Review of the Research Institute for History and - Universiteit Utrecht

Threats
Random retirement and ditto budget cuts can potentially unhinge certain research areas. Due to the imbalanced
age-structure of tenured faculty, where very few appointments are made, almost all programmes are
threatened by aging. For the past years postdoctoral researchers have drawn attention to the fact that, due to
budget cuts, there are not enough opportunities for them to acquire tenured faculty appointments.
As long as PhD-students remain employees, and their salaries keep rising at the current rate, the number
of PhD positions will continue to drop. The number of places has indeed already reached dramatically low
levels. With the creation of a local Graduate School, the relationship between local training and courses provided
by national research schools is in urgent need of revision.OGC favours a combination of local responsibilities
with national programmes. Deans of the Dutch Faculties of Arts are also in favor of maintaining the
research networks created by the national research schools.
OGC is increasingly successful in raising NWO funding, but this also has a serious drawback, as NWO
requires ever-larger matching components from local institutions. The autonomous allocation of research
funding is liable to suffer.
Analysis
OGC’s ten research programmes have developed different profi les, with respect to output, cooperation and
international networks. These variations are the result of varying combinations of personal and structural
factors. The current evaluation nonetheless hints at a number of general conclusions. Proportionally, groups
with a strong internal cohesion tend to be the most productive. Output of scholarly publications per fte
research time is above average for the programmes Ancient and Medieval Culture; Cultural Construction
of Media; Arts, Cultura and their Contexts; Social and Economic History and Gender Studies. These groups
have also been most successful in obtaining external funding. The internal cohesion of these groups profi ts
from a combination of circumstances, but one seems to be of overriding importance: successful groups tend
to collaborate more (internally as well as externally) than their less successful counterparts. Even if the original
ideas and inspiration of individual researchers will remain an important, even decisive factor, especially
in the humanities, scholarly success tends to grow where such individual efforts are combined. With this in
mind, OGC management stimulates the organization of regular research seminars—not a regular feature of
OGC programmes so far—for all programmes, with local, national and international presentations of workin-progress.
Adjusted strategy and goals
OGC management is even more actively engaged than in the past in fund-raising efforts, so as to expand the
institute’s research budget. At the same time it will help create a situation to protect tenured faculty’s research
time; the research quarter that will be applied throughout the Faculty of Arts as of September 2005 is a major
step in that direction.
Within the context of the Graduate School Arts & Humanities, soon to be created, renewed efforts will
be made to improve the numbers of PhD-students actually graduating within the time-limits set by the university.
A clarifi cation of their status—students or employees—should also help clarify responsibilities for the
projects undertaken by PhD-students.
Collective efforts, both in the development of research projects, as well as in regular research seminars,
are promoted and fi nancially supported. We hope to help set up a European network of humanities institutes
in the next couple of years. OGC management has also been a prominent participant in Utrecht University’s
efforts to create a comprehensive exchange agreement with the University of California system, which is set
to be formally concluded in the Summer of 2005.
To improve international visibility, OGC management has ensured that all faculty now have a personal
internet-page, that includes a list of individual publications since 1997. OGC is actively engaged in promoting
international cooperation. Participation in CHCI enhances international visibility on an institutional level. 11
379 Research Institute for History and Culture OGC