Our Vision

For the love of learning.

Transformative learning is an approach to learning and teaching that assumes that learning is not just about acquiring knowledge, but about discovering who you are and want to be or become as a student, as a person, and as a global citizen. Teaching is all about enabling that adventure of discovery. One of the great attributes of UCR’s Liberal Arts and Sciences approach to undergraduate education is that it fosters and supports such transformations. As a college, we encourage our students to cross boundaries between academic disciplines, to take risks and discover, to not simply accept what they are passionate about but to expand on it, for their growth. Some students reach such growth by staying strictly within the academic environment, others need to connect their learning with challenges outside the academic environment. Transformative learning values, encourages, and enables both.

Our student body told us; “we came to UCR for the love of learning.” Phrases like “my journey through the curriculum,” “building my individual program,” “making my own connections between disciplines,” are typical of such conversations. Our students indicate and value movement, change, creativity, and adventure. The love of learning is about enjoying the transformations and the growth that liberal approaches to learning brings. It is UCR’s mission to offer the right conditions for such transformative learning.

Always be curious. Always learn. Always be supportive. And always innovate.

UCR’s mission is to offer a curriculum, extra-curricular programs, campus facilities, and connections with external partners that help to realize our vision. We cherish our practice of innovation. We will challenge not only what we do, but also how we do it, always asking ourselves if we are offering our students and employees what they expect and need from us to achieve our shared goals. We will select highly motivated and talented students who consciously enter the challenge of transformative learning in a broad and open curriculum and a safe and supportive inner-city campus. Our faculty will stand for the craft of academic teaching in innovative and transformative ways; teaching that is rooted in best theory and practice, and that challenges not just what we think, but how we think. Our administrative departments work from a similarly open and inquisitive perspective, taking pride in enabling the teaching and learning we offer.

In short, we will be curious. We will learn from our past and each other. We will support each other. And we will innovate to solve problems and capitalize on opportunities. It is therefore a key part of our mission to integrate the values of freedom, responsibility and participation in everything we do. And not just as ideals we support, but as values that guide what we do, to achieve our goal of transformative learning and our vision as a leading LAS college where students can go beyond themselves to become the change they want to see in the world.

Freedom. Responsibility. Participation.

UCR’s vision and mission is rooted in our core values of freedom, responsibility, and participation. These values are what shape our community and therefore are what we, as a college, stand for:

Freedom

We champion freedom. We cultivate a sense of curiosity rooted in knowledge, inquiry, and good practice. We want our students and colleagues to be free to ask important and difficult questions, develop creative approaches to problems, and have the courage to make changes and transform practice if needed.

Responsibility

We care for each other and for the world around us. We value equality, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability. We shape the world through our actions. We act with integrity. When we can change something for the better, offer help, or make a difference, we choose to do so.

Participation

We are inquisitive and engage actively and productively with the ideas of others. We are curious, rational thinkers who make common decisions based on the best available information and the collective good. We are never too wedded to our assumptions or ways of working. If we uncover new, relevant insights indicating that we should change, we do and act with determination, together.

UCR is the only sizeable stand-alone college in the Netherlands, away from the bigger-city- environment. It is the place to be for students, faculty, and staff who value a strong sense of community in a stand-alone, liberal arts environment, placed in a beautiful medieval town and a natural delta area in which some of the world’s greatest challenges of climate change (such as water, energy and food, sustainability, and the social and cultural transformations associated with it) can be studied.

In this unique environment, our students are registered as students of Utrecht University, one of the leading universities in Europe, and work with professors who have chosen to build their careers in undergraduate Liberal Arts and Sciences education. UCR actively contributes to the celebrated culture of educational innovation that Utrecht University is well known for. And as one of only few LAS colleges globally that does so, UCR offers a number of tech-focused tracks in sciences and engineering, which can be combined with a myriad of possibilities in arts and humanities, social science and the natural sciences. We actively combine forms of knowledge and innovations, rather than separate them.

UCR will focus on the connections through which we can exists and thrive as a small-scale, stand-alone institution – something that makes us unique in the Netherlands. Balancing this stand-alone uniqueness with great opportunities that can come with even stronger connections, is a core strategic aim in the years to come.

Strong connections with the outside world start from good connections within. With good, personable, and effective relationships between students, academic, and administrative staff, our community is even more likely to thrive. Continued care for the value-based relationships within our community will therefore remain a basis for all cooperation.

As a college, we will:

• Trust – Members of the UCR community are open and honest in their thoughts, actions, and all forms of communication.
• Have mutual respect – At UCR we work together with mutual respect and value each other’s input. We find solutions based on collective insight, wisdom, and creativity.
• Have acute self-awareness – We take responsibility for our words and actions and are aware and mindful of the impact we have on the people around us.
• Be inclusive – We welcome and embrace diversity in people and opinions and actively consider them in our institutional decision-making.
• Be transparent – At UCR we are transparent about our organizational rules, decision-making, and finances.

Objective: UCR will conduct an employee satisfaction survey every 2 years. The survey will, among other things, seek to evaluate the sense of connectedness and relationships amongst colleagues.

Status: First survey has been completed.

The strength of UCR lies in the consistently high quality of teaching and learning within academic tracks and the combinations between tracks and courses from which students ‘build their own curriculum’.

Transformative learning is often inspired by students and faculty making connections that they would not normally make without crossing borders between tracks, departments, academic and non-academic challenges. To make such enriching confrontations less dependent on the initiatives of individual professors, we will foster them institutionally by creating intellectual hubs around a number of themes within UCR.

UCR will launch three thematic intellectual hubs which will serve the purpose of helping us reach the said innovations.

