To Prof.

Karen Maex
Rector Magnificus
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, 1 June 2016
Esteemed Professor Maex, dear Karen,
We, the undersigned academic members of staff of the Institute for Logic, Language and
Computation (ILLC), are addressing this open letter to you on the day of your appointment
as Rector Magnificus at the UvA regarding a matter that is very close to our hearts and of
the utmost importance for every working academic. We ask that the regulations governing
who may act as promotor of a doctoral thesis at the UvA be modernised, so as to bring
them in line with international standards.
Under the current regulations, only a Full Professor (HL) can take on the role of promotor
and thus assume ultimate responsibility for the supervision of a doctoral thesis. This is
not an accurate reflection of everyday practice at the university. Certainly at our institute,
very often it is an Assistant Professor (UD) or an Associate Professor (UHD) who is the
leading expert in the field a given doctoral thesis is contributing to, and this person thus
mustand doestake responsibility for that thesis. However, under current regulations
they cannot be accurately credited for their contribution. Not giving credit where credit is
due is fundamentally unfair and creates a number of problems. For instance, it damages the
international standing of the researcher in question, who has to compete in an international
environment where most of their peers are not held back in this manner.
Besides being unfair, the current system raises serious concerns regarding quality control.
While one might argue that restricting the pool of potential promotores to a fairly small and
selective group, namely the Full Professors, constitutes some form of quality control, this
argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, there is little or no quality control involved
when selecting a promotor from this pool for a specific PhD project. The Doctorate Board
(College voor Promoties), which appoints the promotor, currently does not have the means
to verify actual expertise. Thus, the implicit assumption is that everyone belonging to the
pool of potential promotorescurrently all the Full Professorsautomatically has the
capacity to supervise any given PhD project. This assumption clearly is false. Sometimes,
in fact quite often, there will be no Full Professor qualified to be promotor. Indeed, many
PhD projects are financed with money that has been brought in by either an Assistant or an
Associate Professor, often in domains where there simply is no Full Professor available who
could credibly take responsibility for the content of the thesis. A system that nevertheless
forces a Full Professor to take responsibility in such a case places unnecessary pressures on
that Full Professor and raises questions regarding quality control.
Indeed, the regulations currently in place at the UvA do not live up to international
standards. Top universities outside of the Netherlands, such as Harvard and Oxford, do
not have anything resembling these regulations in place. Instead, every suitably qualified
Assistant or Associate Professor can take full responsibility for a PhD project. In those
places, the kind of hierarchical system reinforced by the UvA regulations would be seen
as hopelessly outdated and as actively obstructing high-quality research. The operations
of the all-important funding agencies also are out of sync with UvA regulations. Every

Assistant or Associate Professor at a Dutch university can apply for funding to the European Commission, including the ERC, to create a PhD position. Whether or not there
is a Full Professor available who is qualified to act as promotor is irrelevant for those
funding decisions. Even the NWOat least for its most prestigious funding programme,
the Vernieuwingsimpulsdoes not require the applicant to specify the name of a formal
promotor before awarding hundreds of thousands of euros for PhD positions to Assistant
and Associate Professors obtaining Vidi and Vici grants.
Maybe thirty years ago it was still possible to argue that a single Full Professor was the
main expert in a given research area and thus capable of overseeing the supervisory work of
their Assistant and Associate Professors working as copromotores. But given the great
diversification of science and scholarship in recent decades, this has ceased to be the case
a long time ago. Also, back then, it was much less common than it is now for Assistant
and Associate Professors to have to shoulder the responsibility of bringing in the funding
required to create PhD positions in the first place. Finally, back then, competition with
other, more modern systems of research infrastructure abroad was less of an issue than it is
now. Thus, the traditional system of granting the ius promovendi only to Full Professors
may well have had some justification in the past and it may have been less unfair and
better able to ensure quality then than it is now.
Today, however, changes are urgently needed and long overdue. We therefore very much
welcome the recent governmental proposal for a change in the relevant law (Wet op het
Hoger Onderwijs en Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek ). According to this proposal, in the
future it will be up to each individual university in the Netherlands to decide who should
have the right to take on the role of promotor. The text supporting the proposed change
mentions similar arguments as we have given here, and it particularly emphasises the issue
of international competitiveness. It clearly suggests that universities should make active
use of this new opportunity. It is our understanding that it is likely that the proposed
change of the law will come into force sometime in late 2016. The UvA must welcome
this opportunity to modernise and it must implement significant changes to the current
regulations. In the remainder of this letter, we sketch a proposal for how this may be done.
According to the current doctorate regulations (promotiereglement), the tasks of a promotor can be divided into three major groups. First, the promotor supervises or oversees the
supervision of the PhD candidate. Second, the promotor is responsible for the approval
of the manuscript. And third, the promotor is in charge of organisational and ceremonial
matters surrounding the thesis defense. In doing so, the promotor should guarantee the
quality of both content and process. But there is no rational reason for linking any of these
tasks to a specific job title. Rather, in a fair system that is driven only by quality concerns,
everyone who is qualified to take on this kind of responsibility should have the right to do
so, independently of their job title. So what are the relevant qualifications? A doctoral
degree clearly is a minimum requirement for any promotor. Beyond this, comparison with
international practice suggests that Assistant and Associate Professors must be part of the
pool of potential promotores. In those cases where someone in this group does not have a
permanent position, they must hold a contract until at least the foreseen end of the PhD
project in question.
At the same time as we are enlarging the pool of potential promotores, we must sharpen
the procedure for appointing a specific individual from this pool to a specific PhD project.

