Academia in Maastricht (part 4): Are academics stuck spinning their wheels? A final verdict

What feels like a lifetime ago, an opinion that mattered told me that “academics are stuck spinning their wheels”. The argument so eloquently laid out before me was that academics are engaged in a pointless search without hope of finding truth or impacting the real world. I was warned that the future I had chosen for myself would contain nothing but writing papers that wouldn’t be read by anyone outside of this small scientific community. Even though I considered the entire line of reasoning an absurd joke and didn’t for a second consider it valid, something urged me to set out to disprove it all the same.

Are academics just a bunch of poorly paid, idealistically misguided (but highly educated) people? Is it all just an entertaining pastime going absolutely nowhere? I think not.

Unfortunately my inquiries with three international academics at Maastricht University met with more disagreement than I had initially anticipated (See related articles below). Faced with these somewhat opposing views on the matter I was forced to reconsider my position, quite unexpectedly so. Maybe I was just being terribly naive?

Nancy’s story
In a final attempt to get yet another perspective I make an appointment with Nancy Nicholson, who is an assistant professor at the department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology. I frequently run into her at the faculty (of Psychology and Health, Medicine and Life Sciences) and already know her a little. She always comes across as a very driven and intelligent person who very much enjoys her work. The perfect person to ask about life as an academic at Maastricht University.

The day I manage to speak with Nancy we both have to be present at the same faculty meeting. It is drizzly and gray outside and the large modern faculty building stands gloomily amidst the concrete hub that is Maastricht Randwyck. Of course I rush into the meeting slightly delayed, dripping with rain, and a coffee already in hand. The meeting is long but interesting, and afterwards Nancy and I decide to simply stay put and carry on with the interview in the conference room.

The first thing that Nancy says is that she isn’t quite sure whether she is the right person to talk about academia in Maastricht from an expatriate point of view because she has already been living here for a rather long time. After assuring her that hers may very well be the perspective I’m angling for, she keenly tells me her story.

Originally from Billings, the largest city of Montana, which she describes as “kind of a wild cowboy state”, Nancy got her first experience abroad during high school, when she spent a year as an exchange student in South Africa. “The country was still an apartheid state at the time, which was quite shocking and interesting for me.”

Next she enrolled at Stanford in California and started out on an interdisciplinary program in liberal arts, spending half a year in Vienna, Austria. Upon return she switched her curriculum and ended up with a BSc in Human Biology. “At that point you could say I was checking out possibilities and taking opportunities as they arose”.

These opportunities included studying chimpanzees for six months in Tanzania and a summer in Louisiana at a primate center, also working with chimpanzees. As Nancy’s interest in primatology, biology, anthropology and psychology grew, she looked around for a place that would allow her to combine all these subjects. In 1974 she ended up doing her PhD in Behavioral Biology at Harvard.

During that time Nancy spent two years in Kenya, studying the interaction between mother and infant baboons. “That was great, the highlight of my life,” Nancy remembers with a big smile on her face. “At that point I realized that my true love was with primates and doing field research, but it’s really quite difficult to do as a career”.

“Gee, Maastricht is ideal”
After returning to Harvard, Nancy focused on human studies for her post-doc and around the same time met her husband. “He was also working at Harvard and as it turned out, had been in many of the same places in the world I had been, but at slightly different times”.

It was through him that Nancy came to move to Maastricht. After contemplating their future plans of starting a family they felt that the Boston lifestyle was not what they wanted and that it might be a good time to move to Europe where both had spent considerable time before. “We heard about Maastricht from an American friend who had been a guest professor here, and he told us the university was looking for a research psychiatrist, which my husband is,” Nancy says. Then, shrugging her shoulders, she adds: “We weren’t even sure where Maastricht was!” After a visit from the dean to Boston, who was “very persuasive,” they went over to the Netherlands to check out the city.

“I fell in love with Maastricht, I thought it was wonderful,” remembers Nancy. Her first impressions were that of a compact small town: “Safe, good education, good social facilities, no bums sleeping on the street, that kind of thing. We thought, ‘Gee, Maastricht is ideal’. During a second visit a couple of months later in the spring of 1983, the matter was settled. “The weather was glorious, everything was attractive, and when I mentioned the fact that our coming would be conditional on me also having an attractive job, the university said ‘Fine’”. So that year Nancy and her husband moved to Maastricht with their first baby, and Nancy received a three-year funding for a project at the human biology department.

