The internationalisation official Feite van Dijk was interviewed by UT-Nieuws on Thursday 31 August 1995 as he was leaving for a new job at Delft University.
Internationalisation was a novelty in Twente when Feite van Dijk started his work in 1990. Most universities had a foreign office, but the UT only had an internship committee. The faculties did little and there was limited contact with the internationalisation programme at the ministry or the ERASMUS programme (which had started in 1988).
At the start the emphasis was on out-going student mobility, Van Dijk remembered. 'The thing was to send as many students as possible somewhere, it did not really matter where.' And it worked. In 1990-1991 only a few dozen students spent some time abroad, almost exclusively for internships. In 1993-1994 400 students went. In most cases, about 70%, internships.
The in-coming mobility (foreign students spending some time in Twente) was a different story. In 1990-1991 it was almost unheard of. In 1993-1994 there were 150 foreign students in Twente. Still not as many students as those who left Twente for a while. The problem could not have been the way they were received, thanks to the successful activities of the S.M.I.T. Foundation, which was founded in 1992.
At the moment of his leaving Internationalisation was getting a new face at the UT, a new Bureau Internation Co-operation (BIS) was being set up with more people and resources. The new BIS would get three main tasks: international student mobility, creating a distinct international profile for the UT and foreign aid.
Van Dijk was in favour of more courses in English, and to avoid 'ghetto-courses' and expensive parallel lecture-cycles he preferred Dutch students to attend the English-language lectures too. This did not rule out the need for intensive group-courses Dutch. 'Dutch at lecture-level can be acquired in two months, especially by Germans and Norwegians.'
The university should consider changing its English name, according to Van Dijk. 'It sounds horrible in English, the University of Twenty, moreover, Twente cannot be found on any map.'
Van Dijk still agreed with the existing UT-policy concerning foreign aid, although he thought the term somewhat old-fashioned. As an example he mentioned the relationship with Bandung, Indonesia, which was no longer 'foreign aid', but a fully-grown co-operative relationship.
Van Dijk saw a number of chances for the new BIS. Recruiting full-time students abroad (Germany, but also Indonesia), professionalisation of the services concerning student mobility ('should become the calling card of the university'), the transition from ERASMUS to SOCRATES. 'The latter demands a dialogue with all the faculties on what the position is of internationalisation in overall policy.'
