Closure of Utrecht astronomy

The abrupt end of Utrecht astronomy in early 2012, 370 years after its start, had nothing to do with the track record or prospects of the Sterrekundig Instituut Utrecht (SIU) as partner in the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA).  It arose from personal prejudice in the Utrecht University (UU) board that there is too much astronomy in The Netherlands.  Too much of a good thing, they seem to have thought, since astronomy is one activity in which Holland excels exceptionally, far beyond its GNP.  In fact, at the same time that the UU board thought it better to kill Utrecht astronomy the Dutch government decided to award considerable extra funding to Dutch astronomy (i.e., NOVA, including the SIU astronomers and actually with UU as formal NOVA agency at the time) because an international evaluation committee had judged NOVA to be one of the only two "exemplary" research schools of all disciplines nation-wide in The Netherlands.  The ex-SIU staff now partakes in this NOVA funding from their new bases at other Dutch universities (Amsterdam, Leiden, Nijmegen).  Most kept their tenure in this relocation and took their external funding, postdocs and graduate students along.  In total, two dozen astronomers moved from Utrecht to other NOVA sites.  Others moved abroad.  Their research continues, but the excellent Utrecht astrophysics education program and the famous Utrecht solar physics research are gone.

A direct consequence of the closure of the SIU was that the planned bundling of NOVA's optical and infrared astronomy instrumentation groups at Utrecht fell through.  Utrecht will also loose the national institute for space research (SRON).  The termination of astronomy won't even improve the UU budget because the gain from firing the 10 SIU fte's amounts to less than the losses in income from student influx, PhD production, and external funding (NOVA, SOZOU, NWO, TNO, STW, EC, ERC, ESA, NSF, NASA).

Obviously, the worst aspect is the diminishing emphasis on science at Utrecht University.  The Dutch economy should become a "knowledge" economy, but this rosy goal is severely hampered by severe undereducation in the technical and exact sciences.  The overall quality is still high but the volume is much smaller per capita or GNP than in comparable (and competing) countries.  Cutting down on a prestigious exact science in which the Dutch excel extraordinarily and which attracts more public attention than any other (with NOVA's outreach program exemplary as well) is a bad mistake with respect to inspiring bright high-school pupils to choose an exact-science education.  Counter-example:  at Nijmegen University (which accepted half of the SIU's staff, a sizable increase of its astronomy department) the fairly recent restart of astronomy substantially increased the influx of physics students.  Utrecht University is likely to suffer the reverse.  Not a win-win strategy but a lose-lose lack of perspective.  No more UU astronomy PhDs.  No more astronomy-trained academics enriching wider society.  Fewer physics students.  Less science.

How did the closure come about?  It seems that in 2010 the notoriously autonomous UU board ("College van Bestuur", CvB) decided that the SIU was too small for a Masters-education discipline and proposed in secret to move the similar-sized Amsterdam and Nijmegen astronomy departments to Utrecht - meeting indignant rebuttal.  The CvB then set up a secret evaluation panel which advised to maintain the SIU; in December 2010 the CvB signed an agreement to do so and strengthen the SIU.  However, in June 2011 the CvB decided to kill it, without consulting anybody wherever.  Its non-disclosed motivation seems to have been that Utrecht University would profile itself favorably by not doing what others do - i.e., by single-handedly withdrawing from this nation-wide, exemplary, government-endorsed, student-attracting, top-level science endeavour.  The CvB ignored the government's acclaim for NOVA and desire for more exact-science students.  It literally shut its door and telephone to the NOVA directors even though it was the formal NOVA lead agency.  It forced a new science-division dean (replacing one who resigned in protest to the CvB's science policies) to terminate the SIU.  Its only public announcement was, hypocritically, that it "respected the dean's decision".

The subsequent deal, orchestrated by SIU director C.U. Keller and NOVA director W.H.W.M. Boland, to transfer most SIU astronomers to other NOVA universities (at large UU cost) was officially concluded in March 2012.  However, by February most astronomers had already left.  Namely professors A. Achterberg (theoretical astrophysics, to Nijmegen), C.U. Keller (polarimetry instrumentation and solar physics, to Leiden), F.W.M. Verbunt (high-energy astrophysics, to Nijmegen), and the other permanent staff S.S. Larsen (galaxy evolution, to Nijmegen), O.R. Pols (stellar evolution, to Nijmegen), M.C. van den Berg (education, to Amsterdam), J. Vink (supernovae, to Amsterdam), A. Voegler (solar magnetohydrodynamics, undecided).  NOVA-paid instrumentalists F.C.M. Bettonvil and F. Snik moved to Leiden.  Support staff S.J. Hogeveen and M. Wijburg accepted other jobs at Utrecht University.

Upshot: Utrecht astronomy is gone, including Utrecht (read Dutch) solar physics.  The UU astronomy education program ends de facto in June 2012. 

By the end of 2011 the CvB had also announced new priority themes for Utrecht University:  "sustainability", "life sciences", "institutions" [sic], "youth & identity" [sic].  In this vision the exact (beta) sciences vanish apart from "useful" applications such as medical and climate physics.  Termination of mathematics and theoretical physics was already considered.  A climate in which the best researchers leave first.  Utrecht University goes soft and mediocre (its much-touted current Shanghai ranking was earned in hard natural sciences).  The CvB chairwoman had a humanities-only education, a bad case of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" syndrome?