The Bell #9: June 2015 - Transformations

UCM & UCMSA Universalis magazine Issue #9 June 2015

theBell

2 theBell University College Maastricht

UCMSA UniversalisIssue #9 June 2015

3theBellUniversity College Maastricht UCMSA Universalis Issue #9 June 2015

editorial» issue #9

colophon

ABOUT:The Bell is an independent

student magazine by the UCMSA Universalis Magazine Committee for University College Maastricht

(UCM). The Bell is free for students and staff of UCM.

The content of The Bell does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the committee board, the board of UCMSA Universalis or UCM.

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CIRCULATION: 150 copies and online

COMMITTEE BOARD:

Finn O’Neill (chair)Sergion Calderón-Harker (chair)

Sarah Kunze (secretary)Dominik Leusder (secretary)Dominik Leusder (treasurer)

Zoé Numan (Treasurer)Lea Schaefer (PR/editor)

Nick Papaconstantinou (editor)Lisette Reuvers (editor)Amelie Bahr (editor)

Eivind H Bratterud (layout editor)

CONTRIBUTORS:

AMELIE BAHRSERGIO CALDERÓN-HARKER

RAPHAEL DIAS E SILVAELISA G. SOTO

MARIE-JO GEUKESLAURA GOLDBERG

ZOE GORRINGEVIKTORIA KAMUFMAREN LEBSANFTDOMINIK LEUSDER

FRANCISCO MOREJÓNNAGIHAN MUTLU

ZOE NUMANFINN O’NEILL

NICK PAPACONSTANTINOUXAVIER SALET

RIEKE SONNENBERGHANNAH STEWART

CESARE VAGGETHOMAS VERBEEK

MARTA ZIOSILIZ ZOETEKOUW

COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMERAll content © respective authors

contact usQuestions, concerns, wish to send in a letter (max. 100 words) or want to advertise? email: [email protected]: www.ucm-univer-salis.nlcommittees/thebellfacebook: facebook.com/thebellmagazine

What a fitting topic for our final edi-tion of the year - transformations. We have transformed as a magazine over the past year and hope to have ce-mented our status as the platform for UCM students to share and contribute ideas and other creative products. I have thoroughly enjoyed the past year and am proud of what the current ed-itorial board have achieved in helping the magazine grow. However, as with all things, change can only be good. I have the utmost confidence in the incoming editorial board for 2015-16 and would like to wish Sergio and the rest of the board the best and am sure that their presence will only be good for the continued transformation of The Bell. Everyone who has contribut-ed to the magazine over the past years has been part of our long continuous process as a magazine and I would like to pass on my thanks to the contribu-tors. I hope that many will continue to contribute and that many new writers, illustrators or photographers also con-tribute in some manner next year!

Yours,Finn O’Neill, Chairman 2014-15

--x--Oh how time passes, how things change. We move forward, back-wards, sideways. Sometimes we even tend to stagnate. And as we look back

we see a path, marked by blood and tears, by smiles and memories. Trans-formation occurs as we move through time, but reflection is only possible if we gather the courage to turn our head around and look back at the road we’ve walked for so long.

We have dedicated this edition to the topic of transformation, also hon-ouring the change that our beloved magazine is going through, as the new board installs and the old board pre-pares to move into new adventures. In the name of the new board, writ-ers, poets, illustrators, photographers, artists, and above all, our readers, we would like to thank the old board for all their work and efforts to allow The Bell to grow and consolidate as UCM’s creative platform. We wish you all the best for the future!

To our contributors, thank you for trusting us with your talent, effort, and endless creativity. We strive to contin-ue our task of establishing The Bell as UCM’s very own hub of beautiful po-etry, well-crafted writing, and unique illustrations and photography. I hope you all enjoy this issue, and may you have an adventurous and joyful sum-mer.

Cheers to all that has passed, and cheers for all that is yet to come!

Yours,Sergio Calderón-Harker, Chairman

2015-16

Untitled; A residential building rises behind one of Maastricht’s preserved historical walls.Credit: Andrés Felipe Caycedo Sierra

Untitled, Laura Goldberg

Sweet UCM,

Other illustrations throughout the magazine:

p. 6, Laura Goldbergp. 33, Zoe Numan

Authors noted next to illustrationsAll illustrations used for non-commercial purposes and strictly under “fair use”pol-icy.

Untitled, Hannah Stewart(Originally for Raph-ael Dias’ article, but black/white does not do it justice.)



overview»editorial

3EDITORIAL - SWEET UCM...BOARD

current affairs5THE EARTH IS HUNGOVER, AND IT NEEDS A FULL BOWL OF PASTAELISA G. SOTO

7BEGGAR THY NEIGHBOUR DOMINIK LEUSDER

10UCF COLLABORATION: GRASS GROWING IN TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETYMAREN LEBSANFT

12DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES: CHANGES WITHOUT CHANGELIZ ZOETEKOUW

transformation14UCM TRANSFORMATIONfinn o’neill

17LETTER TO A FRIENDRIEKE SONNENBERG

19

PAWNS?FRANCISCO MOREJÓN

21GENTRIFICATION - A DANGEROUS TRENDVIKTORIA KAMUF

24TRANSFORMATIONS BY CHOICESTHOMAS VERBEEK

25THE UCM EFFECTANONYMOUS

features

28INTERVIEW: MARTA ZIOSI, UPCOMING UNIVERSALIS PRESIDENTSERGION CALDERÓN-HARKER

30GREAT TRANSFORMATION: INTERVIEW WITH MARK STOUTCESARE VAGGE

reflections

33CONSUMING LIFEXAVIER SALET

35SHANGHAI BABY

AMELIE BAHR

36UCF COLLABORATION: YOUR EVERYDAY OPTIMUS PRIMENAGIHAN MUTLU

38THE QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS; ANGER, DESPAIR & FEARLIZ ZOETEKOUW

39CRITICISM AND WHY WE ALWAYS NEED ITNICK PAPANCONSTATINOU

41A LITTLE TRANSFORMATION THAT HAS MADE A BIG DIFFERENCEZOE GORRINGE

creative

42DARK MORNINGRAPHAEL DIAS E SILVA

44THE LIMP OF TIMEMARTA ZIOSI

44AN HOUR MISSEDMARIE-JO GEUKES

oh no, we ran out of budgeted pages again! Or did we run out of contributions?


The Earth is a little bit like the human body: mil-lions of cells and organs working together in syn-chrony and harmony, form-ing the incredible biological system of our body that makes it possible for you to wake up every morning and go out there into the world. The circulatory, the respiratory, the immune system - all of them carry out specific functions nec-essary for everyday living. Now close your eyes and try to imagine the Earth. Well, it is actually a lot like the wonderful, complex human body but a few times bigger. The Earth’s forests, oceans, atmos-phere, fossil fuels, carbon sinks and many more form the Earth’s systems called “biogeochemical cycles”

together. As for the body, these large-scale cycles are 100 percent necessary for the well-functioning of the Earth. It is the Earth’s way of self-regenerating and recycling itself, like the hu-man body does each day. Many elements, natural sources and species are in-volved in these large pro-cesses forming a complex web of actors. Everything is inter-connected and if one actor is missing, the whole system might collapse.

All of the actors have their role within the sys-tem, but some are slightly more important than oth-ers. Some of them are key to the functioning of an ecosystem such as tuna is for the oceans or bees for the flora. The problem is that we are consuming the

Earth’s natural resources at a pace that is too fast for them to be able to regen-erate themselves again. We are emptying the oceans with large-scale fishing and, together with our acts of deforestation, we are driving species to their ex-tinction. We are taking too much of some elements such as phosphorus or ni-trogen from their natural sources, depleting them too fast and putting them into places like the water where they actually cause a lot of damage. Sadly but simply put, we are currently killing what allows us to be alive, to breathe, to have ener-gy, to survive. We seem to have forgotten about the other 8.6 million species that inhabit this planet and actually make it livable. It is funny that the “smartest” species of all is killing all of the others and with them the conditions that make life possible on Earth. We have forgotten about one of the most basic concepts

«currentaffairs

THE EARTH ISHUNGOVERAND IT NEEDS A FULL BOWL OF PASTA



of human and the Earth’s nature, the “web of life”.

Our current Western lifestyles and consumption patterns pose too big a demand for the Earth; we are putting too much pres-sure on the system. Think of a night out and the fol-low-up hangover. We go out, we dance, we burn a lot of energy and instead put lovely substances into our body of which alco-hol is the least damaging. What happens on the next day? Well, we are simply exhausted, “burned-out”. This is what is happening to

the Earth. We suffer from headaches, muscle fatigue, stomachache, we vomit…The Earth suffers as well and it shows its “hango-ver” in the form of climate change, acidification of the oceans, biodiversity loss, eutrophication, global pol-lution, acid rain… We can take a rest, slow down the rhythm from yesterday’s night, sleep and eat a full bowl of pasta to recover ourselves. But we are not letting the Earth do this. We are putting the Earth into a constant “hangover state”. And yes, we can all

go one, two, three, days even a week from party to party, from h a n g o v e r to hango-ver. But how about for more than two centu-ries? Could you, the queen/k ing of the par-ty handle it provided you could live that long? Well, it could be an inter-esting ex-periment to

make, but sadly I am afraid you could not keep up for that long. Too many hang-overs may lead to irreversi-ble damages for your body and for the lovely Earth.

We have eaten more than half of the big fish in the ocean, nearly half of the coral reefs have dis-appeared, fossil fuels are getting depleted, we are running out of crops to feed an ever growing pop-ulation… I already hear you saying: “but what can “I” do? This is such a far-away, big piece of a problem!”. Well my friend, actually there is something you can do: inform yourself about the causes and symptoms of the Earth’s hangover and find your own way to give back the Earth the rest it deserves after two centu-ries of constant partying. Al Gore said in a TED talk in 2008 that “we have to rise to the challenge history is presenting us”. And I say, yes, let us rise to this chal-lenge, let us all stop this constant “hangover state”, let us all give a full bowl of pasta to the Earth!

