Just as lists of potential new leaders circulate in the country during elections, the same thing happens when a board chairman leaves: who will be the new chairman of the highest administrative board? The same happened at Radboud University in 1992 with the announced departure of Willy van Lieshout, who that year said farewell to a presidency that had lasted no less than seventeen years. A man of integrity who filled every room he entered: who would dare to succeed this Radboud behemoth? Surprisingly, it was Tom Stoelinga, a name that was missing from every list, an appointment that – as they say – came completely out of the blue.
The surprise of this appointment had everything to do with Stoelinga's work history, which has been entirely in higher professional education. Moreover, his very last commitment before coming to Nijmegen was at a college far away from everyone's sight: that of Leeuwarden, where he does not have his best memories, by the way. In Leeuwarden he had to complete a syrupy merger; he had already earned his spurs as chairman of the HBO Council and – among many other things – as the first civil servant of the Tilburg School of Economics, then still a college, now Tilburg University. Higher professional education was dear to him, but the university was a completely new playing field for him, quite apart from his student days in Utrecht, where he studied history and also obtained his doctorate in the 1960s.
During Stoelinga's years at the university, and certainly in his early years, it was tempting to compare his performances and presentations with those of his predecessor. This was done extensively, including in the various interviews he gave to the university newspaper KUnieuws. Where Van Lieshout sketched one grand vision after another, Stoelinga remained deaf to it. Whereas one was known as flamboyant and intellectual, Stoelinga was labelled as the bureaucrat incarnate and a steep administrator. ‘I miss the inspiration,’ was one of the descriptions, and: ‘It's all very business-like here.’ That sounds unpleasant, and Stoelinga will have experienced it that way too, but on the other hand he will not have been surprised by the image, because it was part of his working life. In one of his interviews he once recalled a remark made by one of his students at the beginning of his career when he was still a history teacher: ‘Sir, you look so stern’. He did not fight against the image of aloofness and the cat-in-the-tree-looking foreman in Nijmegen. He was cut out for a role behind the stage, and even in the anniversary year of 1998 – never has an anniversary been celebrated as exuberantly as then – he did not claim a leading role. He remained authentic in his level-headedness all those years, never making the world seem more beautiful than it is.
The image of the university welcoming an interim pope between 1992 and 2000, waiting for another truly colourful figure, does Stoelinga a gross disservice and ignores the spirit of the times in that decade. It was precisely during those years that the universities faced an immense administrative reform, which culminated in the University Management Modernisation Act of 1998. This act strengthened the position of the board of directors, provided for clearer management of the decentralised units and transformed the student and staff representation. Stoelinga went all out and started building a new home for the board and management in Nijmegen even before the MUB became a reality. It was an immense job that demanded the lion's share of his attention, which did not exactly win him friends and only served to strengthen his identity as a bold administrator. But he succeeded. Stoelinga has prepared the university institution for the future, or rather: he has given the whole thing a sustainable primer, paving the way for his successors to add colour.
In addition to the primer, Stoelinga himself has also added a few colours here and there, as can be seen in his drive to bring about a merger with Tilburg University. It would have been his tour de force had the merger not been thwarted in 1999, with the port just around the corner, due to a final outburst of tension over the inequality in size and influence. One of his other causes is the Katrina van Munster Fund, which he and his wife set up in 1996 with the aim of strengthening the position of women in science – with a chair named after her and several scholarships. The fund is named after the university's first female doctoral candidate, who studied at the arts faculty in 1929. It is a wonderful coincidence that Stoelinga's wife, also named Katrina, is the aunt of this first female doctoral candidate.
After his retirement, Stoelinga did not sit back and do nothing for the university. In particular, he worked hard for the Higher Education for Older Adults programme (HOVO). He taught several courses and was also chairman of the HOVO Advisory Board for ten years. When the board of directors pulled the plug on HOVO in 2020, Stoelinga publicly took up his pen to respond to his distant successors. Unusual. Not because he showed passion here – that has always been there – but because it was now brought into the spotlight. Anyone who still had any doubts could now see that we had a man at the helm who put his heart and soul into the university.
Paul van den Broek, former editor of university newspaper KUnieuws
