One of the great newcomers was unable to personally visit formateur Rutte today. The 61-year-old scientist has left his current workplace in the United States and is in quarantine at the Corona hotel in The Hague, a little further away. Rutte therefore speaks via a video link with Dijkgraaf about his approaching ministership.
The general public mainly knows Dijkgraaf from his television appearances, such as in The World Turns Deadr, where he tries to explain complex phenomena such as the big bang or the infinite in ordinary human language. Dijkgraaf’s mission is to make science accessible.
The NRC reader also knows him from his columns, in which he does not hide his criticism of government policy. In the search for new impetus, D66 has certainly found someone “from outside” with scientist Robbert Dijkgraaf.
Dijkgraaf studied theoretical physics, was president of the KNAW, the scientific advisory body to the government, and is now director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the US. However, the Netherlands did not disappear from his field of vision; last year he became a member of the assessment committee of the National Growth Fund, the investment fund founded by Wopke Hoekstra and the now retired former minister Eric Wiebes.
Broader advice
Dijkgraaf was one of 36 scientists who October 2020 made an appeal to the cabinet to “really do it differently to get out of the corona crisis”. The core of the criticism was that the cabinet was advised by too small a number of experts. “Not only microbiologists, but also behavioral psychologists, communication experts and physicists should participate,” Dijkgraaf said at the time. He called it very important that the OMT has “all this scientific knowledge” at its disposal.
One of the major tasks that Dijkgraaf will be tasked with is the elaboration of plans to invest an additional 5 billion euros in higher education and science. Universities and institutions will soon want to discuss this with him.
Grocery Policy
He was critical of his predecessor and party colleague Ingrid Van Engelshoven in 2019. He called the redistribution operation in which money was shifted from, among other things, the social sciences and medical education to technology a “naive Dutch zero-sumapproach” (gain for one means loss for the other).
“In the US, this is seen as completely unfeasible grocery policy,” he wrote in a statement his column. “You also don’t give a present to a child by taking it from someone else.” Dijkgraaf criticized those choices between different forms of science: it is not either philosophy or technology, but both-and.
Basic grant
It is not inconceivable that Dijkgraaf himself will soon have to deal with criticism or protests. He may carry out the reform of the student loan system: the return of the basic grant is planned for the 2023-2024 academic year. He has 1 billion euros in cash to compensate students who had to borrow in recent years.
Students already call that far too little. The LSVb union has announced a protest manifestation for February.
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