the US was actually diverse based on the DEI definition, but the team members had all been selected based on their individual qualities. I only have two prerequisites: nurturable talent and commitment. If you don’t display the latter, you take advantage of the sacrifices others are prepared to bring. In my case, those were some serious sacrifices, as my time in New York was certainly not a happy one: for almost fifteen years I focused exclusively on work and lived separated from my wife and daughters, who resided in Eindhoven."

Equity

The concept of equity, which aims for an equal outcome, is also an unrealistic one according to Mulder. “It’s naive to think you can aim for the same outcome for everyone. Our liberal society was founded on equality, which aims to create equal opportunity. It’s up to every individual to take this opportunity. Not everyone can be prime minister, rector or professor.”

For Mulder, the third concept, that of inclusion, represents the basic principle that everything should be made accessible. “But one should never compromise the level of one’s education and research to achieve inclusion, and in practice that does happen.” Mulder calls identity politics, more popularly known as ‘wokeness’, “a pseudo religion, with dogmatic rituals characterized by tremendous outgroup hostility. That doesn’t work at universities, whose very task it is to teach you to deal with varying perspectives and enable you to discover that our world is far from perfect.”

Truth-finding

For Mulder, university is a place “where scholars come together and offer new perspectives, where new scholars are bred and truth-finding is key. Not a place for ideological activism that undermines that truth, nor an incubator for children of highly-educated parents, who were born into privilege but are yet to accomplish anything of substance.”

Does this mean that whoever doesn’t have a scientific record that’s on a par with Mulder’s is not a serious conversation partner for him? “Not at all, I’ve set myself a certain benchmark and want to take my new group to the same level as my former group in the US and the groups that I collaborated with. Shortly we’ll publish the first study of our new group in one of the leading journals. Two Dutch PhD students worked on this study as part of a large team. They will reap the rewards and I couldn’t be prouder. My new research group consists of a TU/e team and a Radboud university medical center team. I also founded two biotech companies. Sure, all of this demands discipline, which isn’t always fun, but it does allow us to create a lot of opportunities for young people. So what we have here is not a generational battle, as the Board would have us believe, but criticism of an inconsistent ideology. In my opinion, the commotion at the end of August was fabricated, as I don’t know anyone else that took offense at those paintings. The whole thing seems very forced to me.”

Shortcut

As far as he’s concerned, what mainly drives those involved with the painting removal is “creating attention for themselves as a shortcut to status and success. There’s an increasing amount of activism where the only beneficiary is the activist themselves, often at the expense of the group whose interests they claim to defend. This has become an appealing business model within the administration structures of Dutch academia. Looking at this group from the outside, you’ll notice they signaling to each other rather than that they interested in real dialogue.”

Mulder does hope for a serious dialogue. “Activists often think they have nothing left to learn, but they do. And so do I. Mentorship is important in our world. It worked miracles for me, as a student and PhD candidate, but also during my time in the US. Look at how a successful scientist approaches their research, learn from it and use the knowledge to develop your own way of working. Bert Meijer, whom I never had the pleasure of working with, is one such scientist that helped many of his students, PhD candidates and postdocs to develop their careers. I try to do that for my trainees as well, which is the single most important aspect of our great jobs as tenured professors.”

“We live in an incredibly chaotic world right now. The current generation of students and PhD candidates has to solve the problems of the future. We need to give them the intellectual and technological tools to do this, but we also have to make them resilient and creative. And a great way of doing that is through art.”