It may well get very busy on Domplein in Utrecht next Thursday, as higher education institutions are making it as easy as possible for their students and staff to go there to protest against the cutbacks in higher education.

So does TU/e, which recently indicated that employees may participate in the protest during working hours.

Resit

So the TU/e is not doing this alone. At least ten universities are giving their staff time off, a survey of the institutions shows. Many administrators want to lead by example and announce they’ll be joining the march.

Universities of applied sciences are protesting as well. Saxion, Avans and HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht are amongst the ones indicating they are encouraging staff to make their voices heard. Avans students can skip their exam on Thursday and concentrate on the resit, a spokesperson says, but they will not be given an extra resit for this occasion.

At Radboud University Nijmegen, activists announce they may come to Utrecht with a thousand people. The idea is for the activists to gather in the local Moreelsepark, right next to Central Station, at one o’clock on Thursday afternoon. After that, everyone will march to Domplein, where the protest will end at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Train ticket

To allow staff to join the protest, Maastricht University is paying for their train tickets (around 55 euros there and back). Leiden University and Saxion University of Applied Sciences also promise to reimburse staff’s travel expenses.

Marileen Dogterom, director of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, will join the protest march and calls upon her employees to come send the government a “clear signal”. The biggest opposition party, GroenLinks-PvdA, also plans to come to Utrecht to make clear they’re against the government’s cutbacks.

Free museum

In May, the coalition parties announced they’re cutting higher education by hundreds of millions of euros, through the exclusion of international students and introduction of a slow-progress penalty, amongst other things. Also, less money will go to scientific research. A few weeks ago, it became clear that the Dutch Research Council will get even less money than initially anticipated.

The protest is an initiative by unions such as AOb, FNV and CNV and the Dutch Student Union, together with WOinActie. The Utrecht Hortus Botanicus and University Museum support the protest: they will be freely accessible on Thursday “to show everyone how valuable science is to society”, says a spokesperson of Utrecht University.