A haven of peace.

Rob Mudde

Never before have I seen our campus looking so deserted. Even at the height of summer or in the Christmas holidays there are always plenty of people going about their university business. But not now. Now all is quiet. During the first days of the coronavirus I was still working on campus. If I happened to look out of my window facing the Merkel Park, I never counted more than five people at any one time. A sad sight, but that's the way things are for the time being. Now I too am working from home. Two weeks ago I had a slight cold and fever. I felt a little uneasy, what if...? I texted my daughter who’s a GP in England. No, dad. I'm sure you're fine. But... meanwhile stay at home and practice social distancing. Even from mum, who works in a hospital. Yes, daughter-doctor. So, ten days living apart together. Boring, but no worse than that... The fever subsided after two days, so it probably was a false alarm. However, just to be on the safe side, I'm following my daughter's advice. Working from home is becoming more and more of a routine for all of us. Of course it's easy for me to talk, unlike many of my colleagues I don't have any children at home demanding my attention. It's incredible just how energetically our community has responded to the situation; a great sight that fills me with pride. Yet I am concerned at the pace at which many of my colleagues are working. How long will we be able to keep this up? How much can we expect of each other? This is something I am struggling with: on the one hand we want to help our students as much as possible, but on the other hand our colleagues need to stay healthy. We'll have to find time to get the necessary rest sometime during the summer, each in their own way. I am also concerned for our students. Studying from home is proving more difficult than we thought. It is hard to concentrate for a long time staring at a monitor. The social contacts provided by on-campus teaching, with the encouragement this provides to study together and stick at it, have now fallen away. Many students have other things to worry about. Our international students, for example, are worried about their families at home, and about their financial situation. And our Dutch students also share these concerns. It is difficult to get these worries under control; they keep going round in your head. They disturb your concentration, divert your thoughts and reduce your ability to study complex material. This is all very bad for your motivation. And motivation also suffers from a lack of progress, the feeling that it is all pointless anyway, and from the lack of sporting, social and cultural opportunities to provide an outlet. It turns out that we are not the ‘digital beings’ we may have thought we were under normal circumstances. So how can we steer things in the right direction? And what is the right direction anyway? There turn out to be many right directions, depending on who you speak to. One person is keen to get on and complete their BSc so they can start their Master's programme in September. Another may want to push on in order to escape the increasing financial pressure. And others have so many worries, that they would rather slow things down. But how can we allow for speeding up and slowing down at the same time? We have many questions in uncertain times. But fewer answers. What is the right thing to do? It really does feel like Prime Minister Mark Rutte said: “We're managing for 100%, but with 50% of the knowledge”. I see it everywhere, among staff and students. As a member of the Executive Board, I am trying to find a balance in all the different interests that we have to serve. We are staring into an uncertain future that changes from day to day. We are consulting together, looking at things from all sides, but ultimately we have to make decisions. And it isn't good to prolong the uncertainty. Everyone, from the Executive Board, the Directors of Education, the E&SA Director, to all the working groups, is doing their best. Trusting each other, and in the confidence that we all want what is best for our students. Where do you find distraction in these days when you've been agonising over all these questions, you've been working hard to keep the show on the road, trying to study while your thoughts wander and your head is in a continual spin? For me, it's every evening at half past eight, when my five-year-old granddaughter phones to ask if grandpa will tell a bedtime story. Of course grandpa will. It's wonderfully relaxing, with a little girl who is blissfully unaware of all the troubles of the outside world. A little girl who knows that she'll only get one story from mum, but grandpa always gives three. It's touchingly naive: of course mum knows grandpa tells three stories, but for Sarah, stories two and three are a bonus. She already knows all the stories, grandpa wrote them himself and Sarah drew the pictures. A children's book with stories about Sarah and her little sister Sofia. A haven of peace at the end of the day, twenty minutes with nothing more serious than the daily concerns of two girls aged five and two. Just for a moment, life is very much as normal. Hopefully after a while we will be able to start getting back to normal. I can't wait to see the TU Delft campus filled again with students and staff. And I will never again complain that the campus is too busy!