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Dear Rector Magnficus, dear Dean, dear friends of ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College Utrecht,

How did Liberal Arts and Sciences shape my life?

This month 24 years ago, I first set foot on this campus through the main gate. I was here with my parents, who about an hour before that, had picked me up from Schiphol Airport where I had just landed coming back from a year’s stay in South Africa on a high school exchange, after finishing my VWO in the Netherlands the year before that. From Cape Town I had applied to UCU and this was the first time I was seeing the place. As an introverted teenager, up until that moment in my life I had felt an outsider in most situations, growing up in our village in the Achterhoek, at high school where I soon realized that my interests in various domains differed quite strongly from those of the majority of my peers, and most certainly in South Africa, where I spent one part of the year as the only European in an entirely non-white school in a former township, and the other part of the year with a white Afrikaans-speaking family, a cultural setting which also could not have been more distant from that of my own upbringing. 

And as I entered this campus, I thought: maybe this will be the place where I can feel like a real insider for the first time, where I can really feel at home among like-minded peers and start shaping my own life.

During the three years that followed on this campus, that certainly turned out to be the case. I put together my own curriculum and learned an incredible lot about a variety of topics, perspectives, and theories. I dived right into the UCU-mode of heavy and intense reading, doing assignments and writing many, many papers, preparing debates and designing and carrying out small research projects. I completed tracks in Political Science, Economics, History and Geography, and entered sideroads into seemingly unrelated subjects I, nonetheless, thoroughly enjoyed, such as Argumentation Analysis (never drop that course), architectural history and French up to the near-fluent level.

Life on campus sometimes seemed like a misty social experiment, but for me it offered exactly the right environment to grow, personally and socially. In my first year I co-founded one of the UCU-fraternities that is still going strong, I joined a few student committees and I spent many late hours in the College Bar with friends.

I came out to my family and friends, and felt liberated and empowered as a result. And it was here that I made my friends for life. With all of my 9 housemates in building G, unit 16, in my third year, we still share a WhatsApp group where not a single day goes by in which our highs and lows in life are shared, jokes are exchanged and we comment on the news, or on anything someone found on the internet really. So, in a real sense, UCU is still part of my life on a truly everyday basis.

As the second cohort, at UCU we were also very pampered and groomed in a certain way. In my memory, teachers and administrators took every opportunity to tell us that we belonged to a chosen group who would undoubtedly become the global leaders of tomorrow. That idea was also internalized by many UCU-students over time, more in some than in others.

So if you had asked me on my graduation day how Liberal Arts and Sciences education had, and was still going to shape my life, my answer probably would have been: It turned me from an outsider into an insider, formed me as an academic and helped me to thrive personally and socially. I think we really believed it would be going to open just about any door for us in our later professional lives.

After graduating from UCU, I went on to pursue my master's degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics, a highly selective program with fellow students coming from the best universities and colleges in the world. By now, I really started to believe that with my Liberal Arts and Sciences degree from UCU in my pocket, the job market would see me as a snack.

And then it didn’t.

Back in the Netherlands, employers at that time did not seem to have much of a clue about, or much interest in, the value of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This became clear to me when I wanted to apply for the so-called Rijkstraineeship, a traineeship run by the Dutch central government to let broadly interested and talented graduates enter a fast-track career in the public service. A programme for which a Liberal Arts and Sciences background would be spot on. That program had only existed for a few years at the time, but was already very popular. I remember that as the first step in the selection process you had to fill in an online form where, in addition to your motivation, you also had to select the field of your undergraduate degree from a menu. I started filling in the form with high expectations, self-contented with my motivation answers and with the good grades that I could fill in. My field of study, Liberal Arts and Sciences, was not listed. What to do? At that point, I could have smartly chosen to check the box for any field in which I had completed a track, or I could have checked the “other” option, and then typed in Liberal Arts and Sciences. I thought, I'll do the latter, because it will definitely increase my chances of going through to the next round. But, alas. After about a week, I received a standard rejection stating only that my field of study was not one that they were looking for in that year.

Also, in a couple of places where I applied for PhD positions afterwards, I was rejected because they preferred a candidate who was already well versed in the theories and research traditions of the particular discipline in question. It was kind of a cold shower, not just for me, but for many of my UCU friends experienced this at that time: from being the insider groomed for global greatness, to realizing that in the outside world no-one believed we were particularly good, let alone special. In other words, for me it meant going back to being some sort of the eccentric misfit.

After a while I opted for an unpaid internship with the Liberal Party faction in de Tweede Kamer, the Dutch House of Representatives, while continuing to apply for PhD positions and other jobs. In hindsight, those were my baby steps into the inner world of parliamentary democracy and party politics. When I started working there, it took me some time to convince the people there that I was any good, not least because my Dutch writing skills proved to be quite underdeveloped. In the end I landed a PhD position at Leiden ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��, which turned out to be the start of a career path in academia. But also during my time as a PhD researcher within a monodisciplinary Institute of Public Administration, I felt mostly an outsider amidst my peers who had a much better command of the canon of the field, had already read all the classical authors in the discipline and had been better trained in their specific research methods. On many occasions I wished I had “just simply” studied political science or law, because it would have allowed me to have an easier time specializing during the PhD phase.

