Research Fellow Martijn Nolen
After having enjoyed being Head of Legal Affairs at Tilburg University for the past five years, I recently made the transition to the Vereniging CVO Rotterdam en omstreken. This association maintains 38 secondary schools for 20,000 students. Here I fulfill the role of Secretary/Director of Governance and Policy.
Before joining TiU in 2018, I was a lawyer at Van Doorne NV in Amsterdam from 2004 to 2018 and assistant professor at the Molengraaf Institute of Utrecht University from 2014-2018. In 2017, I obtained my PhD at the Vrije Universiteit with Miek Laemers and Frank van Ommeren for a dissertation entitled 'The legal position of the director in education'. After that dissertation, I continued to conduct scholarly research even in my position as Head of Legal Affairs, including a research project on governance in education funded by NWO and completed in 2022 in collaboration with Marlies Honingh (Radboud University). I have published regularly on the administrative organization of education since 2004, both from the perspective of special education law and from the perspective of general law of legal persons. I also give guest lectures on education law at the Vrije Universiteit and various umbrella organizations in education. I was also one of the initiators of the course for deans and administrators of universities of UNL (UGOV) and of the Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (Vakkundig Besturen). I am currently busy writing a preadvice for the Education Law Association on the future of good governance in education in light of the knock-on effect in the semipublic domain of the general principles of proper and good governance.
In the coming years I would like to contribute to further embedding of Pieter Huisman's extraordinary chair in education law within TLS and in the Netherlands, participate whenever possible in the lectures on this subject, and am happy to be involved in the supervision of students and young PhD students. One of my dreams is to come together with Annemarie Neeleman (colleague at Vereniging CVO and as an administrative law lecturer at the Hogeschool Rotterdam) to form an interdisciplinary academic workshop focused on the administrative organization of education. I look forward to continue building together with Pieter Huisman in the coming years from the special environment of the Department of Public Law & Governance at TLS and look forward to new encounters.
Martijn Nolen
