Our search for the roots of the celebrating Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) takes us back to 1986. The economy was ailing, unemployment was high and the government continued to make cuts. In January, the Challenger space shuttle exploded and three months later, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred. The world found out about a ‘computer virus’ that spread via floppy disks. Emulating his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher, prime minister Lubbers pushed for a free market and cutting government spending. So when education minister Deetman announced more cuts to higher education in January 1987, Delft university president and former minister Henk Zeevalking knew what he had to do: move full speed ahead.
“We should not limit ourselves to training ‘those narrow-minded engineers from Delft’ but instead broaden our field of vision to include languages, humanities, arts, social and behavioural sciences and sciences”, he announced in Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. Two years earlier, a new major – Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management (SEPAM) – started in Delft after minister Deetman announced that he wanted to expand the intake capacity for this field. At the time, it was the only growth sector for Dutch universities. In Leiden and Rotterdam, new SEPAM degree programmes were introduced and in Delft, a new major.
Later on, TU Delft decided to expand the major to create a whole SEPAM degree programme. In 1989, Information Systems professor Henk Sol was asked to set up such a degree programme. In January 1992, the Executive Board appointed him ‘founding Dean’ of the Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management faculty. September of that year saw the intake of the first one hundred undergraduates (limited by a numerus fixus), along with 22 graduates. A merger with the faculty of Philosophy, Technology and Society in 1997 created the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) as we know it today. The current dean of TPM is Professor Aukje Hassoldt. She fits the technical and social profile of TPM perfectly, having studied physics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and gained management experience at the Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), for example. Over the past thirty years, the faculty which Hassoldt has been head of for three years has grown from 122 to 2,331 students. What does the faculty contribute to society in her opinion?
TPM works on ‘major social issues’. What contributions has it made?
“Indeed, we are working on topics such as the energy transition, climate adaptation, digitisation, safety, liveability and healthcare. Take cyber security specialist Michel van Eeten, for example. He combines the technical and management side using honeypots – like bait boxes – to provoke cyber attacks. He then sees that the attackers are not evenly distributed between providers and talks to those where the most attacks occurred. He also works with regulators from the Telecommunications Agency and the ministry of Justice and Security on maintaining control in this world. I think that is a good combination of understanding the technical side as well as the managerial side.”
What kind of jobs do TPM alumni get?
What happened to the desire to train engineers who could transcend discipline boundaries in order to address major social problems? According to figures from TU Delft, TPM graduates end up in all kinds of places. Among the alumni, we count 412 different professions, ranging from adviser to sailing and windsurfing instructor, with the most common being consultant, adviser and project manager. But there is such a wide variety that even the percentage of alumni with the most common jobs is still low. Which employers do TPMers join after their studies? Here too, the top three is hardly surprising: a ministry (4%), a foreign university (3%) or TU Delft (2%). Also in this approach, 91% work not for one of the major employers but for one of the 667 other companies. In short: all over the place.
The development of technology and the problems associated with it is moving at an incredibly rapid pace. How does TPM keep up?
“We are in the midst of those developments and are part of them. We work together within the departments, within the faculty across the departments, with other faculties and with external parties in fields such as systems, management and ethics. It’s great when you complement each other, with each person having their own domain. To work well on climate action, the energy transition or healthcare, you need knowledge of those fields. We obtain that knowledge externally. That is why we have to work together.”
What kind of people work and study here at TPM?
“Typical TPM employees have a variety of backgrounds, often a science degree combined with a background in social science or humanities. Those combinations are very useful. For instance, Neelke Doorn, our director of education, has a background in civil engineering as well as philosophy and law. Also, many people have combined their IT background with social sciences. One of our talents, Katerina Stankova, a mathematician and game theorist, put it very nicely the other day: ‘For the people at TPM, the technical aspect and the social aspect are equally important’.”
The number of students at TPM is growing steadily and graduates are doing well in the market. Is there room for improvement?
“I have been here three years now and have been actively involved in making it clear what we do and who we are. It is a misconception that TPM should be badged as a languages, humanities, arts and social and behavioural sciences faculty at TU Delft. We are much more technical than that. What makes us special is that we understand socio-technical systems due to our combined backgrounds. We can design concrete solutions that have an impact on society and do justice to its complexity. Our staff include more than three hundred full-time employees and over two hundred PhD candidates. Those kind of numbers can’t be found anywhere else in the world. Many technical universities may have a similar group but it is usually no bigger than fifteen to twenty people. We need to wake up to our position as a frontrunner. We should become more self-confident as we are still a little bit too shy.”
© Montage: Ontwerpwerk | Photo’s: TU Delft | Thijs van Reeuwijk | Wirestock | Softulka
Dean Aukje Hassoldt: “Typical TPM employees have a variety of backgrounds, often a science degree combined with a background in social science or humanities.” ©Sam Rentmeester