Elisa G. Soto

Illus

trat

ion:

Lau

ra G

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Europe, Greece and the Myth of Fiscal Profligacy and the Politics of Resentment

To err is of course hu-man. To mess things up spectacularly, however, we need an elite. The elite in question consists of clue-less political personnel in Brussels, Berlin and Frank-furt that refuse to treat a systemic crisis systematical-ly, and would rather contin-ue in its pursuit of destruc-tive and divisive economic policies than admit to their errors. This is the reality of the crisis in Greece, an in-solvency crisis that has de-teriorated into a full scale humanitarian emergency. To quote Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on the mat-ter: “how did we mess up just this badly?”

To explain this we must cast a critical gaze on the origins of the crisis. The conventional narrative goes something like this: the European debt crisis is the result of fiscal irrespon-sibility of the spendthrift,

insufferable lazy ‘grasshop-pers’ of the southern econ-omies, Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and Ireland, usually grouped together under such contemptible acronyms as PIGS or GIP-SIs. It was the industrious and virtuous surplus econ-omies, above all Germany, that had to come to their aid with massive bailout programmes – all in the interest of European soli-darity, naturally. The con-dition attached to this was austerity. “The public spent too much, getting in too little and lacking compet-itiveness. Immediate fiscal consolidation in highly in-debted countries is of the essence”, German finance minister Schäuble an-nounced at the onset. After all, one cannot spend more than one takes in, and once this fiscal naughtiness has ceased investors will regain confidence and supply the much needed credit lines.

Virtually everything about this narrative is false. Let us dispense with the most appalling falsehood

first: or fiscal consolidation, or austerity, leads to ex-pansion via increased con-fidence of investors. The intellectual loan for what is now derisively called the ‘confidence fairy’ was pro-vided almost entirely by two papers: Alesina and Ardagna (2009) and Rein-hardt and Rogoff (2010). Both papers have widely and completely discredited. Paul Krugman described austerity as “an econo-my-killing lie”; the Finan-cial Time’s Martin Wolf, arguably the most influen-tial financial journalist in the world said of the policy that it did “not even de-serve the label primitive. It is simply ridiculous.” It has since been shown that aus-terity does not only increase the debt burden relative to GPD, making it more diffi-cult for countries to access credit, but shows a negative correlation to growth. Aus-terity has failed. It turned a nascent recovery into stag-nation. That imposes huge and unnecessary costs, not just in the short run, but also in the long term: the costs of investments un-made, of businesses not started, of skills atrophied, and of hopes destroyed.

It is an eerie coincidence that the German word for

BEGGAR THYNEIGHBOUR



debt, Schuld, is also the word for guilt. This gives new meaning to the mor-alizing tone of the likes of Schäuble and European Minister of Economic Af-fairs Otto Rehn. The crisis was not however caused by the fiscal profligacy the southern countries. To the example of Spain, the ep-icenter of the crisis, with unemployment rates that rival those of the depres-sion era. In 2007 Spain had a debt to GDP ration of 27% compared to Germa-ny’s 55%. By all accounts Spain was a paragon of fis-cal responsibility. The prob-lem arose from speculation on the property market. These speculations where largely funded by German

money. “We did not force them to take our money” was Schäuble’s response. Thus, what actually start-ed off as liquidity crisis was pushed into an insolvency crisis by market sentiment. This situation was emblem-atic of the rest of Europe: The surplus economies of the North rely on building current account surpluses vis-à-vis the rest of Europe in an intra European beg-gar thy neighbour zero sum game; confronted with this influx of capital, the booming economies of the South had to go into debt. This is simple arithmetics: the economy is not like a household; your spending is my income. It is mathe-matically impossible for all

European economies to run surpluses at the same time. It was, therefore, not fiscal profligacy that led to the current quagmire, but a glut of saving and I short sighted beggar-thy-neigh-bour policy in the North. Fifteen years ago, Germany was a moribund, sclerotic economy. Its success is not, as the much reiterated nar-rative would have it, the re-sult of fiscal discipline, but of massive internal devalu-ation of wages, and of the weak Southern economies the necessary recyclers of German surpluses, keeping the Euro week and Germa-ny’s exports strong.

Greece, however, is a different matter. It started off very clearly as insolven-


cy crisis, but was treated in early 2010, when it was no longer capable to shoulder it’s mountainous debt it re-quested massive €110bn bailout loan. The so called Troika – the ECB, EC and IMF – obliged. This might well turn out the have been the most mendacious and divisive misstep in the history of the EU. What happened is that the Troika pretended that Greece had a liquidity not a solvency crisis, and then proceeded to give the largest loan in human history to the most insolvent of nations, to pay-off bankrupt German and French bankrupt banks, locking Greece into per-manent indebtedness. At

the same time, the German taxpayer, and the working classes, clinging to the pov-erty line themselves, were told that, thought once wayward, the Greeks were now in check and that this was an act of solidarity. This was what Winston Church-ill once termed a ‘lamen-table terminological inex-actitude”, or simply: a lie. The loan was never meant to help the Greek state. Rather, it was a transfer of banking losses from the bankers onto the shoulders of the Greece and eventu-ally German taxpayer. After that had been affected, a haircut was made, despite loud assurances against it. The recipients of the hair-

cuts: small bondholders mainly. The loans were not being used to reenergized the Greek economy; the were being thrown into the black hole of an insol-vent banking system. The burden of the adjustment and the cost of crisis shift-ed from the shoulders that caused it onto the shoul-ders that didn’t cause it. The Greek loan and the austeri-ty conditions attached to it, not only crushed the Greek economy and endangered the very foundation of the monetary union, but pitted one proud European nation against the other.

Dominik Leusder



This article is part of the UCF-collaboration series

“Grass doesn´t grow faster, if you´re pulling it”.

This is an African say-ing I first heard of during my high school principal´s Christmas speech. She ad-dressed the parents and the teachers, asking them to be more pa-tient with the pupils, and to accept that some things just take time. Every transfor-mation starts with change, a term equal-ly loved and hated by humans. It can be ex-citing and long-await-ed, but also rash and ephemeral.

One such exam-ple is Better Place, a company selling the infrastructure need-ed for e-cars. It was founded in 2007 by several board members of established companies which were able to gener-ate a seed capital of 200mil € and start a cooperation with Renault. They were

able to endow Israel with a nearly complete network of charge and service station. The specials aspect was the goal to standardize the batteries, charging stations and software which were at the start of development in many automotive compa-nies at that point. In 2013 the company had to file for

bankruptcy. It just was not their time yet. Aside from Renault, no other compa-ny wanted to invest in such a new and insecure field. The public could not im-

agine (yet), how the usage of e-cars could be practical, efficient and affordable. If you look at the success of Tesla and European com-panies right now all intro-ducing their first, and some even their second e-cars, you can see my point. Better Place had a perfect plan but they were ahead

of their time. Not enough people could imagine such a fast change from oil to electricity, let alone were ready to invest money in it.

That people are not

GRASS GROWINGIN TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY

A few years ago, many could not envision electric cars becoming a thing but now the grass has grown, without being pulled.

CC BY-NC 2.0, Nicola Sznajder, 2013


ready for change is not just a problem in technological innovation, but also in oth-er fields, particularly in poli-tics and society. Maybe you have heard of the recent decision by the German Bundestag concerning the introduction of a female quota for the supervisory boards of 100 listed com-panies among other things. From 2016, at least 30% of the seats in these boards have to be held by women and 3500 medium-sized companies are required to

formulate their own goals for the increase of female employees in management levels. The theory behind

this is that the glass-ceil-ing, which many women have to experience in their career, is mostly due to the fact that the direct super-visor responsible for pro-motions is almost always male, suggesting that it is unimaginable to see a woman in this position. Al-though most parts of the quota promoting wom-en only become effective when the applying man and woman have the same qualifications, there has been an outrage and al-

ready a lawsuit filed against it. Of course, this decision makes companies and men among the unhappy. Es-

pecially the listed compa-nies have to get hundreds of qualified women from somewhere to join their boards and many men will feel discriminated when women will get promoted over them not because of better qualification but be-cause of politics. However, some of the loudest voic-es against the quota come from highly qualified wom-en. If they will be promoted in the next years, they will be the “quota-women”, not taken seriously no mat-

ter their qualification. Additionally, the man who lost the position will have an unwanted amount of sympathy among male employees. On the other hand, it is probably easier to prove the men wrong, once you have that position instead of being over-looked again and again. It is still questionable if the implementation of the quota in only a mere 100 of several thousand companies in Germa-ny is the right way to achieve equality. Maybe we should stop trying to

pull the grass and stick to watering it, maybe adding a little bit of fertilizer.

Maren Lebsanft

Gender quotas, another example of grass that needs to grow without getting pulled?



At UCM a lot of attention is paid to development. The famous Waffle Wednesdays of the Charity Committee are only one example of the multiple attempts to raise awareness for famine, sanitation and education in other regions of the world. Luckily, UCM students are not the only ones who care about the extreme poverty circumstances in other parts of the world; since World War II, western countries have tried to help the relatively poorer envi-ronments. However, many people argue that the cir-cumstances in these are-as have not changed yet. This article aims to illustrate the several attempts for change and it emphasises how each change in devel-opment approach did not establish a change in the poverty circumstances.

Before elaborating upon the different attempts to development that have been made, it is helpful to define the concept “de-velopment”. Even though the definition is contested, many scholars argue that it could be seen as “good

change.” This means that the goal of development is progress or improve-ment of the society. How-ever, opinions differ again about the meaning of pro-gress, improvement and “good”. Should the focus be on poverty reduction, industrialisation, health, education..? Development approaches have changed their focus several times during the years after the second World War, but this change has not been found in the biggest parts of the poor areas.

As mentioned above, after World War II interna-tional development came on the agenda. Conse-quently, money was invest-ed in the poorer areas of the world and these parts were called “developing countries”, emphasising on their growing and chang-ing aspects. For the next decades, countries would focus upon modernisation theory and orthodox eco-nomic growth theories. This entailed that modern practices such as new tech-nologies and western insti-tutions were imposed upon

the poorer areas. There were no straightforward re-sults though, which caused countries to turn to alter-natives as import substitu-tion and even communism.

