The Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) has made €25 million available for attracting top international researchers. The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has matched that, bringing the amount available for the newly established Tulip Fund to €50 million. This is intended for a total of fifty scientists, for each of whom the organisation concerned will be eligible to receive one million euros.
Operation of the fund will be straightforward, without any centralised selection of applications via NWO. Research organisations can submit a certain number of nominations for scientists who they wish to bring to the Netherlands. A fixed amount will be available for each scientist. This means that the boards of these organisations will bear great responsibility as regards nominating the right candidates.
The Young Academy acknowledges the importance of supporting scientists who are under threat, but is concerned that – in its current form – the new fund could be used to attract top scientists who are not in fact threatened. We are committed to internationalisation and to supporting scientists who are in a precarious situation, such as refugees and other scientists who are under threat. We have therefore long advocated providing funding for scientists whose academic freedom is restricted.
However, the NWO/OCW initiative is difficult to reconcile with the unprecedented cuts now facing Dutch higher education and science. The fund is supposed to attract top scientists , even though such scientists are being laid off in our own country due to budget cuts. Moreover, many top international scientists in the Netherlands feel unwanted, isolated, and scapegoated. That is due to measures such as the Internationalisation in Balance Act [Wet Internationalisering in Balans], which is supposedly intended to limit the number of international students in the Netherlands. We have stated our opposition to these budget cuts and restrictions on internationalisation. We therefore hope that the fund will be used solely to welcome talented scientists from abroad who are no longer able to carry out their work (or do so safely) due to increasing threats to academic freedom.
We therefore call on the boards of organisations that are eligible to submit nominations to take the following into consideration:
1. Academic freedom: Use the fund to support scientists and scholars who are unable to carry out their work in freedom. Serious violations of academic freedom are apparent in various parts of the world. Organisations such as Scholars at Risk and Cara have been working for a long time to support scientists who are in a precarious situation, and they have established criteria for assessing their applications. We call on board members to apply these criteria and not to focus primarily on indicators of scientific excellence.
2. Young scientists and scholars: Focus on younger scientists and scholars, who can contribute to scientific endeavour for decades to come, and for whom threats to their academic freedom can have serious long-term consequences.
3. The entire scientific spectrum: Ensure that the researchers involved come from across the entire scientific spectrum: the exact sciences and technology, medicine, the humanities, and the social sciences. This will require national coordination, given that each organisation can only apply for funding for a limited number of candidates. We ask board members to take the lead in this regard, in the same way as they have successfully done in other matters requiring national coordination.
If it is managed effectively, the Tulip Fund can contribute to making the Netherlands a safe haven for scientists and scholars who are in a precarious situation. For the moment, the fund is a one-off initiative. Any follow-up should not be limited to scientists from outside the EEA and Switzerland, given that scientists from these countries may also be subject to restrictions on their academic freedom. We hope that this will mark the start of the development of broad, systematic, and long-term support for threatened scientists worldwide.
On 15 July, this appeal was sent to the boards of all the organisations that are eligible to nominate candidates for the Tulip Fund.