On 13 March 2024 the Management Team of the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), after briefly siding with its staff in their long battle against the plan for rehousing them in the new Cluster Zuid building, joined the Faculty after all in declaring 'the conversation closed' with regard to housing. The staff were told to get on with the grim business of preparing for the move, and on 26 March the staff advisory council, which had been in the forefront of the campaign for a better housing deal, collectively resigned in protest.

To get an idea of what the fuss is about, take the official virtual tour of the soon-to-be completed building. This reveals a building designed without any regard for its purpose or its users. The video includes an image of an academic staff member giving a presentation, complete with power point, in the middle of a large public space, with people chatting and wandering past in the background.

Any student or lecturer will recognize this as foolish and absurd. But it is not just a product of artistic license; the screen being used in the film really exists, and is really set up for presentations. How could such a stupid idea ever have made it beyond the drawing board? This is not a university: it is a managerial wet dream of a university, created by people who have never worked in one.

Shared offices

All LIAS academic staff will be crammed into shared offices, either two to a 14 square metre room or four to a 28 square metre room. These spaces are so small that until 2010 they would have been in straightforward violation of the Dutch 'arbo' norm (NEN-1824), which stipulated eight square metres as the minimum requirement for office workers of any kind. Since 2010 a new version of NEN-1824, based on an assumption that employees will not spend all their working hours at their desks, has made the arrangements in the film just about legal for a worker in a bank or insurance company. But for university lecturers, with personal libraries, rare document collections, and students to supervise, these workspaces are obviously inadequate even in purely spatial terms.

More importantly, staff need peace and quiet in order to concentrate on research and writing, and in order to conduct audio and video conversations with interlocutors elsewhere without disturbing their colleagues; and they need privacy and a couple of chairs in order to supervise doctoral and other students.

The traditional professor's room, with its books and clutter, also serves an educational function in its own right, displaying key works and showing students what an intellectual life is all about. The cramped, shared, near-bookless, glass-walled offices in Cluster Zuid will rob staff of all these things. Clean minidesks, shared workspaces, and lack of privacy are inimical to academic performance. They are also an act of dispossession, a statement of disrespect, and an attack on the identity of the academic professional. Even before they are finished in reality, they already send two clear messages to their intended users. First: you are not important to this university. Second: don't work here, go home.

The fate of another group, the study advisors, in the new building is even worse. Despite the fact that their work constantly involves them in one-to-one conversations with students, they will not even be given a personal desk in a NEN-1824 goldfish tank. Instead they will be subjected to a 'flexible' system whereby they share their desks with others. As a result, students too will suffer, and at their most vulnerable moments, from the consistent idiocy of the plan.

In April 2023, 103 LIAS members - almost the whole of the academic staff - signed a letter to rector Hester Bijl protesting against the rehousing plan. Their petition included the results of a survey of staff opinion within the institute. Of the 97 respondents, only eight were in favour of the Cluster Zuid plan, and a great majority found it simply 'unacceptable'. A delegation of lecturers was duly invited to meet with Bijl to discuss their concerns.

The only formal response, however, was a dismissive letter from the Property Division offering LIAS strictly temporary use of just ten additional rooms in the Reuvensplaats building. After two years this building would be demolished, and all LIAS staff would be crammed into Cluster Zuid after all. The necessity to share rooms and workplaces, the letter claimed, arose from the fair and consistent application of a single workspace norm in all parts of the university. The rationale here was a calculation of average floor area per member of staff, whereby the area was considered to include all those near-useless communal spaces, populated in the video by businesspeople on sofas and designer stools, in which Cluster Zuid abounds.

This was offensive nonsense. In the History Institute, we knew, every member of staff was to get what almost every academic wants above all in terms of working conditions: a private office. In LIAS, no member of staff was to get any such thing. The historians, clearly, were infinitely better off. How could this be a situation of parity between departments?

No compromise

Conducting a second survey of staff views and work practices, in December 2023 the advisory council once again wrote to the rector and the dean, this time in a letter co-signed by the institute's director. They proposed a specific compromise. On an interim basis: 20 extra rooms, allowing 40 LIAS members, approximately the number using their present rooms intensively on a daily basis, to continue to occupy a single office. In the longer term, staff participation in the planning of those parts of the campus yet to be redeveloped, where a more sensible architectural outcome can still be achieved.

No dice. On 27 February, Rutgers, co-signing a letter from Humanities Faculty 'executive director' Saskia Goedhard, denied our request for more rooms in the same words used in the original letter. 'There is no possibility', the new letter added, 'of accommodating LIAS in yet to be developed buildings elsewhere on the Humanities Campus'. No reason was given.

The managers will say: academic staff attendance is already poor even when single offices are available, and unused office space is an expensive luxury. Here they have a point, which should have been a starting point for negotiations between academics and administrators. Even considering that lecturers spend time in lecture theatres and elsewhere as well as in their own rooms,  and are often away at conferences or for research, the office occupancy rate could be higher.

One obvious compromise would be to make access to a single office conditional on a certain minimum attendance requirement. There is no reason why a time clock should be taboo for academic staff; one of the present authors worked with one for many years as a researcher. An office-for-attendance deal would kill two birds with one stone, boosting staff presence on campus while securing vital campus facilities. Staff who insisted on working mainly from home could still do so, provided they accepted a shared rather than single office on campus.

Losing control

To hope to put such a proposal on the table now, however, is to overestimate the administrators' interest in staff attendance. If that interest had been significant, then such alternatives would have been explored years ago, in the first discussions about renewing the campus. The managers' real interest is not in attendance, which indeed they actively discourage, but rather in the level of office occupancy, the occupancy rate (Dutch: bezettingsgraad). The simplest way to jack up the occupancy rate is not to promote better use of existing offices, but to provide fewer of them, as in Cluster Zuid. This involves forcing more people to share offices, which means that they attend less, and a vicious circle is created.

There are more serious issues in the world, and even in the sheltered world of academia, than this sorry tale. But it is a microcosm of a bigger story: the managerialization of our university, which means less priority for teaching and research, and more for peripheral functions like those of architects, property managers, executive directors, external consultants, communications officers, policy advisors, and now a highly paid 'vice rector for organizational development' appointed via a dodgy internal procedure. It is a warning to the academic staff that we are fast losing control of our university to people whose idea of what a university is and does is radically different from our own.

David Henley is professor of Contemporary Indonesia Studies
Remco Breuker is professor of Korean Studies
Niels van der Salm is lecturer for International Studies and Japan Studies