In the 1980s, people realised that progress did not occur. Therefore, they changed the development approach from moderni-sation theory to neo-lib-eralism. The free market was central, but the state played a role as well in the market regulation and the distribution of goods. The goals were organised via Structural Adjustment Plans; exact plans for state rollback, trade liberalisation and financial liberalisation. Unfortunately, the impact of neo-liberalism was not what everyone hoped for. Economies in Africa stag-nated and poverty rose. Also Latin America and Eastern Europe experi-enced worsening positions. East-Asia however, who used an alternative to the western development ap-proach, was able to reach sustainable development via import-substitution and export orientation.

DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES:CHANGES WITHOUT CHANGE


Therefore, from the 1990s onwards multiple new approaches arose, call-ing themselves “alternative development approaches”. These approaches aimed for empowerment of the powerless. An example of the participatory develop-ment approaches is femi-nism, where the main aim is to reach equality between genders. The participatory development approaches strived to include habit-ants in their practices. This means that they could use local knowledge and that they could approach the population much better. The participatory develop-ment approaches reached a change from the Struc-tural Adjustment Plans to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, where local own-ership and empowerment were central. However, even though this looks like a big change, many schol-ars argue that the papers were just “old wine in new bottles”.

As a new attempt for change, the Millennium Development Goals were established to show that there are more important aspects than economic cir-

cumstances only. The fo-cus was broadened to, for example, education and health. People continued to focus upon participatory development approaches and empowerment. How-ever, despite the thoughts behind participatory de-velopment, there are two categories of limitations to participatory development.

First, there are the tech-nical, exogenous implica-tions. How do we want to reach participation? Should participation be treated as a mean to development or is it an end in itself? Sec-ond, there are the theoret-

ical, endogenous implica-tions. These focus mainly upon the question whether participatory development really is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach; when richer countries im-pose participation, they are still the ones with the actu-al power.

Therefore, currently another group of devel-opment approaches has arisen. Instead of being an alternative develop-ment approach, the group claims to be an alternative to development – creativity in names is not really seen as a virtue. This group de-sires no western interven-tion at all anymore. The poorer states themselves need to improve their sit-uations, because the past has shown that no one else can do it for them. However, the question re-mains: how far is this ap-proach a change in devel-opment approaches? The

fact that western countries decide that the non-west-ern countries should figure it out on themselves actual-ly illustrates the power that still exists. Okay, now you are allowed to try it…

Liz Zoetekouw



“The college changes from a pioneering pro-ject to a normal school”

If I’m honest I was really not too sure what to ex-pect when I sat down with Gerard Korsten to discuss the topic of transformation with regard to UCM. One of our ‘founding fathers’, I figured that Gerard would be able to give some insight into the changes which he has witnessed at UCM over the past thirteen years. What did I expect? I’m not really sure. Has UCM radi-cally changed since the first batch of students enrolled in September 2002? Or, has UCM always been what it is? I approached the topic with literally no idea. Hav-ing spoken with Gerard, it seems that some practi-cal things have of course changed, but the aspects which perhaps distinguish UCM have always existed in some form.

Firstly, I think it is appro-priate to give you the histo-ry of UCM. It may surprise you that the idea of UCM has its origins as early as 1990. Gerard, along with

Louis Boon, had been part of the committee which started the Arts and Cul-ture programme in 1990. However, this was not quite enough to satisfy either of them. The idea of a Faculty of Social Sciences original-ly started as a private joke between them, a dream you could say. An 80 page report on this prospective Faculty of Social Sciences was written, based on two

separate programme - one in cognitive psychology and one in international social science. The execu-tive board at the time de-cided to set-up a psychol-ogy faculty and Louis and Gerard were chairman and secretary of the committee that developed and imple-mented the programme. So, the proposal for the international social science programme had to be put on the shelf for the time begin.

In 1998, Utrecht Univer-sity opened its own Liberal

Arts programme - Univer-sity College Utrecht - and set an example which ap-peared quite successful in the Netherlands. Finally In 2001, the executive board at Maastricht was ready to develop a liberal arts and science programme and Gerard and Louis were given their opportunity to pioneer the programme. In its early stages the idea of UCM was met by fierce opposition from other fac-ulties who couldn’t see the worth of such a college and were concerned that the University’s education budget was being spent on it. The Dean of FaSoS at the time was particular-ly against the idea! Louis and Gerard had gathered a comprehensive list of col-leagues during their time at other faculties, so made a list of the people they wanted to get on board and asked them what they would do “if you would be free to make a nice course about your discipline”. And so UCM begun!

I was surprised to find out the building we like to call home has not always

transformation»

UCM WAS MET BY FIERCE OP-

POSITION

UCM


been our home. It seems strange to even try and associate another building with UCM, the two ap-pear to go hand in hand. However, for its first three years the programme was based in what is now the DKE building. It was only during December 2005 that the College relocated to our wonderful current location - how grateful we all are of this move! So… the building changed, what else? Well, at the begin-ning there was a core staff of 5 people, now there are 17 full-time staff mem-ber. Clearly the scope of our wonderful College has grown. Of course, with time comes better prepar-edness, and so our belov-ed OSA has developed and

become quite a remarkable example of organisation and preparation. This con-trasts dramatically with the state of affairs in August 2002 (a month before the first batch of students start-ed) when a grand total of 1 course manual had been written! Clearly as time has progressed certain bu-reaucratic measures have improved significantly and this has helped the College flourish.

How about the struc-ture? Well, the semester structure as it is has always existed. Indeed, the Core Courses have been kept throughout the past thir-teen years to a large extent (so, yes, students have had to struggle with Philosophy of Science for as long as the

College has existed!). Mod-elling Nature, however, did not make its entrance into the curriculum until around 2005, and replaced the Core Course of Quan-titative Methods which Gerard jokes “didn’t work out well”. Furthermore, the courses and tracks which are popular nowadays such as International Relations, Human Rights, Public Ad-ministration, and Sustain-able Development were popular with the students who were the first intake in 2002. This, it seems, is part of the fabric of UCM. The first students were also able to go abroad as Ina had already joined the col-lege and set-up the Office of International Relations. It seems quite remarkable



to think that, from the be-ginning, many of the things we associate with UCM did in fact already exist as part of UCM.

Throughout my conver-sation with Gerard I sense a feeling of nostalgia per-haps creeping over him. It is clear to me that for him the initiation of the pro-gramme and the first 6 years which he labels as the “pioneering years” were incredibly fun. That is not to say that the College as we know it today is not fun or special, but I think we can all un-derstand that when a project is in its fine-tuning stage and is indeed pio-neering, then the magic of the whole project is in not knowing what to expect, in encountering problems and in having to adjust. Now, many of the things which make the College work are known, so some of the excitement may have slowly faded away. Gerard is also quite wary of the fact that the College has become an established and recognised institution, he remarks that “excellence and competence are dan-gerous”. It is clear that this notion of prizes and the la-bel of excellence do not sit too well with Gerard, or at

least he is aware of some of the possible negative implications. He notes with caution that when people start coming to the College for extrinsic reasons, such as the fact that it is the top Liberal Arts programme in the Netherlands, then the values of UCM, and the ide-al which him and Louis set-up would start to be com-promised. We are in quite a fortunate position in that the building does limit the

number of students we can have - therefore the risk of the College expanding is relatively low. However, it is important to bear in mind that the admission process is becoming increasingly more difficult as more and more students apply and the number of these stu-dents who are really good and would do very well at UCM is rising.

So, what did I gather from my hour-long conver-sation? Well, some of the more historical facts around UCM became apparent. I, for one, was quite shocked that the idea of UCM dates back to a private joke be-tween Louis and Gerard

in 1990! Obviously Gerard and Louis are incredibly proud of what the College has grown into, however Gerard’s cautious tone with regard to extrinsic motiva-tion and UCM’s need to maintain students who fully fit with the programme was clearly evident throughout. As Gerard noted “working hard in the college is just a day-to-day job, it is not go-ing round winning prizes,

if we all do that then the college wont exist anymore”. We should all be very proud that we attend the number

one Liberal Arts College in the Netherlands, however, we must also not forget what UCM is really about. Those first 80 students who were effectively guin-ea-pigs in 2002 joined the programme because they were truly interested and intrinsically motivated by the College. Perhaps we all need to remind ourselves that this is the mind-set which we should all try and replicate. UCM is what it is because of its history, the courses, the building, the staff, the students… not because of its prizes.

Finn O’Neill

THE IDEA OF UCM DATES BACK TO A

PRIVATE JOKE


Dear beloved UCM,First of all - I think you’re

great. In the daily academic rush, you give your students a place to be. To be critical, to be innovative, to be ex-cellent. Most of your values are lived and loved by your students. The result is a vi-brant community. Howev-er, I do not want to merely praise. In fact, that is not what I want to discuss at all, especially because most of your students know or at least think that they are special anyways. What trig-gered my speaking up is that there are other values that are not lived. Values that get support, but that are not implemented in the daily lives of the individual or the community. The val-ues I talk about concern the relationship between us as human beings, as earth-lings, and our environment. If it hasn’t become obvious yet, I’m talking about sus-tainability - a topic every-one talks about in current times. And not surprisingly so, for it is indeed a pressing topic. However, I also see that it is a term which eas-ily encounters resentment. In our heads we already try

so hard, though there are so many other things we have to worry about: mon-ey, our freedom, and most importantly, our comfort. In this liberal environment in which we try to pros-per, there is no space for restricting ourselves. And unfortunately, restriction is what many of us associate with sustainability. Con-suming less? No way. Obvi-ously, sustainability is great as long as we don’t have to limit ourselves. I hope it’s not a surprise for you, but climate change is real. Social inequalities are real. However, our ability to ac-tually do something is real, too.

In line with the plans of the municipality Maastricht to become carbon neutral by 2030, the Green Office developed, a roadmap to achieve its ‘Sustainabili-ty Vision’. The vision of Maastricht University is to become a sustainable uni-versity by 2030. This entails encouraging education and research in sustaina-bility, as well as fostering environmentally conscious behaviour by students and staff. The university’s plans

include concrete measures for education and research, operations like energy and waste, and implementa-tions in the community and culture, which can be found in detail on the Green Office’s website.