“I will never be full professor at this university”
Some 25 years and two more kids later Nancy and her husband are still here. When I ask her whether the city has lived up to all her wonderful expectations she gives me a clever smile and says: “We’ve been through a lot of different phases”. However, on the whole Nancy believes that Maastricht fulfilled all of her expectations as a place to live: “We wanted a nice small town where you could get around by bicycle and our kids could grow up, go to school, and be happy. And that has definitely been the case. I still love it and think it’s wonderful”.

Concerning the university Nancy admits to having more mixed feelings: “It has gone through so many cycles of growth and crimping in again, ups and downs, also politically…” Nancy had to deal with a number of temporary appointments due to the fact that she and her husband initially planned on staying in Holland for three or four years only. Because they ended up living in Maastricht permanently, Nancy kept on scrambling for soft money, which was rather stressful in the beginning. “I think part of my position was temporary for about 17 years, I don’t think that’s even legal”.

The best thing about coming to the Netherlands in Nancy’s opinion is that you can work part-time and still have a decent interesting job, which is much harder in the States where academic jobs tend to be full-time jobs. “I do have an extremely flexible position here, and have been able to do pretty much what I wanted. In the beginning I didn’t even have teaching responsibilities”.

In retrospect choosing for this kind of flexibility also had some disadvantages. “If I look at my colleagues at Harvard that did things the traditional way, they went on and took full-time positions and are now all professors,” Nancy explains. “I am not, and am actually quite certain that I never will be full professor at this university”.

So does Nancy feel any regrets about her choices? “I’ve accepted this as a result of my personal decisions along the way, although sometimes I do wonder,” she says. “Sometimes I complain, but if I look back at the entire picture I see how my children grew up here in the Netherlands and had all the opportunities, and succeeded in ways that I hoped for”.

From friends Nancy hears that it is quite stressful in the States to get children into good universities. Also, she informs me of recent figures indicating that 20 to 30 percent of undergraduates at Harvard and Stanford take medication (like antidepressants and anxiolitics). “I am glad that our children weren’t forced into that”.

Maastricht, the Harvard of Europe?
How does the atmosphere at Maastricht University compare to that of big US universities like Harvard? Nancy turns her eyes up for a moment and gives me a contemplative look: “Some things I’ve gotten so used to over the years that they don’t even strike me anymore, but I remember when we first moved here I noticed that people spent a lot more time in what seemed to me a sort of endless, extended discussions of the smallest points”. Whereas at Harvard decisions would just be made, and actions carried out, in Holland there seemed to be more need for discussing everything in minute detail. “Over time that culture has decreased plus I’ve gotten used to it, but I used to get very frustrated in endless meetings.”

Another aspect that troubled Nancy within this university was the noticeable lack of women, especially in higher positions: “So if I did go to a meeting I’d be sitting in a group of men who would often display sort of conflict behaviors with each other that seemed to me quite odd.” Nancy tells me that luckily also this has changed over time.

The academic environment is simply different in The Netherlands, she continues. Universities such as Harvard and Stanford are big places, and Nancy tells me that they have an abundance of interesting speakers visiting every week to give talks and colloquia. In comparison when Nancy arrived in Maastricht there was no such thing, and it is still rather infrequent. “Sometimes we invite very famous international speakers to Maastricht, but you never can be sure if ten people or a hundred will show up. It seems not so much a part of the culture here to have that kind of exchange.”

Also the nature of the faculties is quite different from what can be found in the states, “Basically I’m a biopsychologist, which is fairly unusual in this country, and there is nothing like a liberal arts university. So it has never been completely clear, at least to other people, where I fit in,” Nancy explains.

What about the reputation of Maastricht abroad? I inquire. “I think it has a very good international reputation, although I can’t say that everyone at Harvard would know where it was, but there’s been a lot of exchange and the quality of the research here is really very high I believe,” Nancy says. In her view, Dutch universities in general, and Maastricht in particular, play a very active role internationally and “that can only grow”.

