Permalink Submitted by Ton Dietz on 13 September 2025
Organization/ affiliation:
former director ASCL and emeritus professor African Studies
Research Masters' studies should be regarded as pre-PhD training, with a major emphasis on individual and small-group coaching, and on fieldwork-based research and writing a thesis. It was and is very short-sighted to use formal criteria like numbers of students to decide about continuation or termination of RESMA programmes. The evidence of the high quality of the programme's students and products of the RESMA African Studies and of the research careers of many of the RESMA alumni afterwards shows that it is not only a short-sighted decision, but a stupid one, certainly for a University like Leiden. Hopefully they will soon decide that the programme should be restarted.
Research Masters' studies should be regarded as pre-PhD training, with a major emphasis on individual and small-group coaching, and on fieldwork-based research and writing a thesis. It was and is very short-sighted to use formal criteria like numbers of students to decide about continuation or termination of RESMA programmes. The evidence of the high quality of the programme's students and products of the RESMA African Studies and of the research careers of many of the RESMA alumni afterwards shows that it is not only a short-sighted decision, but a stupid one, certainly for a University like Leiden. Hopefully they will soon decide that the programme should be restarted.