by Annemieke Klijn

If there is one person who from the very beginning threw herself into new developments at Maastricht University, it is Ine Kuppen (1945-2022). Various times in her 38-year-long career at this university she was closely involved in yet another innovation. In early 1974 she started out as secretary of the UM’s first rector magnificus, Harmen Tiddens. At the time, secretaries were asked to perform all kinds of educational and organizational tasks beyond clerical work and making coffee. Kuppen was one of the organizers of the university’s opening ceremony on 9 January 1976, and she also became the first head of the rector’s office. Next, she set up the secretariat of the Network of Community Oriented Educational Institutions for Health Sciences. Today this Network, founded in 1979 by twenty medical faculties worldwide with support from the World Health Organization, has over 200 members. Its aim is to bring medical curriculums into line with everyday healthcare as much as possible, often in combination with some form of problem-based learning.

In the early 1990s, Ine Kuppen provided support to staff who, much to their regret, had to move from the inner city to the new campus in Randwijck. And later she initiated the alumni-policy of Maastricht University: it was her ‘sacred conviction’ that alumni are the pride and joy of any university. Her heart went out – and goes out – in particular to the first crops of medical students, who needed to prove to the outside world that their Maastricht problem-based education had equipped them with knowledge and skills that were at least as good as those of medical graduates from elsewhere. Ine Kuppen has always attached great value to sound relationships among the university’s staff members, and this is why more and more she began to resent the inevitable bureaucratization.