My Terrifying Experience at TU Delft
The university of Delft, one of the highest accredited dutch universities, yet, my education quality was exceedingly poor. This university, driven by its desire for profit and industrialisation of studying, has formalised everything into multiple choice questions where there often is no correct answer because automated question generation misses some nuance. For addressing their own mistakes, and their own low quality material, they have no time at all. And if you speak up about this, if you send your teacher your assignment back, with spelling, grammar, logic, formulaic and mathemathic improvement points, they will get defensive, argue "your feedback is shit". Try to call them out on a direct false statement they make in class as part of a lecture, thats not just a little obvious slip of the tongue, and watch your teacher tremble and fret and enter into a defensive mode. This university has a very thick culture of fear, oppression and hierarchy. Ultimately many people put in complaints about such things and i was harrassed by the university over it and never allowed to argue my point, share my side of the story, or discuss it. Instead i was told "if anybody complains about anything regarding you, no matter how small or irrelevant, we will immediately expell you" i indicated to them how hostile they made this environment and told the university i cannot safely study if they seriously try to use such threats against me, if someone has reported me for asking the teacher a question, how can i safely exist, and be, without constant fear of any tiny disagreement or literal nothing leading go expulsion? So i stayed at home, continually pleading to do things at home, trying to communicate with my studyadvisor, trying to arrange djfferent ways to do my exam. I also proceeded against their internal warning, which was a very weird and kafkaesque experiencr, especially because i did finally win, they didnt really clearly indicate why, but they cancelled their original warning. However, by this time i had missed 2 exams in this period (my study advisor, had a very relaxed attitude, and didnt seriously discuss or reply to me with me the option of taking exams in a different way, until two exams had passed by silently)
And the exam commission said "exceptions dont exist, we never allow to retake more than one exam, because we learned, that then often people fail" which seems a totally insane defense considering the circumstances. There is just no logic at this university, only procedure, it works how it works, questioning is taboo, disagreeing is taboo, any form of conflict is preferably resolved with distance, punishment, oppression, rather than true conversation and resolution. I hope nobody ever studies here, and if they do they heed this warning, they will try to break you, you will one day spot a mistake, and maybe if you are lucky, the teacher will be exited that you are so engaged in the material that you spotted it, and happy to be corrected, but most likely, they willl try to shame you right there publicly, by saying you are being "very technical and pedantic (in a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, WHAT A SURPRISE!). Or theyll simply say, no, you are mistaken, i can "answer your question" after class. And then after class, when almost everybody is gone, they might sheepishly admit their lecture slide is plain wrong & misinformation if you are lucky.
If you are thinking about studying here, consider very deeply how the toxic workplace & studyplace culture will affect you.
Sidepoint: they also break privacy laws in sharing student details with police for peaceful protesting (thereby endangering students), they work with countless weapons companies, they invite radical ultranationalist zionist speakers with claims like "there is no genocide in gaza" and dont invite a counterspeaker, they heavily police expressions about israel, about government, ablut the university itself, etc.
They also let me know (exam commision) that i could not continue studying there, only one day after the admissions deadline for most other universities, it is hard to believe, after all that happened, that this was not on purpose, if so, that speaks of an unyielding institutional cruelty in this university.
edit: removed the word "harmful" from a sentence to make it flow better