Pauline van der Meer Mohr

Among the major dissatisfiers in any professional environment are the cleanliness of the location and the quality of its catering. When it’s ok, nobody talks about it, except when you have contracted a 2 star Michelin chef (as business school IMD in Lausanne once did). When it’s not ok, everybody is unhappy. Unfortunately, we (the [...]

Dear EUR students, I would like to invite you to enter a contest. I am harvesting ideas about “the university of the future”: what will it look like? How is it different from today? What needs to be done to create it? Here’s the challenge: send me your ideas in the form of a ‘column’ [...]

Some researchers have the soul of a rock star. Nowadays this is most visible in the USA, country of supersize and hyperbole, where Nobel prize laureate Paul Krugman shares his wisdom and insights with Playboy readers. And his co-stars George Soros, Edmund Phelps and Jeffrey Sachs debate the state of the economy in a New [...]

When I was a student, Rotterdam boasted its very own Erasmusica symphony orchestra. I have blogged about students and music before, and about the gap there is in Rotterdam’s cultural scene since the demise of that student orchestra. How pleased I was to meet the respresentatives of the Rotterdam youth symphony orchestra yesterday. Under their [...]

In an attempt to allow the supply-side to determine where government research funding should be allocated, 10 so-called ‘top sectors’ have been identified which will collectively draw on 350mln euros of NWO/KNAW’s research budgets by 2015. This means that all non-top sector research domains will be starved to the point where we can expect that [...]

Yesterday, one of my favorite poets passed away, Wislawa Szymborska, at the age of 88. She was one of the greatest Polish poets of the 20th Century and was awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996. A brave and vocal dissident voice who suggested that one 2 in 1000 people enjoy reading poetry. [...]

Erasmus continues to draw scholars of eminence as well as world leaders to Rotterdam. Tomorrow, Cynthia Schneider, former US ambassador to The Netherlands is visiting and giving a guest lecture on the Arab Spring. Yesterday, we had the pleasure of welcoming prime minister Kubilius of Lithuania, who accepted a world leader award from EFR, the [...]