Floris van Berckel Smit is a PhD Candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). He holds a MSc degree in Public Governance (Utrecht University, 2017) and a MA degree in Political History (VU, 2018). Floris incorporates social science insights into historical research. His research focuses on the history of higher education governance, (New Public) Management, governance of private funding for education, Learning Histories, and oral history.

His research is embedded in the research group of Political History of the VU and the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent of Ghent University. He was a visiting scholar at Ghent University (2019-2020). Floris has participated in various projects in which he collaborates with historians, political scientists, educational scientists, public governance experts, and organizational sociologists. In 2020 he received a NWO-grant to conduct research on the rise of New Public Management in Dutch and Flemish university governance.

Pál Nyíri is professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research has included international higher education and the ethnography of organisations. He has been involved in numerous interdisciplinary research projects bridging the social sciences and humanities. Nyíri has published on internationalization in education and audit cultures in Western research institutions.

Jeroen Huisman is professor of Higher Education at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG), Ghent University. He holds a Master’s degree Educational Studies, University of Groningen, the Netherlands (1991) and a PhD in Public Administration of the University of Twente, the Netherlands (1995). In 2005, he was appointed professor of Higher Education Management at the University of Bath. in 2013, he was granted an FWO Odysseus project at Ghent University.

 He is editor of Higher Education Policy, co-editor of the Emerald series Theory and Method in Higher Education Research. He is furthermore member of the editorial board of Journal of Studies of International Education, Studies in Higher Education, European Journal of Higher Education, International Journal of Chinese Education and Tertiary Education and Management. He was member of the Executive Committee of EAIR (and past chair, 2011-2016), a European society for linking policy, research and practice in higher education.

Ab Flipse is the university historian of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He conducts and coordinates research on the history of universities in the 19th and 20th centuries (especially the history of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), of science, of medicine, and the science & religion debate. Lately his research has focused on the changing university governance and also on the spatiality and geography of universities in the Netherlands in the twentieth century; and the university ideals that were behind these changes. Having a university-wide position, Flipse also performs functions such as public outreach and advising administrators, faculty, and students on matters dealing with the history of the Vrije Universiteit.

Ronald Kroeze is Professor of Parliamentary History and director of the Netherlands Centre for Parliamentary History, which is embedded in the Faculty of Arts of Radboud University Nijmegen. Previously, he worked as associate professor of Political History and director of the History programme at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Earlier he was a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting scholar at the universities of Oxford (Corpus Christi College), Avignon, Warwick and Berlin (Humboldt). Kroeze’s research focuses on the history of global good governance, anti/corruption and colonial politics as well as on oral history, heritage (“uses of the past”) and the history of (New Public) Management, finance and businesses in the modern era.