Now I ask you, UCM, do you think that you and your students have what it takes to transform a vision into a lived state? Do you think we can practice what we preach and be a role model for others? You are a rather small faculty with a major-ity of highly motivated and educated students. Isn’t that the perfect combina-tion for a fruitful practice of environmentally friendly behaviour? Sustainability is not as fuzzy and com-plex as it sounds but can be achieved through many actions. If you now wonder what we could do in our small community, I will give you some ideas. Improving the system of our print-ing and recycling, e.g. the trash separation, is already in progress. However, not only recycling is important, but rather to reduce our us-age itself - to reduce plas-tic, including disposable

LETTER TO A FRIEND



plastic cups, plates and cut-lery that are provided at all the many events that you host. Moreover, it should be considered what food or drinks are used for events. Are they local, organic or fair trade? I know that if there are different options, it is hard to determine the ‘best’ solution - if such a thing even exists - but it is important to consider what is actually available. To reach satisfying results, the different committees need to be willing to act consciously, but they also need support from slightly higher above. In the name of all students, the Univer-salis board needs to take ethical considerations into account in all their actions. The board has the power over the financial resourc-es and the last word in the

decision making process. However, Universalis con-sists of the whole student body and thus, decisions are made by your students. I wish that budget deci-sions are made not only by cost-effectiveness, but rather by bearing social, economic, and environ-mental concerns in mind. This means that if availa-bility allows for it, the most sustainable option is to be preferred over the cheapest one.

But to take action, you need everyone. You need Universalis to give sup-port to the committees, you need your students to say ‘Yes’ to conscious de-cisions, and you also need the management board to agree with the chang-es. We are taught to think globally, but we need to

act locally. Dear UCM, I ask

you to remind everyone

that we must appreciate

the knowledge and aware-

ness we gain through our

education. Remind us that

it is not bad to be idealis-

tic. Your students have the

abilities to make things

happen even if it is merely

on a small scale, within the

faculty. Remind us to em-

brace the life we live in, but

to do so with respect for

future generations. Remind

us that there is a day after

tomorrow.

My dearest regards,

A believer

Rieke Sonnenberg

Kev

in D

oole

y, 2

013

CC

BY

2.0


When I watch two play-ers in front of a chess-board, I do not see a game of chess. I see two gener-als who dominate, govern, and deliver orders to two colors that hatef’ully en-counter each other. I do not see meaningless pieces of wood in a board. Instead, I see a tower; an L-jump-ing horse; an oblique bishop; an armed queen and lastly an infinitely val-uable king, sheltered by a dwindling army of pawns. The black and white pieces get ready for a mental war between two players that have imprisoned them-

selves in what sometimes is an eternal and uncertain game. However, I look at one piece carefully, I look at the pawn. The pawn is the undervalued warrior, who moves forward across the board blindly with nothing

but faith. It has faith hid-den in his chest, not that beggar called hope, but it has faith. It has faith of reaching transformation in its dubious and ephemeral

lifetime. It has faith of get-ting to the other side and becoming royalty itself, sacrificing himself for a cause he does not even un-derstand. It moves steadily and constantly, while the rest of the combatants die and encroach on the limits of the other side aiming at one ambition. After a long and cold war one of the players has arrived strate-

gically at one penultimate box with a pawn, and it is ready to cross that bor-derline between a blinded soldier and a royal queen.

Once the pawn crosses the borderline it immediately transforms itself into no-bility. As the player moves the pawn to the last box, imagine how the grand

PAWNS?

THE PAWN IS THE UNDERVALUED

WARRIOR

Alejandro M

ejía Greene, 2008

CC

BY-NC

-ND

2.0



achievement of a hopeless warrior becomes the res-urrection of a royal queen. This queen was trans-formed by the faith a pawn carried across the board, and in the final moment, it is that faith that consumes up the pawn, giving rise to a fierce and noble queen. This pawn is like a legend-ary phoenix that consumes itself when the time has finally arrived, and it burns down every old majestic feather to transform itself into a fresh, vivid phoenix. That phoe-nix, now a queen, does not only represent royalty, it represents the poetic sac-rifice whose mystical heart contained the most power-ful instrument of life. Faith.

Transformation is an in-

escapable reality that peo-ple, just like the pawn, have the chance to undergo. Every step we take is part of the train of life. This train contains other passengers, this train contains many stops, and this train will have passengers who we adore, admire, and ambi-tion. Nonetheless, we start the train with our families sitting in the same cabin,

and as we grow older there is a stop where they leave the train, leaving us alone to explore freely the won-ders other passengers have to share with us. Then, we meet our first girlfriend or

boyfriend, we discover the wonderful butterflies of love, we discover that loy-al friends leave the train in certain stops, and that girlfriends also leave this train. They leave us in this train of life with one thing, and one thing only, with faith. And just as the pawn moves across the board, we move across the train waiting to transform, wait-

ing to overcome diffi-cult moments, waiting to resurrect into a roy-al queen. Just remem-ber, every resurrected queen once was a faith-

ful pawn, moving across the train of life where un-expected transformations occur. When difficult mo-ments come and we feel like pawns, remember that pawns carry an invisible belt protecting their fully faithful heart. Dear reader do not be afraid of transfor-mation, embrace it whilst you still can. Dear read-er, have faith in the train of life; have faith in what sometimes looks like a sim-ple chess game; have faith in the power of change just as the pawn does. When I watch a game of chess, I watch transformation.

Francisco Morejón

TRANSFORMATION IS AN INESCAPABLE

REALITY


For some UCM students, the Landhuis, the LBB and the Mandril are like a sec-ond home. The populari-ty of those dynamics hubs depends to a large extent on the charm of their lo-cations. After Maastricht’s famous pottery industries shut down in the second

half of the 20th century, a whole quarter of empty buildings dominated the Northern view of the city. Instead of being torn down, the big halls have been dis-covered and transformed by first squatters and later

the municipality too. Today, the former industrial build-ings are playgrounds for artists, musicians, political activists, freethinkers and form a great part of Maas-tricht’s student life. The re-valuation of the area which is officially called Belvédère goes on: Not only did the

Musikgieterij find its place close to the old bassins, soon, the Lumière Cinema will move into one of the buildings too. What first started off as an independ-ent movement of a small number of people, has

reached the municipality and its city planners, who see the transformation of the Belvédère as a chance to improve the urban shape of Maastricht and increase its popularity and attrac-tiveness.

The development I just described has a name in

our modern and globalized world: Gentrification. It is everywhere - what happens in Maastricht on a rather small scale can be observed in all the big cities of this world. New York, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam are

GENTRIFICATION- A DANGEROUS TREND

Het Landhuis, a second home to some UCM-students, is at risk of gentrification according to the au-thor. Mark Ashman, 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0



just a few examples of this global phenomenon or “global urban strategy” as it is sometimes called. The dictionary defines Gentrifi-cation as “the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated ur-ban neighbourhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals”. Regarding the example of Maastricht, it is easy to see why this phenomenon is widely viewed in a posi-tive way and seems to be in the general interest of not only city officials, yet also the inhabitants of those cit-ies and areas. The housing prices are low, the chanc-es high. Beautiful lofts, art

galleries, and cultural as well as political free-zones can emerge in such an at-mosphere.

Sadly, as we all experi-ence everyday, things are never that simple. And of course, gentrification, too, has its negative sides. Al-though widely ignored by state actors, a closer look at them must show that the problems are big enough to reconsider the whole utility of the development. But first a good notice: The fol-lowing paragraph will not destroy the picture you had of Maastricht. This is simply because the process which has taken place so far in the Belvédère area concerned

empty buildings, where no one had to be kicked out to make room for others. In many other cities, how-ever, the process of gentri-fication is on a further lev-el than in Maastricht and more developments have taken place. Let us take a look at the last part of the definition from the diction-ary: “(…) thus improving property values, but often displacing low-income fam-ilies and small businesses”. This means that either peo-ple who have always lived in those rather poor areas or the “pioneers” who first squatted empty industrial buildings are kicked out in the next step to make room

Mark A

shman, 2011

CC

-BY 2.0


for wealthier individuals and corporations.

Have you seen the last two seasons of Shameless (US version)? There you can perfectly see what happens on the other side of the coin. In case you have not dedicated a significant part of your live to this (amaz-ing) series, I will explain it for you. The main protago-nists, a family, live in a poor neighbourhood, where the people more or less strug-gle to survive, and where crime and drugs are daily fare. Suddenly, however, housing agencies and other businesses begin to show their interest in the neigh-bourhood. Houses are be-ing renovated, wealthier families move in, and Cafés where you can order your coffee with soy milk open. What sounds like a nice development which does not only upgrade property values, yet also seems to offer a better environment for the children to grow up, is in fact poison to the poorer families. Instead of profiting from the gentrifi-cation, they will eventually have to move out of their houses and apartments, as the rents and other living expenses rise too high. Or – as it happens in the series – large amounts of money

are offered to the inhab-itants of the poor neigh-bourhoods by housing agencies who want to buy their homes and eventually get rid of them. A last pos-sibility could be, although it is less likely than the for-mer two that the low-in-come families stay in their homes, yet become sur-rounded by the new inhab-itants and their style of liv-ing. However, even in those cases it has been observed that the most which could be achieved regarding the communication between the two groups was an un-spoken ignorance.

Despite those negative effects, politicians hold up to the process of gentrifica-tion and support it through urban policies. This might amongst other have its cause in the interest of more and more high-in-come families, individuals and popular corporations who move into the gen-trified areas after a few, independent “pioneers” have paved the way for them. It has already been mentioned above that gen-trification is often called a “global urban strategy”. The word strategy implies that especially institutions such as governments de-liberately try to use the

phenomenon in their own interests, which are not seldom of financial nature. Popular slogans using a vo-cabulary in between “start-up”, “integration” and “cultural diversity” show most times just the super-ficial layer of this complex phenomenon which can be better described by the term “segregation”.