We suggest the following measures, which are in line with international standards. First,
every PhD project should have two promotores, at least one of which must have previously supervised a PhD project to completion. One of the two may be designated primary
promotor, and the other secondary promotor. Importantly, there is no need for the more
experienced promotor to always be the primary promotor. For instance, if a new Assistant
Professor brings in a large grant, they should be primary promotor for the PhD candidates
working on that grant, but there needs to be appropriate support from a more senior colleague. Second, the two promotorescollectivelyneed to have the expertise required to
supervise the PhD project. Expertise can be verified by the Doctorate Board in consultation with the departmental chair (afdelingsvoorzitter ) or, better, a committee installed at
the level of a department or a research institute. In summary, besides satisfying the basic
criteria associated with belonging to the pool of potential promotores, actual promotores
must meet strict requirements regarding experience and expertise, and they must share
responsibility with a colleague.
Of course, the process of selecting promotores does not occur in a vacuum. Departments
and research institutes should provide adequate mentoring for less experienced promotores,
but such mentoring can take place outside of the supervisory arrangements for a specific
PhD project, and there is no reason why the mentor of the junior PhD supervisor should
be referred to as the promotor of the PhD candidate.
As an aside, we note that the role of copromotor need not change in principle, although
in practice it will become less common. A team of promotores may still choose to appoint
a copromotor on a given PhD project to assist them with specific supervision tasks. Just
as under the current regulations, the only requirements for a copromotor are that they
hold a PhD and that the promotores in charge consider them capable of performing the
supervision tasks assigned to them.
We urge you to push for a change of culture as well as regulations at the UvA along these
lines, and we would like to see new regulations that meet the requirements sketched above
to come into force in the course of 2017. Wherever possible, we are willing to help in
bringing about this change. Finally, we must stress most emphatically that a half-hearted
change that merely extends the ius promovendi to also include Associate Professors would
be insufficient, as it would not address the shortcomings of the current system, nor would
it bring the advantages of the alternative we propose.
We are looking forward to hearing your own views on the matter in the near future.
With our warmest regards,
Signatories (in alphabetical order)
Dr. Maria Aloni, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Krzysztof R. Apt, HL Emeritus @ ILLC/FNWI & Fellow @ CWI
Prof. dr. Jos Baeten, HL @ ILLC/FNWI & CWI
Dr. Alexandru Baltag, UHD @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Benno van den Berg, UD @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Hein van den Berg, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Franz Berto, HL @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Arianna Betti, HL @ILLC/FGW

Dr. Nick Bezhanishvili, UD @ ILLC/FNWI

Prof. dr. Rens Bod, HL @ ILLC/FGW/FNWI
Prof. dr. Harry Buhrman, HL @ QuSoft & ILLC/FNWI & CWI
Dr. Paul Dekker, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Dr. Tejaswini Deoskar, UD @ ILLC/FNWI
Prof. dr. Jan van Eijck, HL @ ILLC/FNWI & CWI
Dr. Ulle Endriss, UHD @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Raquel Fernandez, UHD @ ILLC/FNWI
Prof. dr. Jeroen Groenendijk, HL Emeritus @ ILLC/FGW
Dr. Luca Incurvati, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Dick de Jongh, HL Emeritus @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. ir. Jaap Kamps, UHD @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Michiel van Lambalgen, HL & ILLC/FGW
Dr. Floris Roelofsen, UHD @ ILLC/FNWI
Prof. dr. ing. Robert van Rooij, HL @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Federica Russo, UD @ ILLC / FGW
Dr. Makiko Sadakata, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Dr. Christian Schaffner, UD @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Katrin Schulz, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Khalil Simaan, HL @ ILLC/FNWI
Prof. dr. Sonja Smets, HL @ ILLC/FGW/FNWI
Prof. dr. Martin Stokhof, HL Emeritus @ ILLC/FGW
Dr. Jakub Szymanik, UHD @ ILLC/FGW
Dr. Ivan Titov, UHD @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Leen Torenvliet, UHD @ ILLC/FNWI
Prof. dr. Frank Veltman, HL Emeritus @ ILLC/FNWI
Prof. dr. Yde Venema, HL @ ILLC/FNWI
Dr. Daniel Wiechmann, UD @ ILLC/FGW
Prof. dr. Ronald de Wolf, HL @ ILLC/FNWI & CWI
Dr. Henk Zeevat, UHD @ ILLC/FGW & Heinrich-Heine-Universitat D
usseldorf
Dr. Willem Zuidema, UD @ ILLC/FNWI

A copy of this letter is available online at http://tinyurl.com/uva-ius-promovendi. It

is an open letter, which we would like to see disseminated broadly, and which we hope
will be useful to others who may also wish to take a position on how the UvA and other
Dutch universities should take advantage of the expected changes in the legal framework
in which they are operating. Those who are not familiar with the relevant documents can
find the current doctorate regulations (promotiereglement) of the UvA and the text of the
proposed change of law at the following addresses:
http://www.uva.nl/onderzoek/promoveren/promotietraject/
http://tinyurl.com/wetsvoorstel-whw-2015