“I am somewhat amused when I read things such as Maastricht wanting to be seen as the Harvard of Europe,” Nancy continues. “I am amused because I think it’s very difficult for something like that to occur, [because] those private universities have a long history in the States and enormous endowments.” Since Maastricht is not able to attract the absolute top people in the world, Nancy believes that the comparison is bound not to be completely realistic, although “as the university continues to grow it will undoubtedly develop a very positive European profile.”

“I am a kind of dyed-in-the-wool academic”
I wonder why Nancy choose for a life in academia in the first place, and whether she ever doubted this was what how she wanted to spend her time. Montana isn’t exactly the breeding ground for academics, and Nancy’s parents were not academics either. “I think I grew up in a time and place where your dreams could easily be realized if you had them,” Nancy replies.

She confesses to always having been fascinated by research and to being quite motivated academically. “I enjoyed it completely, all along the way, I just went with it, I’m afraid I’m a kind of dyed-in-the-wool academic.”

Nancy believes a career in academics has many advantages, mainly in terms of flexibility: “The pressure I experience is pressure I put on myself”, she explains. “If you really like this job the excitement and the fun more than compensate for the little extra stress”.

For the future Nancy plans to keep doing what she’s doing until she reaches an age when the university “kicks you out”, which is usually 65. Will she move back to the States at that point? Nancy isn’t sure: “I think I would experience enormous culture shock if I moved back. Also under the current political and economic situation I wouldn’t consider it”. And what about staying in Maastricht? “Perhaps, I really have no concrete plans, maybe Spain or Italy, it also depends on where the children end up. We’re all travelers, and will continue to being so”.

Listening to Nancy’s story I feel confident about asking her one final question, the one nearest to my heart. Are academics really just stuck spinning their wheels? Nancy smiles and admits: “I think it’s something we ask ourselves all the time, especially when you’re in the more basic research areas such as myself”. Before answering, she seems to carefully weigh the question in her mind. She finally says that the “publish or perish” mentality is unfortunate but that “if you didn’t write papers it would be completely idiotic. I think we have an obligation to publish. If we didn’t we’d be doing society a disservice”.

On the other hand Nancy strongly feels that whenever possible, attempts should be made to find links to real life problems. This is something she also strives for in her own research, for instance in a study of stress physiology in children who were exposed to the tsunami of December 2004. “We are always looking to identify the problem and how to take the next step, how to get the world mobilized to deal with these kinds of issues”.

Ultimately the question remains whether cranking out papers really results in an adequate contribution to society, but then there is teaching. Nancy thinks that “however narrow a subject you may teach, if you can help the next generation of researchers and doctors to think in a creative and broader fashion, to spark them, then I think you can make a contribution”. Altogether Nancy believes she can look back and be satisfied with what she’s been doing. As for academics being stuck, Nancy concludes resolutely by stating: “I don’t think so, I don’t experience it in that way, and I don’t think most of my colleagues do either”.

So what’s the true answer about the state of academia? I think the only truly academic answer would be is that we don’t know, like with everything else. Talking to Nancy made me feel confident that it’s okay to enjoy being a scientist, and if anything, it’s a world far more interesting and fulfilling than many others. Thinking back to that first confrontation with what academia is viewed to be like by some, I realize how much has changed. Many a discussion about the ultimate goal of science has taken place since then, and if anything I’ve become increasingly skeptical. But however feeble it may be, it remains my delusion of choice, and as such I’m left with no other option than simply enjoy living a life in an academic environment. Be it completely useless or not, it’s a wonderful world to be spinning wheels in.

By Rosanne Rademaker

Born in The Hague, Rosanne Rademaker is currently living and studying in Maastricht for a research master in Neuro Psychology. Rosanne also writes (in Dutch) for youth magazine Code Maastricht.

Related articles:

• Academia in Maastricht (part 1): “A good quality of life and a university: the perfect combination of things”
• Academia in Maastricht (part 2): the life and times of a Polish-American rebel
• Academia in Maastricht (part 3): Lost in translation