Eventually, research of-fers enough food for fruit-ful and critical discussions on this topic which has already been discussed for the past century amongst sociologists. Those discus-sions must be conducted, as the urban revalorization does not only affect peo-ple who live in megacities, yet more and more the whole world. The people in Maastricht have been lucky so far that the Landhuis, the LBB, and the Mandril could have been held up. However, other examples show that with the rise of attractiveness and property values, the situation may quickly change. In the end, gentrification is one exam-ple of how the power rela-tions between the rich and the poor as well as public, government and corpora-tions are being shaped.

Viktoria Kamuf



Eager little beings as most of us are we have great ambitions, sky-high expec-tations, and, perhaps, a little skewed image of our future. To reach the top of our personal mountain we need to make decisions. Even worse, we need to make sacrifices. Neverthe-less, we continuously tell ourselves, in the end it will all be worth it. Our sacrific-es will pay itself off as long as we relentlessly keep pur-suing our goals; and when we reach them, that’s when we are ultimately happy and satisfied.

Nevertheless, what some tend to forget, is that people change. You might not have noticed it, but you yourself also change, and with that your desires and sources of happiness. We are currently only at the doorstep of life, and it still has much to reveal to us. It may very well turn out that your little imaginary moun-tain turns out not to be so desirable at all. On the other hand, there may be innumerable activities and pursuits you do not even

know about which can yield you great pleasure of which you are currently missing out.

Life is so versatile and holds so many secrets that it would be foolish to think we have already figured out our ultimate goals and sources of happiness in our

early 20s. Think only of the change you have gone through in your short time here at our beautiful col-lege; how your perspective might have shifted, how your interests have diver-sified, and how your hori-zons have expanded. For some of these changes you might not even be able to

imagine to life without an-ymore; you have now ha-bituated them and it would feel like life is not as com-plete without them. This can be anything, from your weekly jog to a bedtime ritual, to changes as big as becoming part of a social movement or any other re-cently discovered passion.

The point is that a year ago or perhaps even a month ago you would have never imagined your life being made up of the ac-

tivities it currently is. There-fore, in my opinion, the choices and sacrifices you make need to be made in a bottom-up manner, rather than a top-down one. With this I mean that you should not guide your choices by your imagined endpoint, but rather have your end-point guided by your choic-

TRANSFORMATIONS

BY CHOICES

Our choices transform us; which route will you choose?


es. Of course, I do not en-courage you to therefore adopt some sort of reckless YOLO-lifestyle, but rather to be more liberal in the choices that you make.

Do not limit yourself by asking the question wheth-er a certain activity brings you closer to your ambi-tions, instead, ask yourself how it enriches your life in a way which is not covered by your current activities.

You might find the great-est happiness in things you would not even consider doing at first. Try out that sculpting class you’ve been glaring at for some time, finally join that jam group that always seems to have fun, or borrow a camera and go out photographing for the day.

Stop making choices based on some false no-tion of rationality and rath-

er make them on basis of what really interests and excites you. Be more crea-tive, pursue new activities, and, most of all, dare to live a little. The smallest chang-es and discoveries might lead you to the greatest stories and life experienc-es. Explore what you truly value in life and enjoy the process while doing so

Thomas Verbeek

Dear UCM,

Our lovely community changes you. Of course it does, you may think, but I am not just talking about how you become more independent etc.. Uni-versity, and UCM in par-ticular, gives you a certain bias in political and social issues. Let’s talk about the UCM-effect: how we are all basically turning into leftist, feminist, super-sustainable activists.

First of all, I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. The world could use some more people stand-ing up for equality and the environment. However, in my opinion, this hurts the

diversity of UCM that we love so much. Most stu-dents and staff have a bias towards leftist parties. Most are egalitarian and femi-nist. Most are very aware of the damages we do to our earth. Becoming a part of this community influenc-es your opinions as well. This bias affects you and subtly changes your views. It is noticeable in for exam-ple courses such as Political Philosophy. Considerably more left-wing philoso-phers are discussed than right-wing philosophers. Nozick and von Hayek are the only authors that can be described as right-wing, of no less than 10 different theories. I must admit that

I am not an expert on political philosophy, so I could not give you an example of other

right-wing philosophers that could be discussed, but surely the political right has an equally diverse num-ber of theories as their left counterpart.

THE UCM EFFECT

The cupboard for mugs at U

CM

; a typical example of the

left-leaning spirit of UC

M?



Not only in the course programme, but also in the tutorials themselves this bias stands out. Leftist opinions are dominant among UCM students which can cause an overload of critique on or underrepresentation of right-wing views. When I say ‘can cause’, I mean that it actually does. I have learned from conversations with fellow students that their critique of, for exam-ple, egalitar-ian theories was not tak-en seriously by students nor staff - tutors who should be objective.

Of course not all tutors do this, and those that do probably have no bad i n t e n t i o n s in any way. However, in my time at UCM I have heard it a couple of times too often and have expe-rienced it myself. Now, re-garding feminism, or sus-tainability issues, I think it is good that UCM promotes this. They are themselves issues which should be giv-

en more awareness and our faculty does a great job at that. I’m sure everyone thinks twice before making a sexist comment and the ‘bring-your-own-mug’ cup-boards have my full sup-port. However, these are also issues associated with the leftist movement, and it is important to be aware of this as well.

I think we all remember the email our amazing ex-

dean Harm Hospers sent out to encourage people to join the People’s Climate March in Amsterdam. Yes, your time as a student is the perfect time to be an activist and to join demon-strations, but should uni-

versity have such an active role in this? Isn’t it part of the fun that you find out independently where your heart lies and what you want to fight for?

We should keep in mind that on some issues, UCM may not be as tolerant as we like to believe. There are scientists who believe that an increase in CO2 is not the main cause of glob-

al warm-ing. There are plenty of people out there who are right-wing and do not believe in egalitarian-ism. Let’s keep UCM diverse in p o l i t i c a l affiliations, or we’ll in-creasingly live up to the ‘hip-py’- image

that other faculties have of us. Besides, discussion is much more interesting when we disagree!

Anonymous

A post from the UCM Facebook-group that sparked mild outrage. Is it an example of political correctness and left-leaning spirit at UCM?


«features

On transformations

I have been in this muse-um for 29263 days, and counting. They shifted me around a few times, and occasionally they fix the wear and tear that comes from people not under-standing the ‘don’t touch’ sign on my pedestal, and every two years they paint me over – but that’s basi-cally it. I do not change. Come back in another 29263 days from now, and it’s very likely that you will find me just as I am today: the same. I am not sure what to think of that. Listening to some of the people that come and visit the museum I know I should feel frustrated, as they measure the value of their lives by the amount of change they manage to accomplish. They work on themselves.

For them, staying the same is the epitome of failure. Their unique self

is defined by constant transformation. They call it ‘growing as a per-son’. This fascinates me, for even if people would stand still and do abso-lutely nothing, they would still grow and transform and change. It’s a given, it is this quality of being alive. These short movies made of still images of a person, one for every day from when they were ba-bies until the moment the creative parent got bored with the project and put it online: people watch them for a few minutes, they sigh and feel nos-talgic about the passing of time, and then they quickly hurry on. Working on themselves and their transformations.

I know it’s easy for me to ridicule their hur-ry. I have no choice but to stand still and remain the same until a cura-tor decides it’s time for

a different place or a new layer of paint. But while I was busy staying the same, I had the time to observe how none of these 29,263 days ever were. Every heart-beat everything changes around you: light, sound, people. And cast in plas-ter as I am, watching this made even me feel alive. So when you feel the wear and tear of this transformation thing – try it, too. Stand still, if only for 29 seconds. Don’t shut yourself off. Watch, hear, smell, sense. Don’t transform. Be alive.

every issue

DUM DUM DOODLEshares his thoughts!



When I first asked Marta for

an interview, the first thing

she said is “I hope I don’t

make a fool of myself.” Ini-

tially, though indeed a very

spontaneous and colloquial

reaction, I thought what she said was very interest-ing. Once I met Marta, as we strolled to the library to grab a bite and conduct our interview, I understood. It is

not that she would ever p o s s i b l y make a fool out of her-self – it was a sweet, d o w n - t o -earth mod-esty, unique and char-a c t e r i s t i c of humble, l i k e a b l e people.

As she smiles she tells me about her-self. Marta was born in Ferrara, Ita-ly, but spent most of her ch i ldhood in Cese-na, in the

northern part of the coun-try. When she was 16 she had the chance of going on an exchange for one year to Mumbai, India. While she had the chance of going to school there, as a result of a mistake, she ended up taking university courses in media and communication. Though not her great inter-est, she recalls this as a very valuable experience. The buzzing streets of Mumbai and its rich culture remain very present in her memo-ries.

Years later, sitting one day on her couch at home, she was reading about lib-eral arts colleges in Europe. Realizing that she wanted to study abroad and that there were no such insti-tutions in Italy, in a “crazy impulse” she decided to inquire more on one col-lege that awakened her interest particularly – a so-called University College Maastricht. Philosophy and mathematics were her great interests, and she re-alized that such an inter-disciplinary study would be possible though a liberal arts education. She plans

“I WANT TO GIVE BACK WHAT I RECEIVED THIS YEAR”interview: upcoming Universalis President Marta Ziosi

Phot

o cr

edit:

And

rés

Felip

e C

ayce

do S

ierr

a


to further focus on these at UCM – Philosophy due to its analytical values, the possibility that it provides to see the larger picture, and mathematics because of her love for numbers and logic. She grins as I tell her that she would have perfectly fitted into ancient Greece.

Over a month ago she decided to run for President of Universalis for the period 2015-16. After getting to know people and life better at UCM and going through a process of integration, she thought it would be noble to “give back what [she] received this year.” For Marta the UCM community is unique. The equal treat-ment and sense of commu-nity that its members enjoy is one-of-a-kind, creating an atmosphere that com-forts and empowers peo-ple to follow their interests and dreams. Following an interdisciplinary concentra-tion herself, she hopes her diverse interests will play in her favour, allowing her to make sure all the different voices within UCM are tak-en into account.

