On Tuesday 18 March, our university will be going on strike to protest proposed drastic budget cuts to Dutch higher education. Higher education institutions across the Netherlands are taking turns with nearly daily strikes from March through mid-April: Leiden, Utrecht and Nijmegen have already held their local strikes, Amsterdam is holding their protest today, 17 March, and students and staff at the University of Groningen are being encouraged to join the strike here this week.
The cuts are part of an agreement in the coalition’s outline agreement (hoofdlijnenakkoord), which called for one billion euros less to go toward subsidies for physical education, public broadcasting and research. The Dutch Research Council (NWO, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) which provides grants and funding for research projects and largely sets the academic agenda in the Netherlands, is set to take the biggest hit from the proposed education funding cuts: the current version of the agreement calls for cutting €8.4 million in 2026 and up to 22 million euros from 2029 onward.
Return on investment
The Dutch right wing coaltion has defended the cuts by citing living expenses exceeding wage increases in The Netherlands, leading to a growing budget deficit and the need to make pre-emptive cuts. But from a purely economic standpoint (let alone ethical or civic), cutting back on educational funding is bad fiscal policy: a 2019 analysis from the Dutch bank Rabobank found that every €1 extra of research and development capital – such as research at knowledge institutions – resulted in €4.20 of added value for society.
An advisory letter in 2024 from the Dutch Onderwijsraad (Education Council) also made the case for the longer term returns on investment from education: “At individual level, education promotes well-being and prosperity, with research findings spanning many decades showing that each additional year spent in education delivers around 5-10% higher earnings on average.”
Ideological lens
The proposed budget changes come at a time of rising far-right political parties worldwide, where higher education is being viewed through an ideological lens. More troublingly, defunding or restricting the media, targeting universities and undermining cultural institutions are all practices of authoritarianism.
The nature of science is international and collaborative, so even if the protests here help to stave off drastic cuts in the Netherlands, our fellow researchers and co-authors working at American universities are already facing grim challenges in the form of arbitrary (and flip-flopping) funding freezes and even efforts to police what subjects they are allowed to research.
Cuts, freezes, suspensions
“Research grants across the US have been frozen or cut” and “scholarships funded by the federal government have been halted”, according to reporting in The Guardian. A rough estimate is that 100,000 (out of 2,300,000) US federal employees have been fired or furloughed by the current administration, alongside substantial cuts at many American research agencies. Research project funding has been frozen for some studies, and any research projects on diversity, equity or inclusion have been cut altogether.
Panels that review research proposals at major agencies have had upcoming meetings cancelled, multiple scientific advisory committees have had meetings suspended, and a number of American universities have curtailed or suspended PhD admissions because of the extreme level of uncertainty caused by the cuts.
Sword of Damocles
Health infrastructure is already being impacted by the cuts, with clinical trials for medical treatment ending abruptly, and Alzheimer’s and cancer research halting due to funding freezes.
Another sword of Damocles hanging over researchers in America (and their co-authors abroad) is a list of words that the Trump administration has flagged to avoid or limit in grant proposals and educational material.
In February, The New York Times reported that scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in America were ordered to retract, pause or “withdraw any pending publications, at any scientific journal” that include terms related to gender and equity.
News agency Reuters wrote that the “withdrawal order involves all manuscripts written or co-written by CDC scientists. If CDC scientists are co-authors on a paper that originated outside of the agency, they are asked to take their names off the paper.”
Two Dutch researchers at the University of Wageningen have already been impacted by the wider efforts in America to redefine valid research topics: they were contacted by the United States Geological Survey and called upon to answer questions about whether their academic activities were political in nature.
“Most of our papers could not be published”
“Many words have been made political, despite the fact that they are neutral terms without any prescreptive or normative connotations”, professor Linda Steg says of the list, such as “women”, “excluded” and “at risk”. If a similar list were to be adopted and enforced in the Netherlands, “most of our papers could not be published”, she says.
“A more basic issue is that science is supposed to be apolitical, neutral and independent, so policy makers or contractors cannot determine what to publish”, Steg says. “This is one of the basic values of science.”
Beyond the wrong-headedness of attempting to dicate what research can be done in America, the list is flawed in another fundamental way: words mean different things in different disciplines. “Minority” does not always refer to non-white people, it literally refers to any group of people that is smaller than another, like this: a minority of Americans voted for Donald Trump, and a combined majority voted either for Kamala Harris, or did not vote at all.
Different meanings in different contexts
“The listed terms have multiple meanings across contexts”, University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Sociology and Animal Studies Emerit Thomas Dietz, a regular research collaborator with our group, reiterates. “For example, ‘diversity’ is a core theoretical concept in ecology.”
“Banning by keywords avoids the more difficult but more reasonable approach of engaging in a debate about what issues and topics should be given priority in research”, Dietz says. “A serious analysis would engage the scientific literature on these issues, rather than scanning grants and papers for keywords.”
Research methods and data sets cannot be accurately described with terms like “female”, “gender”, and “racial identity” banned: scientific publications, many of which rely on large-scale surveys, specifies the demographic details of the respondents to signal how representative a sample is for the relevant population. This is critical to understand the extent to which findings can be generalised and to better understand how different people in society feel about certain issues.
Impact on environmental psychology research
To show the toll that this list of ideologically chosen terms has on academic research, here are examples of recent publications from members of our group which would no longer be eligible for grant funding in America, based on their usage of terms in the “disappearing words” list.
Social Tipping Games: Experimental Paradigms for Studying Consumer Movements
terms: activism, bias, identity, status, systemic
Collective patterns of social diffusion are shaped by individual inertia and trend-seeking
terms: marginalized, minority
Climate anxiety is not a mental health problem. But we should still treat it as one
terms: mental health, climate crisis
Temporal stability of public acceptability of novel and established energy technologies
terms: political, expression
A critical reflection on behavioural difficulty: proposing a barrier-first approach
terms: barrier, diverse, climate crisis, bias
terms: systemic, gender
Climate action on Twitter: perceived barriers for actions and actors, and sentiments during COP26
terms: climate crisis, victims, sociocultural
People’s perception of biodiversity loss: Validation of a scale in Germany
terms: women, bias, status, accessible, barrier
terms: diversity, status, bias
terms: identity, advocate, inclusive
The climate anxiety compass: A framework to map the solution space for coping with climate anxiety
terms: activism, advocate, climate crisis, expression
The public demands more climate action, not less
terms: biased, political
terms: advocates, bias, women, diversity
The above list is far from comprehensive, but is meant to give an indication of how reliant the field of environmental psychology is on these terms.
The words we can use in our research are vitals lenses for understanding the world, and vary from one discipline to the next. Efforts to censor what concepts can be studied amounts to an attempt to alter reality and dictate which issues matter most, or even exist at all. A thesaurus will only get us so far when words like “identity” and “barrier” are deemed too controversial to even be acknowledged.
