All the faculties have a confidential counsellor for PhD candidates. Their joint annual report shows that the number of reported complaints fell from 63 in 2019 to 44 in 2020. The vast majority of the complaints concerned ‘inadequate supervision’ by supervisors and an excessive workload.

The developments at the Archaeology faculty are particularly noteworthy. In 2019, there were 13 people who reported a complaint at this faculty, which is about half of all the PhD candidates connected to the Faculty of Archaeology, the confidential counsellors write. A year later, only three complaints were received. The confidential counsellor suspects that the coronavirus may have played a role: working from home meant that there were fewer direct contacts with colleagues which may have made it easier to deal with problems. At the Humanities faculty, the number of complaints fell from 19 to 7.

In this document, the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) is treated separately from the university. However, the confidential counsellor for LUMC did receive many reported complaints, 13 in fact. This is mostly due to a ‘mismatch between expectations’ of the PhD candidate and the supervisor. Three of the reports were related to ‘scientific integrity’, but the confidential counsellor did not elaborate on this.

Jan Boersma, the confidential counsellor at the Faculty of Science , notes in his report that many PhD candidates tend to wait too long before approaching him. ‘The most pressing problem for PhD candidates is the fear that they’ll fail to complete their dissertation’, he says. ‘As they approach the finishing line, that fear grows larger and more real. This means that they come to me relatively late and that, quite often, their difficulties have been ongoing for some time.’

In addition, almost all PhD candidates state that their ‘dependent position sometimes prevented them from raising issues at an early stage or from taking a hard line’.

Whether you seek help is also partly determined by your culture, Boersma says. ‘In many of the countries of origin, people are more sensitive to hierarchy than in our country. As a result, the threshold for asking for help is (too) high and once that threshold has been crossed, people hesitate to take further steps.’

For this reason, the confidential counsellors call for more attention to the PhD candidates’ diverse cultural backgrounds. They come from far and wide, these days, and they’re not familiar with Dutch social norms, which they often experience as being too direct and sometimes even coarse.’

However, the confidential counsellors also plead for more consideration to the cultural influence the university has on foreign PhD candidates. ‘What exactly are we trying to pass on to PhD candidates regarding the democratic society in which we practise science? Will they also become advocates of our university’s motto “Bastion of Freedom” in their home countries? Shouldn’t we offer an intercultural Praesidium Libertatis Colloquium?’

In addition, the confidential counsellors suggest that more needs to be done in terms of prevention in order to avoid problems. The supervision of PhD candidates should also be improved, ‘for example, by organising courses for PhD supervisors, such as communication training and role playing.’

The document also includes an appeal to the Executive Board. It would be a good idea to establish a university fund for ‘PhD candidates who have fallen behind schedule due to Covid-19 or another illness and who are uncertain whether their contract can be extended.’