In her role as Universa-lis president she intends to enhance the bridge role the association plays within the

UCM community, aiming to ‘get everyone under the same umbrella.’ Her main goal will be to enhance participation on all fronts – internally and externally. Internally Marta aspires to increase the overall involve-ment of UCM students within the community. In other words, this means not only more assistance to large events, but also a larger presence of com-mittees, as well as reviving some such as the theatrical society. Externally she be-lieves that UCM should be more connected to other UM faculties, also to those closest to us such as DKE (Department of Knowledge Engineering) and MSC (Maastricht Science Pro-gram). UCM should have more contact and create more links to the outside; its doors should always remain opened for oth-er parts of the university. Furthermore, Marta vows for a Universalis board that embraces values such as open-mindedness, toler-ance and cooperation. This would be reflected, for in-stance, in creating more ways to integrate first year students into UCM, as well as having a more wide vari-ety of events.

Despite the importance of participation in her pro-gram, she also underlines the aspect of sustainabil-ity at UCM as crucial for our way forward. As UCM students we are often ac-quainted not only with the problems but also the solutions that may be pre-sented to tackle this issue. Marta believes that sustain-ability should play a larg-er role at UCM, and deci-sions about this should be reached through consensus and talking, supported by some more in-depth re-search about specific sus-tainable actions that can be performed at UCM.

Though the future is un-certain, Marta would love to go into academia, either in philosophy or maths, her two great passions. Her fo-cus, however, lies on the sooner future. Despite the upcoming challenges, she seems confident that to-gether with the new board, she will be able to “give back what [she] received this year.” With a wide smile on her face she says thank you as she walks off to her lecture.

Sergio Calderón-Harker



C: Economic historian Karl Polanyi defined the process that turned land, people and labor into goods that could be bought and sold in the free market as “The Great Transformation”. As a historian, which would you regard as the most im-portant “Great Transforma-tion” encountered by the globe in the modern age (1492-present)?

M: To begin with Po-lanyi, his “The Great Transformation” is a great text. I read it three years ago and I re-read sections of it in the last two years in order to include them into the World Histo-ry course. I added this because his analysis of ancient markets and the Industrial Revolution and rep-resent a remarkable of critique of liberal-ism and its approaches to economics, which could also be applied, in part, to neo-liberalism.

M: To answer your ques-tion, Similarly to Polanyi I

believe that the 19th cen-tury phase of the Indus-trial Revolution and the introduction of Liberal eco-nomics were the most im-portant transformation of the modern age. Such pro-cesses indeed introduced the notion that the market should be free from gov-ernment interference and that the system needed to

allow for the starvation of the working classes and the poor in general in or-der to have them working harder. Such cold calculus implied a disregard for hu-man life and human dignity

that anticipated the mass sufferings of the 20th cen-tury. Some approaches to neo-liberalism seem willing to accept this attitude and cold calculus.

C: Are you then arguing that there is a link between the economic violence per-petrated against the work-ing classes in the 19th cen-tury and the mass murders

committed in the 20th century?

M: No, I would not argue that there is a direct link between these. The origins of both can be ar-gued to be found in the Enlightenment and its approaches. That said it was ar-guably because of the Industrial Revolu-tion that people that were considered at the bottom of soci-ety were treated not

as human beings, but sim-ply as priced commodity that could be acquired or disposed of.

C: What is the most im-portant Transformation

GREAT TRANSFORMATIONSinterview: Dr. Mark Stout

Iron and Coal, a painting depicting the Industrial Revoluition

William Bell Scott, public domain


that you have yourself wit-nessed?

M: The most important transformation I lived through was definitely the ending of the Cold War (1989-1991), at the time of which I was a Bachelor student. I was in East Berlin a few months before the wall came down and I had a chance to witness the last living days of that oppressed society. A few months later I was back in Eng-land and one day, while I was mowing my lawn, someone came towards me shouting: “The wall has come down!”

M: Following the fall of the Wall, as all the other Com-munist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed one after the other, West-ern experts were astonished and clueless. Some ac-ademics believed that the Soviet Union and its allies would survive the crisis they were living through. Only the students like me, who had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain and talked with people on the

ground realized that this was not going to happen. My experience of this great transformation taught me something very important about students and young researchers: you are some-times better at analyzing some new rapidly chang-ing developments than we “experts” are because we are used to analyzing past situations using past para-

digms that cannot always be utilized to analyze rapid-ly changing new situations. Therefore the edge of aca-demic research is often the work of young researchers, which always has to be taken into account when

experts make their own considerations. Further-more, the current alarms launched by experts on the coming of a new Cold War remind me of how certain academics are constantly in search for a global situation that their paradigm of anal-ysis could find itself more at ease with rather than ad-mitting that we need new paradigms in order to ana-

lyze present transforma-tions in world politics.

C: The economic crisis of 2008-present has result-ed in the publication of a massive amount of liter-ature claiming the need for a radical transforma-tion of our economic sys-tem. Some scholars have argued that it is time to take Marx seriously again (e.g. Hobsbawm), some preach a return to Keynesian econom-ics and to the welfare state (e.g. Krugman; Stiglitz), while others call for a definitive end to our mode of produc-

tion, since it is incompati-ble with the survival of the planet (e.g. Naomi Klein) Which one of these solu-tions would you regard as the most realizable and, if I may, which solution you would find yourself mostly

Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989, one of the great trans-formations.

Sue Ream, CC-BY 3.0



affiliated with?

M: Whichever solution has to be implemented in order to solve the current eco-nomic crisis, we have to bear in mind that neo-lib-eralism has to be modified. I have sympathy for all the solutions you listed. Piketty has good points and Stiglitz does too at times.

M: To begin with, I think we could reconsider the pricing goods. With this I mean that not just the eco-nomic, but also the envi-ronmental price of certain goods should be taken into account. Externalities of production, especially pol-lution, should therefore be taken more seriously and dealt with.

M: Exploitation can be lim-ited through taxation, since the latter would encourage global capital to invest re-sponsibly. Governments should then re-invest tax revenues to provide work-ers with social security and a decent standard of living.

M: Of course opponents of a return to the welfare state and of a return to a Keynesian interventionist state argue that such solu-tions either encourage la-

ziness among workers or were proven wrong by the apparent failure of Keynesi-an economics in the 1970s. Both arguments seem however flawed. The idea that people are inherently lazy and should therefore be forced to work harder by reducing social benefits seems to be the result of a negative view of humanity. I rather believe that peo-ple enjoy solving problems and constantly seek to give their contribution to soci-ety. The point is that they would do more if you gave them bigger responsibili-ties and made their opin-ion matter. That is the line of thought that has been followed by German and Japanese companies, who take into account their workers’ opinions during decision-making and in-clude their representatives in the board of administra-tion. The high inflation (or stagflation) that brought to the “failure” of Keynesi-an economics in the 1970s was not merely caused by the excessive money sup-ply into the economy en-couraged by governments’ expansive policies but rath-er one of the main causes of the stagflation was the huge rise in the price of oil that was carried out by

Arab oil producers in the aftermath of the Yom Kip-pur war of 1973.

M: However, please take into account that this is just my opinion, which is not the one of an economist.

C: Which transformation you believe the world is mostly in need of?

I believe the transforma-tion we are mostly in need of concerns our attitudes. We must move away from short-termism and start planning for the long term. We should therefore em-phasize and spread the no-tion of global responsibili-ty. Such a sense of Global responsibility will help us to find long-term solutions to solve the current global environmental destruction and fight that income in-equality and economic ex-ploitation that forces mil-lions of immigrants to leave developing countries and risk their lives every day in order to reach the West. Radical long-term solutions are what we are in need of.

Cesare Vagge


A word which gets men-tioned a lot at UCM is ‘’consumerism’’. Together with concepts like ‘’Amer-ican imperialism’’, ‘’social constructivism’’, and ‘’neo-liberalism’’, it is part of our deepest fears and the cause of the worst traumas. We often wake up screaming from a nightmare about this concept. This is pure evil, ready to crawl upon you in the night. We, brave as we are, fight the addic-tive impulses of this mon-ster.

However, consumerism has won. Using a flexible guerrilla tactic it imple-mented itself in the lives of the most anti-capitalist hip-pies.

How? In the form of social media, consumer-ism has turned everything which we initially consider to be priceless things in life into products. Examples of these are personal devel-opment, culture or hob-bies. Going to a concert

has turned from a personal experience to the hipster equivalent of a pimp-ass Mercedes. You going to a concert is permanently on your Facebook timeline, as a badge. It is attached to you. People can now al-ways see that you went to this concert, which gives you social status. It became an ornament you use to make yourself prettier.

This productification of immaterial priceless con-cepts comes back in many more forms: holidays, drinking tea, donating to charity, and everything in between. We even exploit people for it. Just look at the countless pictures of people doing charity work. It went as far as that a commercial industry is be-hind trips for people doing charity work in poor coun-tries. A traumatized, mal-nourished child functions as a product for us to show how awesome we must be. In this way, charity becomes

a market of sup-ply and demand. Looking from this perspective, modern people might be just as materialistic as the Versailles palace.

But how real are we if our personal affec-tions and expe-riences are part of a social com-petition? Didn’t we go too far if some happy pictures determine whether or not a party was fun, and not the party itself? With social status attached to these priceless concepts, happi-ness in itself became a sta-tus symbol. And so people are continuously searching to show their happiness and their great lives to peo-ple with as the all-time low point #momentformyself. The beautiful parts about moments for yourself is that only you are involved. The fact that people feel the urge to show off such moments to a crowd of food photoshopping re-tards they don’t even know is another perfect example of the productification of immaterial experiences and of happiness as a status symbol.

«reflections CONSUMING

LIFE



Very sad part about this story is that I let myself be inspired by my personal ex-perience as well. I too have felt the thrill of likes on some picture. I also exploit-ed my friends, experiences and hobbies for these pur-poses. And I also know the horrible feeling of seeing everyone around you show off their pretty lives while you struggle to find the time to do similar amazing things.

