The University of Groningen (RUG) has appointed Professor Arjen Versloot as interim professor of Frisian language and culture for the next five years. The RUG announced this on Wednesday. This makes the professor of Germanic Linguistics the only professor of Frisian in the Netherlands. He is seconded from the University of Amsterdam two days a week.
Frisian enjoys protected status as the second state language. The RUG receives an annual subsidy of 110,000 euros from the province of Friesland to keep Frisian at the university. Currently, the subject of study has four students. This subsidy must be used to pay for a specialized professor, among other things. Last September, Professor of Frisian Studies Goffe Jensma retired, meaning that the Netherlands lost its only professor in this field, meaning that the RUG no longer adhered to its agreement with the province.
Read also And then there was no longer a professor of Frisian language and culture, against the agreements
‘Not a suitable candidate’
However, postdoc Anne Merkuur was appointed as assistant professor of Frisian, for two days a week. That decision was met with a lot of resistance. Seventy writers, scientists and administrators sent one critical open letter to the RUGparliamentary questions were asked and Minister Hanke Bruins Slot (Interior and Kingdom Relations, CDA) said he was “genuinely concerned” about the preservation of Frisian as a university discipline.
In the middle of last year, the RUG started looking for a professor to succeed Jensma on a permanent basis. According to the university, that recruitment did not produce a suitable candidate. The director of the Frisian historical center Tresoar Arjen Dijkstra said in January against NRC that there were at least ten suitable candidates within the academic field, but ‘not all of them were approached by the RUG’. Professor Versloot has been appointed for five years, after which the RUG will have to look again for a permanent employee for the position.