The Erasmus University College is still a young institution but has matured into an ambitious player within Erasmus University and the Dutch University College landscape. There are ample of opportunities to further strengthen EUCs position as an educational innovator in terms of defining Liberal Arts for the 21th century: the promising development of the RASL network, the Natural History Museum-EUC-Erasmus MC Network and the TU Delft-Erasmus MC-EUR covenant are three prominent examples. In order to fully use the potential of EUC also in the advantage of Erasmus University, EUC needs to have a solid basis for continuous improvement. To nourish such complex educational innovation processes in a focused and smart way, EUC requires a clear research policy.
Recent discussions and developments within the field of Liberal Arts and Sciences stress the need for scholarship to safeguard continuous educational innovation, societal relevance and to facilitate a positive and growth-oriented faculty development (Baker, V. L., Lunsford, L. G., & Pifer, M. J. (2017). When we refer to research, we imply a broad understanding in the sense of scholarship (Boyer, 1990) to stress the societal engaged aspect of research needed at a university college. Scholarship of education entails engagement with society in the sense that real world problems directly inform education and research of university academics and need to be reflected in discovery and dissemination. Similar arguments for engaged scholarship are made in several fields, like medicine (Shapiro & Coleman, 2000) and management (van de Ven, & Johnson, 2006) and applies specifically to liberal arts and science academics (Zakaria, 2015).
All four academic departments of EUC (Economics and Business, Humanities, Life Sciences, and Social and Behavioural Sciences) are active in research, yet, as is characteristic for a university college setting, big differences exist across departments in terms of research profiles. In order to unleash the research potential of the EUC academic staff and to integrate all initiatives and ideas in a focused way, we suggest the establishment of an “Erasmus Centre for Liberal Arts and Sciences”. The research centre encompasses the current research activities of the different departments, allow to bundle resources and facilitate joint projects and funding activities.
This proposal for an Erasmus Centre for Liberal Arts and Science builds on an ongoing discussion within EUC about the establishment of an educational innovation research centre. As a result, concrete development steps are already taken for research on educational innovation by means of an earlier proposal by Gera Noordzij, Ginie Servant and Lisette Wijnia (Feb. 2020) that came out of the EUC Strategy Task Force “Education Innovation”. Gera and her colleagues identified several questions for education innovation that should be addressed. In the HOKA document that EUC provided in November 2019, HOKA funding was earmarked for this initiative among others in “Pillar 1 - Innovation in education”. In this sense, the Erasmus Centre for Liberal Arts and Science could function as an umbrella that integrates also this educational innovation research initiative at EUC.