Utrecht University Appoints Bald de Vries as Academic Director of the Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning
On 1 December 2023, Manon Kluijtmans will step down as Academic Director of the Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning (CAT) after two terms. Bald de Vries takes over Manon Kluijtmans’ role at the CAT.
In 2016, as Quartermaster, she was commissioned by the Executive Board to establish a Centre for Teaching and Learning. With input from the many conversations she had university-wide with lecturers, students, administrators, education and policy advisers, the CAT was set up as a centre and network organisation that brings together the various partners and programmes involved in teacher development, educational innovation and Educational Scholarship, within UU.
Manon is a driver of ideas, manages to connect ongoing initiatives and stimulates a broad and open educational community within UU. In 2020, a highly commended external review of the CAT took place by an international committee, which called UU and the CAT ‘world leading’ and ‘a shining light for the sector’, a wonderful result achieved in part thanks to Manon. Manon also successfully shaped the Senior Fellow programme, which is unique in the world. Eight alumni of this programme have since been appointed as professors with an emphasis on education. Manon remains active within the UU education community, both from her chair within UMC Utrecht and from her position as Vice-Rector for Teaching and Learning.
Henk Kummeling, rector magnificus: “Manon is an internationally respected expert in science-based education and teacher development. I am therefore pleased that she will continue her position as UU Vice-Rector for Teaching and Learning for the next four years, which she combined with her role as Academic Director CAT since 2019. In addition, I am very much looking forward to working with Bald de Vries as the new Academic Director for the CAT, with whom we have found an excellent successor to Manon.”
Appointment Bald de Vries
Bald is a highly respected and active member of the education community at UU. He is education director of law and recently appointed professor of ‘Interdisciplinary Legal Education’. In the over twenty years that he has worked at Utrecht University, he has developed into a broad-oriented lecturer and researcher who always shapes teaching and research at the intersection of disciplines. As a legal scholar, he operates at the boundary between legal theory and social theory on the basis that there is a natural interaction and tension between law and social developments. “I extend this interdisciplinary attitude to education where I want to challenge students to discover and explore their own disciplinary boundaries in addition to innovation and research in education, and to develop sufficient offerings to do so.”
The Senior Fellow programme of the CAT gave him the opportunity to give structural substance to this interdisciplinary attitude. “The Senior Fellow programme also gave me the opportunity to get to know the university even better and to work with so many colleagues coming from other disciplines and backgrounds.”
As of 1 December, Bald de Vries takes over Manon Kluijtmans’ role at the CAT. “I see this as quite an honor and view my new position as a nice exciting assignment. I am looking forward to working with Mirjam Bok, Mabelle Hernández and the entire CAT team to further explore and expand the beaten track in the areas of teacher development, educational innovation and Educational Scholarship.”