So in the first years after UCU, I learned that whatever goal you want to pursue, you need to give it your all right there and then because the environment that you will land into ��DZ����’t see you as special and ��DZ����’t care that you studied Liberal Arts and Sciences. I did still carry the same warm feelings about the programme and my time here on campus, but I also felt that in some ways, it had made my steps into the real world more difficult rather than easier, and that that soothing feeling of having shed my awkward eternal outsider position had just been a temporary delusion. At that point in time, my answer to the question how Liberal Arts and Sciences had shaped my life, would at best have been quite mixed.

Nonetheless, in the years after completing my PhD this idea kept evolving. I got a research fellowship at Princeton ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� at the invitation of professor Ezra Suleiman, a giant in the field of comparative politics and a big advocate of Liberal Arts and Sciences education. Upon return to The Netherlands I started to teach at the then newly founded Leiden ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College in The Hague as an external, where I bumped into several other UCU-ers, both former staff and former students from here. I got to reconnect with Liberal Arts and Sciences teaching and was able to help interpret the teaching philosophy for use at the LUC.

My confidence had by then grown, and I started to have less of a problem with being the outsider, not minding the fact that I might not have a real disciplinary home in academia, and more importantly, not minding always having something to explain to the majority of people who are primed to assume the ordinary, the normal, whether it is in the academic community, or in my personal life.

And as time went on, explaining parts of my outsider status became somewhat of a normal thing, just like having to correct people in their assumptions of normalcy. I married my husband - whom I had met the summer of graduating from UCU - and we are now raising two amazing children that came to us through surrogacy.

It’s safe to say that if my life were a book, the State of Florida would now ban it.

I first became a full professor at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Groningen in 2017 and later on also an endowed professor at Leiden ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��. Earlier this year, I became the Dean of the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College Fryslân, part of the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Groningen, and this Tuesday [13 June], I will be installed as a second term Senator for the Liberal Party.

How do I now feel that Liberal Arts and Sciences shaped my life? My answer today is much different from what it would have been on my graduation day 21 years ago, but also much different from what it would have been 10 years ago. What I now realize is that Liberal Arts and Sciences did not so much turn me from an outsider into an insider, but rather it planted the seed in me to find peace in my outsider status, or actually, cherishing that outsider status and turning it into something productive. UCU or a Liberal Arts education did not make me a different person while I studied, but it planted that seed in me. When I left here, that’s only when that seed started growing. That germinating seed has helped me find the confidence to make my life and professional choices really on the basis of my genuine interests, and my authentic curiosity.

And I am not alone in that. When I look at my friends from UCU, what we continue to have in common is that we have shaped our lives according to our own values and beliefs. Always societally engaged, never uncritically following society’s conventions, and rarely prepared to submit to limitations that might be holding others back. And indeed, one prediction from back then came true: we did not prepare ourselves for fulfilling jobs that already existed, we went out and created and invented our own jobs.

At this time, I know I’m still the outsider that I was when I first entered this gate. As a gay dad I’m an outsider in a heteronormative world; as a dedicated family man I may be an outsider in some LGBTQI-circles. As an academic I’m an outsider in politics, and as a centrist Liberal I’m an outsider among an increasingly neo-marxist student population. And the truth is, I’m now enjoying that outsider status, because it supports my mission to stress the necessity of a pluralistic worldview, to let others see the world from multiple perspectives, and to demonstrate to students that it is very much okay to be “different”, regardless of how they may be different. 

It turned out that the ultimate goal I left UCU with, was not to become the leader of tomorrow, but to find comfort in living my life authentically, also if it means I’ll be the outsider. It also turned out that what I got instilled in me here is a commitment to teaching and living with heartfelt curiosity and empathy. It made me a lifelong advocate of interdisciplinary science, of a strong focus on learning metaskills alongside cognitive development, and the importance of writing-intensive teaching.

It is my belief that today, in a time of huge societal and environmental challenges, and in a time of looming cultural standoffs on a number of fundamental issues, we need a generation of movers and shakers that are willing to listen empathetically, start true dialogues, connect worldviews and disciplines. Diversity of opinions may at times be challenging to your sense of social safety, but it’s crucial to lean into that diversity of opinions rather than shutting yourself off of it. Exactly that is what I learned as a result of my time here on campus and exactly that is what I’ll keep on trying to pay forward.

To everyone at UCU, congratulations on your fifth lustrum. I wish all eternal outsiders a wonderful homecoming today and tomorrow.

Thank you.