Social and behavorial sciences TiU
From 1946 onwards, the College had two departments: one for economic sciences and one for social sciences. The latter department was officially given faculty status in 1963. This term has now been replaced by the English word “School,” and the former faculty now officially calls itself: Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (TSB). In the early Tilburg economics program, the social sciences were already playing a role, paying attention to sociology and business psychology. The newly independent faculty trained students to be sociologists, and it would take a while before psychology acquired a niche of its own. Actually, Tilburg got the psychology program as a consolation prize; when the Netherlands needed an eighth medical faculty, Tilburg was hoping to be able to win this sweepstake’s grand prize, but unfortunately it went to Maastricht. In compensation, Tilburg was allowed to establish a Sub-Faculty of Psychology, which it did in 1971. At that time, the Faculty consisted of two Sub-Faculties, operating relatively independently: Social Cultural Sciences and Psychology. It was not until 1987 that both Sub-Faculties merged into a single Faculty of Social Sciences (FSW), now called TSB.
Popularity
In the early 70s, sociology was a popular study program, with over 100 first-year enrolments and dozens of working students who took part-time programs. In their Master’s programs, students could choose to do specializations such as welfare sociology, labor and organization, the state and public administration, spatial planning and developmental sociology. This last program in particular was popular with socio-critical students, whose criticism, for that matter, also concerned bourgeois sociology itself and whose activists in those days advocated a “sociology that was at the service of the people.” By the late 70s, interest in Sociology was on the wane, and the Sub-Faculty responded by introducing a number of multidisciplinary programs that were later to develop into independent programs: Policy and Organization Sciences (BOW), Personnel Sciences (PEW) and Leisure Sciences (VTW), which pulled in large numbers of first-year students for many years. Such was not the case for Labor and Social Security Sciences (ASZ), which, just like Sociology, only managed to attract a few dozens of students and was dropped in 1998 when the faculty was being reorganized. In that year, Leisure Sciences was relocated to the Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Programs and studies
In the year 2017, some remnants of the other programs remained at the Bachelor's and Master's level: Sociology, Human Resource Studies and Organization Studies. Since 2015, the TSB has offered a Bachelor’s program that focuses on exploring “wicked problems”: Global Management of Social Issues. Despite the program’s small scale, the discipline of Sociology is an irreplaceable component of the TSB. Since 1987, Tilburg sociologists have also been frontrunners in large-scale studies into standards and values in Europe: the European Values Study (EVS). In its early days, the Tilburg Psychology program had a strongly behavioristic and American slant, with students learning in practicals, for instance, how to teach pigeons certain tricks. One of its departments performed experiments with rats. For some years, a monkey lived on the premises. The psychologists’ building is not called an institute but a psychological laboratory. The well-known Amsterdam architect Cees Dam designed a gorgeous laboratory for the psychologists, but as funds were insufficient, this would never get built, and the psychologists would be accommodated in prefab buildings for many years.
Ministry measures
In the 80s, academic education in the Netherlands was affected by austerity measures, designated by the euphemism “selective shrinkage and growth” by the Ministry. In 1986, the Education Minister proposed to relocate the Tilburg Psychology program to Nijmegen and the Nijmegen Sociology program to Tilburg. Protest campaigns (“Brabant is fighting for its university”) and diplomatic consultations were to follow. The Rector Magnificus, Ruud de Moor, himself a Professor of Sociology, managed to get the Minister to withdraw this plan. However, the Tilburg and Nijmegen programs needed be better attuned, with Tilburg focusing more on labor and society topics and Nijmegen on clinical psychology specializations. For the Tilburg Faculty of Social Sciences, this meant a drastic reorganization.
Profile
Fortunately, history has its own irony. In the 21st century, none of the agreements made with Nijmegen matter any longer. Besides a Dutch-language and English-language Bachelor’s program, the Psychology program has three principal Master’s domains: Social Psychology (with specializations in the fields of Economic Psychology and Labor and Organization Psychology); Psychology and Mental Healthcare (with specializations in Clinical Psychology, Child & Youth Psychology and Forensic Psychology); and Medical Psychology, a unique program in the Netherlands that was launched in 2006. This program works in close collaboration with hospitals in the region, and its students do a one-year internship in university hospitals. The specialization of Economic Psychology, a typically Tilburg specialization, was launched by its originator, Professor Van Veldhoven. He was the first to hold the chair by the same name, which was instituted in 1972. These days, the University has a research institute in this domain, in which psychologists and economists collaborate: the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics (TIBER).
Fraud
The Faculty’s programs are arranged in departments. In addition, the Faculty has a Department of Methodology and Statistics (MTO), fusing expertise in the field of research methodologies and techniques (see also mathematics and statistics). In 2011, the TSB was rocked by the so-called Stapel fraud affair, when Professor and Dean Diederik Stapel was exposed as a scientific fraud. Scholars reproduced some of his experiments and found very different results. Stapel was instantly dismissed. There was appreciation, as a matter of fact, for the way in which the University and the Faculty dealt with this crisis. Judging by the increasing student numbers and favorable education and research assessments in the year 2017, however, reputational damage seemed to be limited.