• Data Science and AI – Focuses on promoting data literacy across the curriculum.
• Sustainability – Focuses on the physical, technological, and social challenges which can be explored and researched in Delta areas understood as “living labs”.
• Educational Innovation – Focuses on innovations in teaching and learning in the Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Departments will continue to be responsible for offering the disciplinary tracks in their academic disciplines. Thematic hubs do not replace departments, but instead enable further cross- departmental cooperation.

Objective:  The entire UCR community will be invited to engage in conceptual and more practical preparations. Next steps include implementation where innovations from the themes will be introduced or further developed in the curriculum.  

Status: Hub-groups have formed and started working on identifying opportunities within and outside the curriculum. 

As one of the envisioned founding partners, UCR played a key role in the launch of the Delta Climate Center in the Province of Zeeland, which focuses on research, education, and valorization on society’s climate adaptability regarding water, food, and energy. UCR engages in this project both for academic reasons, and to contribute to the important goals of sustainable development within our Zeeland province and associated with the climate agenda worldwide. The center is a cooperation with UCR, UU, Wageningen University and Research (WUR), Netherlands Institute for Marine Research (NIOZ), HZ: University of Applied Science (HZ), and Scalda for vocational learning as core partners.

UCR also hopes to take the lead in developing innovative educational and research projects that include students from HZ, Scalda, and UCR. In their future lives, all these students will work in environments that are diverse when it comes to the educational background of its members.

Objective: UCR aims to become part of this highly innovative form of cooperation as soon as the center is established. Our participation will be a success if more undergraduate and faculty research becomes possible through this connection, students and faculty are able to do work as part of research groups regarding this agenda, and we can help innovate our own and fellow institutions’ educational programs with an eye to Zeeland’s and the world’s sustainable future.

Status: The DCC has launched and several colleagues have already been involved in different research groups. 

The teaching philosophy is one of bringing together solid disciplinary knowledge and skills, societal challenges, and learning. Students and faculty are free to pick disciplinary, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches. With the introduction of the Engineering department, students have the opportunity to study, design and build small-scale, high-tech solutions in the rich ecosystem of Zeeland.

In these evolving times students and faculty of UCR are already adjusting to the possibilities and challenges that the data-revolution brings to academic knowledge and its applications. The development of the Data Center should promote data literacy across the curriculum at UCR and beyond.

Objective: UCR will, with our regional and funding partners, evaluate the success of the Engineering department to date. We will explore these new insights and compare them to the original business plan for the project. 

Status: Adjustments to the business case have been made and are the department is still evolving.

The heart and soul of the UCR community is its student life on our inner-city campus, characterized by an intensive integration of our students’ academic, social, and personal lives. We will take new steps in developing the right environment for this spirit of UCR. Three things are important here: supporting our student boards in focusing on their core tasks, the further development of student well-being and student life services, and strong campus facilities to back up community life.

Per 2022 the Executive Board of UCR has been extended to include a student assessor.  The student assessor is a second or third year UCR student who has an advisory voice on all student-related matters, both curricular and extra-curricular, that UCR’s Executive Board is faced with.

Existing well-being and life skills programs will be ramped up, including further development of workshops in mindfulness, yoga, and stress prevention, information sessions on issues such as diversity training, consent, sexual safety, and substance use and abuse.

UCR is committed to remain a residential campus. Learning and living together on our inner-city campus is at the heart of our approach to transformative teaching. We want our students to enjoy guaranteed, good, and affordable housing, close to UCR’s main academic buildings.

Objective: With the help of external government funding of the Quality Agreements and NPO monies, we will create a UCR garden – providing students with a tranquil and healthy outdoor space to learn, study, and interact – and a UCR culture program that enables students to see and learn more about the cultural life of the great natural and cultural sites and institutions around Zeeland.

Status: The garden has been established and students gather here to garden and relax.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) have always been core values of UCR’s teaching and learning philosophy. UCR’s goals are to sustain and foster a more inclusive community in a diverse world, for students, faculty, and staff. Diversity refers to the wide array of categories of identity including ethnicity, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic position, philosophical, political and religious beliefs, and physical and mental ability and challenges. We strive for an academic community and culture that encourages mutual understanding, tolerance and acceptance.

EDI will continue to play an important part in recruitment, both national and international, setting the stage for a more diverse student body. This will further be supported by the introduction of diversity scholarships for those students who lack financial means or experience geographical limitations.

The curriculum will be diversified and critical diversity literacy among students and employees will be promoted.  Our facilities and services will aim to be diversity- sensitive in matters of gender, ability, and race, and do so from a perspective of inclusion and treatment as equal of diverse members of our community.

Objective: The scholarship committee, in partnership with Admissions and the EDI Committee, will develop new and specific criteria to ensure that diversity plays an important role in deciding the outcome of scholarship applications, whether this relates to geographies, backgrounds, class, gender, or more.

Status: The first diversity scholarships are distributed for the Fall 2024 intake.

In the broadest possible sense, sustainability refers to the ability of something to maintain or “sustain” itself over time. The concept is often broken up into three core parts: economic, environmental, and social. At UCR, we understand that the environmental crisis the world faces today is urgent and should be regarded through a transdisciplinary approach that puts the societal challenge first. Hence, we look at sustainability in this holistic way; for UCR to thrive and not just survive.

In economic sustainability, we will focus on cost-savings without jeopardizing quality education, services, or facilities at UCR. We will also seek to strike a healthy balance between growth ambitions and optimal student numbers. Finding that sweet spot will be essential in securing the sustainability of the college. This includes costs saving measures in the form of energy, but also by evaluating whether processes or system can be run leaner.

Objective: UCR will explore immediate cost-saving measures to curb the direct and indirect cost of energy.

Status: Cost saving measures have been implemented and the growth of operating costs has been curbed.