Transparency urges politics and political actors to be open about their doings and decision-making processes. An ideal that is so old and important but somehow not much applied in UvA’s politics.Why is that the case?

All CSR plenary meetings are public, which is excellent for their transparency since all students can come by and witness their politics first-hand. Despite this nice idea and great promotion, the council still fails to give much insight.

First of all, there is no clear statement of when the meetings take place without students taking the initiative to ask. On their website or Instagram page––except for the location––the day and time cannot be found.

In addition, the council lacks transparency in general when it comes to the website. Most faculties publish ‘minutes’ on their website, which document the topics that were discussed and decided on. Still, the CSR’s last produced agendas and reports of their plenary meetings are from the 16th of September of this academic year. Reports of the Consultative Meetings are not updated since the last academic years, and the same goes for the Consultation with the Supervisory Board. Overall, the website does not give much information on the actions taken by the CSR. Further, without students taking active initiatives, it is hard for them to find out what happens in those meetings. Unfortunately, CSR lacks transparency, which should be improved in the future. However, some of the faculty councils seem to overlook transparency as well. For instance, the faculty of medicine seems to be on the right track, as they keep publishing minutes of plenary meetings. But, the faculty of humanities has not updated their minutes since the 4th of October. Moreover, for example, on the site of the faculty of social and behavioural science, the minutes are only available on the Dutch version of the site. This gives international no access to any of their meetings. Consequently, not only transparency is lost, but inclusivity as well.

Transparency is essential to politics, so that the students know what is going on in their university. They can hold actors accountable based on the council’s transparency. Currently, the UvA is failing to provide this transparent environment. As Carry Somers once said: “There is no beauty without truth and there is no truth without transparency”.

 

This article is edited, in the original version we stated that the faculty of social and behavioural sciences had published no minutes at all, we have since been notified that this is false. The minutes are not available on the English version of their site, but they have been uploaded on the Dutch version.