I also understand that people will naturally use certain initially priceless things as status symbols. Babies for example, have always been and will al-

ways be whored out by their parents as a personal achievement. Social media did not change this. How-ever, in many ways I feel like these aspects of life are being enlarged and over-emphasized in this mate-rialistic way. Social media also helps making it more visible. But the most im-portant difference is that in earlier times, showing off your experience only af-fected people close to you, whereas now, it becomes objectified in a picture or short message to show to everyone in the world, de-creasing it to the superficial form of the classical status

symbols, like watches or clothing.

Maybe we should take an example in bankers, an-other group UCM hates. At least their main status symbols, money and ma-terial gain, are free from the disgusting pretences you find in people coer-cively shoving their concert in people’s faces. Let’s just appreciate our experiences and friends in the way they deserve, and let our pimp-ass Mercedeses do the work for our social status, because that’s what they are made for.

Xavier Salet

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There were times when I thought, Maybe this is al-ready it, but each time I stopped myself, not allow-ing it to be true. A mas-querade of identities I tried on to see how they fit, whether I liked them. This is not particularly surprising in itself; after all, the strug-gle to find one’s place in the world is analogous with the very definition of be-ing a teenager. But I didn’t recognise it as a search, for how could I be lost if I was already where every-one else aspired to be? In-stead, I called it a lifestyle, a challenge I was taking on, trying to reconcile the sur-roundings of home, high school, nightclub and live-house without being will-ing to settle for only one of them.

Meaning was found in self-deliberation, in what I sought out, as much as in potential, what await-ed, what was just out of but surely soon within my reach. I was equally excited

by my own set coordinates in the city and by the re-maining vastness that had yet to, and never could be mapped out by me. The collision of existences was a miracle at which I marvelled and which I preserved as my own precious little stories. What were the odds, in a pool of millions, in a stream of people coming and leav-ing again? And likewise, what were the odds of not meeting anyone, of staying in on the weekends? There was always somewhere to go to and when it was over, there was always a taxi to take me home at night, speeding over a high-way that had finally been brushed off its countless daytime commuters. Mon-ey was never in danger of running out. Young girls who looked the part could make it to almost anywhere – only that to do so, they al-ways had to bend to some-one else’s rules. Being rich was trump, but even more so when one was male,

too. Those were the politics that seeped into my expe-riences, while the threat of living under a dictatorship that foreign media warned us and acquaintances in Europe inquired about seemed to belong to an en-tirely different world.

After six years in China, Maastricht, too, was an en-tirely different world. The town itself looked sweet and together as though it had once been built and was now tended to by one and the same loving per-son. Looking from St. Pi-eter into the valley below, the cars wound along the roads without making a single sound. And at night, everything vanished under a blanket patterned with tiny golden lights. – All these images thrown at me in which I didn’t recognise myself, and whose beauty I therefore didn’t know how to embrace. Being unsure how to face the unfamiliar, I conjured up the past again. But looking back inevitably

SHANGHAI BABY



forced me to also look clos-er, suddenly embarrassed to realise how obvious it all should have been. Just be-cause people took me to be twenty-three did not mean that I had any idea what it meant to be that age and what it would take to get there. I wasn’t grown up because I could choose from a list of longdrinks, dress pretty and clean and speak in an accent that no longer betrayed a specific heritage.

Here, time is thick and dense with the rhythm of university, seeing this and that friend, lists of grocer-ies, expenses, and so on and so on, a knot of tasks that has to continuously be un-ravelled. In Shanghai, there was only moment placed after moment placed after moment. Some of these re-main stuck to my memory as hastily taken snapshots. The sun setting in soft or-ange over the usual bustle of traffic each evening. Real

estate agents playing bad-minton on the street during their lunch breaks. Walking alone through the nights of the last month bathed in a summer-warm hue of blue. The places, the people, the energy, the madness, as I close my eyes I can’t help but smile. There were times when I thought, Maybe this is already it, but each time I stopped myself, not believ-ing it to be true.

Amelie Bahr

This is an article in the UCF-collaboration series

We all are a Optimus Prime ourselves, changing glori-ously from one form to an-other. This change of form is such an integral part of us, we hardly notice when it is happening. It is so smooth, we don’t make a conscious effort while crunching our joints. To be sure, there are times we are painfully aware of the changes upon us and within us, when something is amiss, or we ourselves are amiss. But it is probably the lack of ap-

propriate change we are feeling thoroughly. That’s the difference between the pacing made concrete to our senses. Sometimes our surroundings are ahead of us, whilst we’ve grown too affectionate of a custom to bid farewell. And some-times it is the other way around, we grow uneasy as we wait for the rest of the world catch up.

Does it sound too ab-stract so far? Or a bit of an exaggeration? Well, think about the times when our immediate surroundings shift dramatically. How do

we, for instance, behave within our family assuming the role of the child? Or when we are in the close friend circle of equals? In both situations, we have a lot of pre-existing infor-mation about the people, the mutual comfort level and the topics that can be discussed without worry-ing about crossing borders. And we have very good hold of what to expect and what is expected from us. The little Optimus Prime, being the awesome mecha it is, knows all of these; it shapes the course of the in-teraction, adjusts the com-fort level without us notic-ing it.

The mecha can have outstanding performances in its ability to transform.

YOUR EVERYDAYOPTIMUS PRIME


Take a business interview for example. Certain as-pects of our character are highlighted, while there are some other aspects, that we are not particu-larly keen on being vocal about. And I do not imply lying or hiding: if it is not our then habit, we are at least showing what we are willing to transform into. Or say, when we travel and are in a constant state of flux, and weighing our own world against the world of others. Transforming from that spoiled kid who com-plains about his/her sleep being disrupted by a single tiny fly to an hostel dwell-er while sleeping as ten people give a night-long concerto of many different snore chords.

And another transfor-mation will eventually be upon us, the so-close-yet-far-away graduation. How many features will be added to our transfor-mation capability? A joint that we are unaware of its existence, say, a reflex of waking up early even in weekends, maybe? Or that change of faces we will see everyday and our respec-tive, reactive change to it? Change in our eating hab-its and coffee drinking fre-

quencies? Or, being more concerned about the tax-es, debts and using some financial or bureaucratic term we would never think we’d use in a sentence with a serious face? How many

changes will we incorpo-rate in ourselves when we incorporate ourselves to a company, an organisation or another school? Well, no one really knows before or even during the transition. But that is exactly what makes the transformation a very curious, fascinating phenomena.

The list of examples of

our transformations can go as far as we let/force/push ourselves into the different surroundings. The more extreme, uninitiated con-ditions we put ourselves

in, the more flexibility and features our transformers gain. As long as we are aware that it is a never end-ing, natural process and we are content with what we transform into when we look from the outside from time to time, I suppose, we just need to enjoy the ride.

Nagihan Mutlu

According to the author, we all are Optimus Prime ourselves, changing gloriously from one form to another.Dan Hancock, 2008, CC BY-NC 2.0



Especially the Capstone stu-dents, but maybe second- and third-year-students as well, would recognise the stressful feeling when an acquaintance asks what you would like to do after UCM. Or maybe even after your Master’s degree. What do you want to do with your life? Things are not as easy as fifteen years ago anymore, when we could simply answer with a “I will be a fireman”, “teacher” or “princess”. Choosing a Master’s program feels like a life-changing decision, not because it brings you to another period of your life, but also because it shapes your future…

That is where the phe-nomenon “Quarter-life Cri-sis” occurs. Looking to a website with general infor-mation about the midlife crisis, I actually recognise a lot of the phenomena in my own life and in the lives of UCM students in their examination period.

To start with, there is the feeling that everyone counts on you to accom-plish certain tasks. Some-

one in a midlife crisis has the feeling that the people around them always as-sume that they will be the one who solves the prob-lems. As a part of this, the person has the feeling that they do not receive enough recognition for the tasks which they have made suc-cessful. Looking to UCM students, I think that the feelings are comparable. Especially during the last exam week, everyone felt so stressed and I heard multi-ple complaints because the capstone draft had to be handed in within the exam week, not after it. Besides the usual UCM stress, there were the plans for the fu-ture that had to be made. Will we get an approval for the Master’s degree? What about that internship I applied for? After the last capstone lecture, we talked to each other about those tasks. It felt so good to fi-nally talk with people who understood the current workload and some other students shared this opin-ion with me! We all had the feeling that no one else

was able to understand the stress that the examination period delivered, just as the midlife crisis person who misses the recognition for the workload he or she has to carry.

Moreover, it is stated that people in a midlife crisis feel like they have reached the end of their ca-pabilities. Therefore, these people only have one ulti-mate desire; get away and start over. This desire could be exhibited in extreme ways, such as the purchase of an expensive car, quit-ting their job or becoming a real sport fanatic – im-agine your dad with the most amazing abs. Looking to UCM students then, it is very notable that many ut-ter the desire to travel. This phenomenon does not only occur at UCM; other stu-dents want to have ultimate abroad experiences as well. Whereas in the past, going outside the Netherlands was enough, these days students go to Asia, Amer-ica and even Australia. Many of my friends desire a gap year before they start

THE QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS;ANGER, DESPAIR & FEAR


the Master’s program. This desire to get away is com-parable for both groups of people in crisis .

Lastly, the midlife crisis occurs because people ex-perience that moment of their life as a turning point in their lives. Children leave the house, the possibilities for promotions decrease and there might even be a physical downfall in the form of growing old. Peo-ple in a midlife crisis see how younger generations accomplish what they had done in their past and they suddenly realise the finite-

ness of their existence. Ob-viously, people in a quar-ter-life crisis do not grow old and do not have kids leaving the house either. However, they similarly suddenly realise the devel-opment of their existence. Whereas before, the big-gest worry had been to fail a course, now it becomes important to shape the fu-ture. For people in both cri-ses, a sudden realisation of being occurs. A realisation of the past, the present and the future.

