For instance, you can’t walk into a building without stumbling over cigarette butts left behind by groups of smokers. There’s a chronic shortage of parking spaces, and there are too few classrooms for the scale of our education.

The TU/e also needs a virtual facelift. Recently purchased IT systems hardly function, do not serve their intended purpose, or fail to handle peak loads. The rigid scheduling system with time slots leads to inefficient use of available classrooms, and projectors frequently crash, only to spend a quarter of an hour restarting.

To see and experience this, you have to step out of your ivory tower as a board member and walk around the TU/e daily. Join the preparation for a course for 2000 students or shadow a financial administrator at a faculty for a day. In short, the ivory tower must come down.

Bean Casserole

That brings me back to the painting work, because Metaforum was once completed with colored walls that give the impression that the architect was inspired by the selection of Olvarit baby food. Many colleagues would have preferred white walls, but their request to repaint them, even on weekends, was denied. It would diminish the design. Then, in 2014, when the Executive Board moved temporarily into the third f loor of the same building, the entire hallway was immediately painted ivory white.

As if by some strange coincidence, the same week Koen Janssen took over as chair, a team of painters appeared on the third floor of Metaforum. The ivory white was replaced with the original color. The ivory tower is no more. And the color? If I had to guess, I’d say vegetarian, brown, bean casserole (with commas).

Boudewijn van Dongen is a professor of Process Analytics at TU/e. The views expressed in this column are his own.