To start with the latter, every university has a strategy and it has to be renewed every six years. The strategy document sets out what the main goals are and how they will be pursued and achieved in the coming period. The previous strategy was adopted in 2020 under the motto: “You have a part to play”. This motto has resonated tremendously over the past few years.
The mission towards society on which the new strategy is based therefore remains squarely in place: Radboud University wants to contribute to a healthy, free world with equal opportunities for everyone. At the same time, society is increasingly challenging us: resources are dwindling and tensions are mounting. Science and universities can clearly not rely on universal support. To be successful in that context, we will have to demonstrate the worth of our university and our values not only to ourselves but also, more importantly, to those around us.
This requires an active attitude and we underline this by turning the core values from our previous strategy a quarter turn. Not only do we want to be curious, we also want to be innovative ourselves. We don't just want to be connected, but also connecting. And we want to be not only reflective, but also responsible; we want to take responsibility. In doing so, we are shifting our core values from what we are to include what we want to contribute.
What we want and are also able to contribute, because of what we are, now and always. Radboud University was founded over a century ago from an emancipatory movement of self-awareness, initiative and enterprise, to help build society – open to all and with an open mind focused on truth. Founding a university from nothing, using your own resources: that is a daring move, and one that asks a lot to succeed. Our predecessors dared to make this move, and they were successful because they formed a community with shared beliefs.
Their original Catholic ideology may now be less visible on the surface, but the convictions that lie beneath it continue to inspire our university community: the value of each person as an individual, the importance of the greater whole in all its coherence, the solidarity among ourselves and with groups still at a disadvantage, international connection and integral ecology, giving responsibility to those who can carry it. That is what we stand for, that is what has made us who we are and who we want to be going forward: critical yet connected, curious yet thoughtful, and remarkably independent-minded. With a great sense of responsibility for the world around us.
This allows us to engage, solicited and unsolicited, in scientific and societal debates. Independent, basing ourselves on constantly evolving knowledge, meaningful to individuals and to society as a whole. Attracting curious students and scientists who want to learn more about their field and who dare to look further.
The latter is essential. We are a comprehensive university for a reason. We have all the assets we need to play a critical, agenda-setting and reflective role as an independent knowledge and educational institution in an increasingly complex society. The breadth of our expertise is not just a historically rooted fact, it is needed. From this breadth and combination emerge perspectives that take different approaches to scientific and societal issues.
To make better use of our tremendous breadth, we need to start removing obstacles to cooperation. This applies to research but also especially to education. Students should be able to benefit from the wide range of expertise we have - and many are keen to do so. Researchers should be able to benefit from the proximity of all these other fields of expertise on a single square kilometre: nowhere else in the Netherlands are so many options available so close together. In the coming years, we will highlight five themes on which our researchers collaborate from an interdisciplinary perspective, and for which they are rightly world-renowned.
The functioning of the brain is a purely scientific area of inquiry and at the same time a gateway to diverse applications through better understanding of disease, behaviour and social interaction.
The foundations of space and matter bring reflection on the properties of matter together with infinite questions regarding materials science, the foundation for exact, technical, and societal applications.
Values-driven AI and digitisation considers the human, societal and ecological sides of AI, with all the critical and hopeful aspects that threaten and protect our freedom.
Sustainable health aims to contribute to a healthy society with a focus on prevention and resilience.
Inequality and emancipation connects researchers who focus on what is needed to create a society with equal opportunities for all.
Numerous other themes are under development that we want to nurture as hotspots, including sustainable landscape.
Our square kilometre among greenery is a beautiful campus that connects us as a community: we want to strengthen it further to foster dialogue, community and collaboration. We aim to create more student housing because it is important for the community, especially for international students who we also welcome and need. A campus where everyone enjoys spending time.
From our campus, we want to inspire and strengthen the region around us, seeking more contact with governments, organisations and companies where our students can engage in instructive and relevant projects, and that welcome collaboration with researchers eager to help address societal problems.
And we want to make our university organisation more resilient and agile, flexible and robust, to avoid becoming the hapless victim of the demographic, financial and bureaucratic waves that will continue to sweep over us. So that we can stand as proud and confident as our founders did a century ago.
This is how our mission and core values are directly linked to today's strategic choices. Our university is an ecosystem of relationships and ideas, connected to the world around us. It offers integral education and aims to be accessible to all; knowledge development should benefit everyone. Respectful debate is essential, and polarising exclusion is utterly unacceptable. Sustainable knowledge and sustainable solutions only emerge from an open and integral orientation towards multiple perspectives and interests, at regional and international level. All backgrounds, beliefs and disciplines are needed if we want to learn from each other. Because our single most important impact comes from all the students we are privileged to educate to become connecting, innovative and responsible people who will build tomorrow's society; a society we as yet know nothing about.
What a mission. A mission that we are glad to take on, as a community of worth and values.