Choose your partners

The construction of knowledge always happens in collaboration with others. Collaborations take place between peer students and colleagues inside our university walls but also with other institutions nationally and internationally. International collaborations are valuable for many reasons, such as scale benefits, access to specific (physical) research areas or the mere act of cooperating with people from different cultures. Since its foundation in 1880, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has had many international partners, which they chose carefully. This online exhibition, contains three mapped tours hosting objects from the Special Collections of the University Library that tell some of the stories of international collaborations throughout time.

Interested to know more? Click on the underlined links in the text or scroll down to the reading list. You are welcome to visit the physical exhibition on in the main building of VU Amsterdam on first floor next to the entrance of the University Library.

VU Amsterdam was founded in 1880 by a group of Calvinists as the first Protestant university in the Netherlands. During its first years, the university mainly looked for partners of ‘kindred spirit’, such as other Calvinist seminaries and universities in Hungary, France and Scotland. Outside of Europe, Abraham Kuyper - the most prominent founder of VU Amsterdam - established relations with Calvinist institutions in North America and South Africa. The Dutch Calvinists felt ‘a religious and ethnic kinship’ with the Calvinist and Presbyterian communities there. Small scale study visits were organized such as  Abraham Kuyper  and  Herman Bavinck’s  Stone lectures at Princeton University, respectively in 1898 and 1908.

VU also welcomed international students, but since almost all academic training was in Dutch the university mostly attracted white South African students. There were some other Dutch-speaking international students from e.g. the US, Belgium and the former Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. In Indonesia and Surinam, there was a network of missionaries that included (former) students and professors of VU Amsterdam. Although missionary work often resulted in helpful infrastructure such as schools, it also caused losses of local culture and knowledge by suppression.

After the Second World War, the international partners of VU Amsterdam were no longer from Calvinist communities only. In the context of geopolitical decolonization and the Cold War, VU widened its horizon to welcome partners in the non-western world. The Christian values of charity and justice were at the core of choosing new partners. Therefore, developmental collaboration was prioritized over collaboration with western universities. Missionary work increasingly focused on providing general developmental aid too. The networks of Protestant missionaries were often used to start projects in Asia and Africa.

In 1961, VU was the first university in the Netherlands to establish a central bureau for facilitating international cooperations and scholarships: Bureau Buitenland. The post-war establishment of the biology and geology faculties created a need for conducting field research abroad. Lastly, during this period the university started making public statements on global issues by giving honorary doctorates to civil right movement activists such as  Christiaan Frederik Beyers Naudé ,  Hélder Câmara  and  Martin Luther King .

In the beginning of the 1970s, there was a growing awareness that the ‘underdevelopment’ of countries was in part caused by European powers. A policy change in choosing partners took place where potential partners had to clearly express the need for collaboration and have some form of expertise to contribute to collaborations themselves. Another important requirement was the political climate and academic freedom in the country of potential partners. Projects also became more sustainable by for example training staff on-site, instead of temporarily sending lecturers abroad.

To coordinate new partnerships, Bureau Buitenland and other committees working on internationalization were incorporated into the newly founded central Department for Development Cooperation (DOS) in 1987. New territories for cooperations were explored, such as Latin-America and China. At home, VU set up a special curriculum as a preparatory year for refugee students that were not directly admissible to the university. This Foundation year for international students (VASVU) still exists today.

From the turn of the century onwards, VU’s international community kept growing, especially due to an increased influx of international (PhD-)students and staff and active outreach to new collaboration partners across the globe, beyond the Euro-American axis. The coordination of internationalization is increasingly professionalized and facilitated by the  International Office , founded in 2014. It consists of three sub-departments: International Mobility, International Relations and the Centre for International Cooperation (CIS). Since 2015,  the 17 UN Sustainability Goals  (SDG) provide guidance in starting new collaborations ensuring social impact.

Today, besides opportunities for research, education, impact, innovation and open knowledge sharing, international cooperations can also bring  knowledge security  risks. By implementing knowledge security regulations, VU ensures the safest possible international relations whilst safeguarding the encroachment of academic freedom and (self-)censorship. Practicing science diplomacy and working together despite geopolitical differences contribute to combatting climate change and poverty and facilitate a proper energy transition, peace and other SDGs. Officers at the International Office also work on so-called ‘Glocalization’ to take better care of the international VU-staff and students in Amsterdam by providing help with housing and career advice, since  recent discussions  on the topic.

In the dashboard below, created by team Research Intelligence and Impact (UL), each dot represents an institute with which VU Amsterdam (including VUmc) has had at least one scientific collaboration between 2020 and 2022. A scientific collaboration is defined as a 'work' in OpenAlex (https://openalex.org/ ) in which at least one author affiliated with VU Amsterdam and at least one author affiliated with an external institute have collaborated. When several authors with different external affiliations have collaborated in a publication, it is included on the map as a collaboration with all these institutes.

Open up the dashboard in a new tab on your computer to dive into the details!

The dashboard was designed by team Research Intelligence at the University Library of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdamm and is based on an analysis conducted for the International Office.

Team Research Intelligence helps answer questions about the academic and social impact of research at VU. For questions about opportunities contact us at  researchintelligence.ubvu@vu.nl .

The SDG Research Dashboard was developed by the Aurora Alliance of which the VU is one of the founding members. The alliance consists of nine research-intensive European universities that are committed to drive meaningful societal transformations through its students, staff, academics and communities at large. The dashboard measures this societal impact based on the 17 Societal Development Goals. The bibliometric tool provides insight into the scientific publications from Dutch universities (VSNU) and European universities in the Aurora Network that are related to the SDGs.

Open up the dashboard in a new tab on your computer to dive into the details!

Do you have a special object like a diary you kept during an exchange, a cool specimen collected doing field work abroad or a snow globe full of good memories from study visit?

Then share your personal international experiences with the VU-community by showcasing your own special object for two weeks!

Email a photo of your object and its background story to our curator of Academic Heritage Eline Bos (e.m.bos@vu.nl) to show internationalization is a continuous process that involves everyone at VU Amsterdam.

• G. Thijs,  Kleine luyden in ontwikkeling.  Vrije Universiteit en Derde Wereld 1955-2005 (Meinema 2005)
• G. J. Schutte en H. Wels (red.),  The Vrije Universiteit and South Africa . From 1880 to the present and towards the future: images, practice and policies (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2005)
• W.J. Berkelaar,  ‘For Us it is an Honor and a Pleasure’ . Honorary Doctorates at the VU University Amsterdam (Meinema 2007)
• G. Harinck, '"Uwe komst in Amerika zou ten rijken zegen kunnen zijn". Hoe de Vrije Universiteit in de negentiende eeuw internationale betekenis kreeg', Over de grens. Internationale contacten aan Nederlandse universiteiten sedert 1876, red. L.J. Dorsman en P.J. Knegtmans (Hilversum: Verloren 2009), 101-120

• The International Office, Student and Educational Affairs
• Team Research Intelligence and Impact, University Library
• Dr. Ab Flipse, University Historian