L: How did they pick up your suggestions?

Right now the biggest issue for them was that they were dealing with the biggest year in the history of psychology at the University of Groningen in this course, cause there were a lot of students, if not in the history of this course than at least during the last few years, and they didn’t expect to deal with it. 800 people got in, because there was no numerus fixus. They bring back numerus fixus every other year or something like that, to sort of counteract for dropouts and stuff, and this year there was no numerus fixus, and usually they get like 500, 600… not this year! So, there was a big spike. And because of those large numbers, they got more people who were loudly complaining.

There are situations in the course where people, me included, have felt very uncomfortable before, because they are basically asked to perform roles of possible psychologists’ clients, and these roles could be anything, it would be a victim of assault at work or something like that, you know, and with the amount of people with different stories, different perspectives that you have in such a course, you cannot tell if this person who is about to interview someone experienced assault at work, you don’t know that!

So, basically I’ve been trying to communicate that to the coordinators for the last two years and this year they finally started listening because there were just more people complaining about it. Which, you know, is good, although I do wish that it had happened earlier.

L: Before all the people had to complain.

Yeah. And when it comes to more physical spaces, to the university as buildings, not as academia, I think it’s getting better now, at least in my faculty, because of all the work that is being done behind the scenes to ensure inclusion. From my perspective at least it is getting better, although I am sure that many people will disagree, because they experience oppression I don’t have experience with.

“From my perspective at least it is getting better, although I am sure that many people will disagree, because they just have different perspectives.”

The elephant in the room the gender neutral bathrooms, we do have them now, I no longer have to go to the basement, where the only gender neutral bathroom used to be, but yeah, it’s still sort of the little things, you know. The system that I have to use to design questionnaires, for example, that one uses my deadname as a default, and I could probably change it, but I’m also doing other things, and on top of that I have to deal with this, you know? There is this one person in the building who, every time I’m picking up the keys, he will say the name he sees on the screen, and that is my deadname, so, ugh… but I know it’s getting better.

Oh, also the curriculum… it’s very cis, it’s very white, we once had a course that was called “Controversies in Psychology”, and it was run by five white straight cis-dudes. I’m assuming the straight part, but yeah.