Luckily however, there is one big difference be-

tween the quarter-life crisis and the midlife crisis. The midlife crisis has its origins in a long-term depression, whereas the quarter-life crisis suddenly appears. It is also easier to end the quarter-life crisis; when we receive our Bachelor’s de-gree, our live will change no matter what. Therefore, the solution to the quar-ter-life crisis is simply time. Do not despair, just some more weeks and we will be fine…

Liz Zoetekouw

One of the things we are constantly told at UCM is to be critical about the world around us. Generally, that tends to be a good outlook to have on life. Keeping an open mind towards the ideas presented to you and not accepting what you see as it appears to be is a healthy behavior to have. It allows you to think and develop your own ideas, rather than to become one with mindless masses we all claim to be so superior

to. However, it seems as though some are tired of having their surroundings filled with people criticizing everything, and want to just accept things as they are sometimes.

The absurdity of this idea is best explained by drawing a comparison to a pro and con list. Basical-ly, you look at a speech, idea, etc. and write down what you like or do not like about whatever it is you are looking at, and why

that is the case. It sounds simple enough, because that’s what being critical really is. So, following this analogy, think of what hap-pens when a idea or event is not looked at critically. You are essentially ripping the paper in half, and then running around telling everyone how amazing that thing is based on only the positive comments. If I could have done the same with my my papers and exams I would be cruising

CRITICISM AND WHY WE ALWAYS NEED IT



through UCM with perfect grades, because the things I do wrong would never be taken into account.

By not being critical you are forgetting another one of its important functions: laying the groundwork for improvement. Secretly, we are all idealists. We would all like to live in a world full of rainbows and butterflies and we believe that should be the case, but trying to say that out loud will most likely result in people not taking you seriously. But it is this naive idea that

everything should be per-fect (or at least as good as it can be) that fosters our desire to improve ourselves and what we see around

us. The only way to do so is by recognizing that some things are bad, others are awful, while others even are good, but with some flaws, and then find solu-tions to make those things less bad, awful or flawed.

The problem is that criti-cism is incorrectly mistaken for negativity. This is actu-ally pretty normal, as neg-ative comments will always have more impact than positive ones. It takes only one negative comment to have the same impact on a person as seven positive

ones. Allowing this fact to change the way you look at the process of being critical is a dangerous trap to fall into, because you are ac-

cepting that the way things are is good enough, and thus that there is no need to improve things. If people had taken up that mentality in former times, we would still be stuck in the Middle Ages.

Granted, there are peo-ple who are just negative all the time, who will not recognize something good along with the bad, no matter the situation. Those people just tend to be pes-simists and cynics who you should not have around anyways. If those people

cannot find enough things in life that are positive to the point that those around them just think they are a very negative person, why not just ignore them? The evolution of the hu-man race didn’t hap-pen off of the backs of pessimists, it came off the backs of criti-cal thinkers who saw problems and did their best to fix them. Not being critical for the sake of not being

negative is settling for me-diocrity, without the pros-pect of improvement.

Nick Papaconstantinou

These two art critics have probably done their fair share of criticism to the improve-ment of art.

‘Art critics. Study’ - Michael Anker, 1906, public domain


Many people, myself in-cluded, go to university with the idea that in the years you spend studying, a magical transformation takes place. Like a well-oiled machine, the univer-sity inputs awkward, naïve teenagers who lack in di-rection, solidarity and in-dependence and outputs confident, well-educated adults with clear ideas, and principles with at least some direction. I was so mistaken.

If anything, university is a hodgepodge of individu-als, some whom change,in-fluenced by their new sur-roundings, and others who stroll through unchanged and unwavering in their goals. I fall into the former category. Before arriving at UCM I was unsure about what I wanted to get out of my studies. I knew I wanted to gain something out of it, I just wasn’t sure what. Now, I have been at university for more than a year I have gotten a little more than I bargained for in terms of transformation

It is undeniable that uni-versity does change you,

however I have found that it can transform you in ways that you least expect. These changes become most ob-vious when interacting with those who you spend time with in your pre-uni-versity days, i.e. family and friends.

When I went home for the first time after 4 months in Maastricht, I sat in the car with my parents talking excitedly about the adventures I had been getting into, the amazing people I had met, the in-teresting classes, and life in Maastricht. As I talked and talked the thing that both shocked and baffled me was not what I was saying or why I was saying these things, but rather how I was talking. Attending universi-ty in Maastricht had actu-ally changed my voice. The tone in my voice was dif-ferent, it had evolved into a subtle rhythmic concoc-tion of accents as opposed to my simple south London droll. The pace at which I spoke had quickened and I now speak with a slight combination of character-istics from many accents.

Colloquialisms from the American accent, with a little French, Dutch and German thrown in. I was not copying the accents directly, but the slang and odd pronunciations which I was surrounded by on a daily basis had altered my way of speaking. Being in an international circle and an international household at an international universi-ty, one can’t help but mimic and eventually adapt to talk in the same way as those who surround you. I have known people whose voic-es have changed to that of the regional accent of the town or city they study in, but I never thought that it would happen to me. Now, for many this may sound absurd and can be quite difficult to explain, but in truth this was one of the most bizarre things I have experienced. It was me speaking, but outside of the context of Maastricht and my circle of friends, the way I spoke and acted just sounded odd and out of place. In a way, my Lon-don life was not ready for the Maastricht me. It may

A LITTLE TRANSFORMATION THAT HAS MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE



not be noticeable to many people, even to the aver-age Englishman, but when I was with my friends and family (many of whom did notice), this change not only made me sound differ-ent, but I also felt different to how I was before. I am still the same person, but I am now communicating in a different way.

This has made a huge impact on me, as I am now more conscious of how I speak and am a little wary that I am sometimes try-ing too hard to maintain my Englishness. Although this little change did not come under my initial ideas

of how university impacts and influences students, it is now one of the most ob-vious outputs of people liv-ing and working in such a close environment. In such an international university, the blending of language, communication and ac-cents is inevitable. We stu-dents spend so much time together that we heavily influence each other in everything we do, includ-ing speech. So these little transformations in how we speak and communi-cate, are a direct result of this influence and in turn can make a surprisingly huge difference in how we

choose to communicate in

the future.

Being around friends at

UCM and UM every day

you don’t notice how much

you change in order to

adapt to the environment.

You don’t notice how you

talk and act, as it is so nor-

mal for you to act in that

way within this city. What

interests me is how many

others, not just myself,

have found that university

life has created these little

transformations that have

made a big difference.

Zoe Gorringe

One morning, Charles woke up to a dark morn-ing. Literally. For the first time in history the sun failed to rise. At first he thought his alarm was bro-

ken, waking him up in the middle of the night. After trying to fall back to sleep, whilst feeling oddly rested, Charles turned on the TV news. What he saw could be described in one word...

chaos. The sun had simply, and quite rudely, not come in the morning. Scientists were perplexed, religious cults rose in fury and gen-eral panic struck the popu-lation.

But not Charles. He had bigger worries at that point: he was late for work. Being so close to that big promo-tion, he could not afford to be late. He quickly got dressed and set off to his office. Out on the streets, as predicted, anarchy had

broken loose. In a mixture of ex-odus and apoca-lypse preparation,

the suited up hero fought bravely against the heavy city traffic. “Come on”, he thought. “Leave your hysteria for later, I’m late”. He saw families running to the supermarkets, rioters breaking into banks. So much overreaction every-where, really. People have this tendency to make a big thing out of anything. Charles was losing his pa-tience as time went by, and was mentally preparing

DARK MORNING

«cre

ativ

e


for his boss’s wrath. After crossing his odyssey, he reached his personal Itha-ca: his office building.

As he crossed the build-ing’s lobby hall, Charles saw the old security guard holding still to his post. “That’s the commitment I like to see”, he said to him-self. Surprisingly enough for him, the office build-ing was hauntingly desert. He expected more people fulfilling their duty, tak-ing their positions and re-sponsibilities seriously. That would have a direct impact on everyone’s Christmas bonus, he thought. Such lack of perspective.

Into his office room, he went to check his emails. “End of the world: repent sinners”. Delete. “10% off Gym membership”. Delete. “A final goodbye”. Delete. “Changes in the contract”. That’s the stuff. Charles worked for the next two hours but the office’s emp-tiness bothered still him. He decided to talk to the one sensible person he saw so

far: the security guard.Charles reached the

lobby and saw the curved figure in the dark, paying close attention to a 5” TV. As he approached the man, he noticed it was airing a rerun of a soccer game and the green light that shim-mered from it illuminated the tired and concentrated face of the security guard. Charles approached the man:

“Hey”, his throat was dry and rough, “Do you know where everyone is?”

“The sun is not out. Ants only work when there is light”, his eyes did not de-viate from the small screen. Charles tried again.

“Do you think they’ll come?”

“Why should they?”Charles felt very uncom-

fortable as if he had been pushed against an uncom-fortable cold mirror, forcing him to look at himself. He got defensive.

“If they shouldn’t come, then why are you here?”

“There’s no where else

for me to go.”The security guard lift-

ed his head and his look pierced through Charles. His red and tired eyes spoke with a loud famili-arity to him, which made him confront an ugly truth. Charles had no where else to go. He had become a machine that’s first reac-tion when confronted with one of humanity’s turning points was “Damn, I’m late for work”. His lost humani-ty was exposed by red eyes and green soccer lights and Charles felt a deep con-nection with someone he never thought he would. He took off his jacket and reached the security guard, whose attention was al-ready turned to the televi-sion. Charles sat by his side, contemplated the darkness of the lobby hall and the eternal night that kept on going outside. He could only ask one thing:

“So. Who’s winning?”

Raphael Dias e Silva



THE LIMP OF TIMECounting backThe metamorphosesOf our transient,Moody times,I misplaced oneOf the coinsIn the bankOf your design.

Puzzled, youCan’t recognizeHow sudden changeTranscends your mind.

‘Should I changeOr just align?’Transformation asksFrom time to time.

As statues waveAnd memory lacksMuseums relieveOur grief of regrets

On the exit standsThis limping manIt all transformsbut keeps intact.

Marta Ziosi

AN HOUR MISSED

Intelligence bloomed The train rattles to a halt Hour has passed, wilted

Marie-Jo Geukes


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Documents

The Bell #9: June 2015 - Transformations