The Governance working group was established in late 2023 and tasked with critically examining the current organizational structures at TU/e – also referred to as “governance” – and issuing advice on potential improvements. They believe that reducing the number of departments and services will lead to faster and easier decision-making and will better align education and research with major societal issues such as digitization and the energy transition. For this reason, the Executive Board established the Future Governance TU/e (FGTU/e) working group in 2023 to investigate this. More than a year later, the final report was published internally on November 28 of this year.

Van den Heuvel, who is not only the chair of the working group but also Dean of the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, explains the next steps in an interview. To better understand the perspectives of the departments and services regarding the plans, Kees Storm (Dean of Applied Physics & Science Education) and Daisy van der Schaft (Director of Education and Student Affairs) also joined the interview.

How is governance organized at other universities?

“We looked closely at the way things work at other universities, including international ones. Many universities decided to merge some of their departments back in the early 2000s. This was supposed to improve the organizational structure,” says the working group chair. “Take Nijmegen, for example, but also Leiden, Utrecht and even Delft,” Storm adds. “TU/e made the conscious decision not to do this at the time. I suspect this was because of its smaller scale back then,” he continues. TU/e has grown considerably in recent years. Van den Heuvel: “This growth prompted the Executive Board to establish a working group to review our governance.”

What came out of the working group’s advice?

“When you have a lot of departments, you also have a lot of boundaries. By reducing the number of departments, you facilitate the growth of these boundary areas. People might say that the ideal setup is one single department, but then you’d have too many disciplines lumped together, and that also comes with downsides,” says Van den Heuvel.

Storm agrees. “Every department has its own traditions. The Mathematics department operates very differently from the Industrial Design community, for example. In the former, success is measured by the number of published articles, among other things, and in the latter by writing books or participating in trade fairs and exhibitions.”

“Nine is a bit much and one is impossible due to the differences between the departments; so the ideal lies somewhere in between,” Van den Heuvel continues. “The advice in the final report is to reduce the current nine departments to four. The working group believes that four will be the right number to bring balance to the departments. That way, each department could have roughly the same budget, number of FTEs (full-time equivalent positions, Ed.), and student body,” he explains.

“The next step was to organize those four departments in a certain way. After inquiring with all the deans, a division emerged based on disciplines. Using that as a basis, we drew up a possible division for four new departments, as an illustration. That was not intended to be part of the advice, but serves as an example of what a restructuring might look like.” The report states the following on this: “The FGTU/e working group will not prescribe the exact clustering of research groups, nor the exact faculty boundaries. The clustering process is best achieved bottom-up.”

The example from the final report illustrating what a division into four departments might look like.

• Faculty of Basic Sciences. Chemistry and Materials (split from CE&C) / Applied Physics / Biomedical Engineering / Mathematics (split from M&CS). 
• Faculty of Applied Engineering. Computer Science (split from M&CS) / Electrical Engineering.
• Faculty of Manufacturing Technologies. Chemical Engineering (split from CE&C) / Mechanical Engineering / Built Environment Engineering (split from BE).
• Faculty of Design and Innovation. Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences / Industrial Design / Built Environment Design (split from BE).

How did the departments and services respond to this advice?

“When I saw the example of the four departments in the advisory report, I thought: ‘I don’t think this is right’. Grouping my department (AP&SE) under ‘Basic Sciences’ doesn’t make sense to me. While it’s true that we have fundamental research, we’re also incredibly proud of our applied research. And I wouldn’t want to see those two split up, as suggested for some of the departments in this advice,” says Storm.

“And so, Theo Salet (Dean of Built Environment whose department is split into ‘BE engineering’ and ‘BE design’ in the example, Ed.) immediately said: ‘That’s not going to happen’,” says Storm. When asked, Salet confirms that he has taken a firm stance. “The BE department’s mission and vision are focused on systemic solutions to societal issues in urban areas and since its inception, the department has strategically chosen to strengthen the connection between design and engineering. We are fully committed to this in our 2020-2030 departmental strategy,” he writes in an email.

For the services, the proposed changes seem less problematic than for the departments. “I agree with the general direction of the advice. A clear and simple governance structure would be beneficial to the decision-making process. Moreover, some of the services, such as ESA, already operate in the suggested chains. So the services won’t object to the changes; we’re already adapting, as you can see with the current developments in SQUAD (program for the evaluation and improvement of TU/e services, Ed.). It’s mostly the departments that differ in culture,” says ESA director Van der Schaft.

What will happen now?

“Our task was to make an analysis of the current governance structure and to offer advice for the future, not to draw up an implementation plan. The analysis and advice are now complete. Further detailing will be needed to draft an implementation plan, but again, that’s not what this working group was commissioned to do. So, it’s a matter of waiting for a new chair,” says Van den Heuvel. “The advice has been submitted to the Executive Board and they are now deliberating on the next steps.”

“I expect mostly preparatory steps in the beginning,” says Storm. “Before having the entire university undergo a major change, leadership needs to take a hard look at itself first. Ask the question: what can we do right now? After all, the departments are very autonomous now and are allowed to come up with different policies for the same issues. You can look to the Executive Board, but as dean, you can also start thinking about standardization yourself. I don’t expect any mergers in the short term. That is the conclusion from the strategy session.”

“What needs to be clear to each layer is: what’s in it for me? We know that the advice has governance benefits but it’s not yet sufficiently clear what it offers researchers or lecturers,” Storm continues. “I think project Beethoven serves as a great case study. Four departments working on the same project. One central steering group making all the decisions: from personnel to marketing to Real Estate. That’s essentially a smaller version of what we want to do with the new governance.”

So the plan is off the table for now?

“Not everyone is on board with the advice at this point, so no, we won’t be implementing it on January 1. I don’t consider it off the table, but it has been shelved for the long term,” says Van den Heuvel. “This is the first time the organization has been seriously reviewed and an attempt has been made to propose a new organizational structure. This is the right time to ask ourselves: if we want to change our governance, what steps are we going to have to take?”

“I never saw it as a proposal for next year. The timing was never made explicit,” Storm adds. “We once had a guest from Utrecht University join one of our meetings and he said: plan on at least ten years to implement such a change.”

So were the working group’s efforts wasted time?

“This was absolutely an essential discussion – one we should have started sooner rather than later. Change is always difficult and things are going quite well now so people tend to think: why change? But how do we make sure that things are still going well ten or thirty years from now?” asks Storm. “So it was definitely not wasted time. We needed to kick things off and that feels challenging for me as a dean in certain areas, but this is something we need to think about.”

“I also think that if everyone had been fully on board with this report, it wouldn’t have been a good report,” Van den Heuvel adds. “So, as Jack Welch said: ‘Change before you have to’.”