Dear reader,

The faculty currently adorned with the somewhat cryptic abbreviation 'SBE VU' has long since entered academic retirement. With a respectable age of 75 years, the moment of emeritus status has slipped away from active memory and found its place in the archives of history. Since the last anniversary, SBE has continued to grow both in quantity and quality. It is quite conceivable that the total number of bachelor and master students in the academic year 2023-2024 will surpass the record threshold of 8,000, in addition to approximately 2,000 annual participants in our postgraduate education. With the upcoming EQUIS accreditation – another obscure acronym – the faculty joins the small elite of business schools bearing that mark of recognition, along with a double AACSB stamp of approval. But this is not where it ends. Fortunately, I am confident that as we celebrate this joyous milestone, we can already look forward to the next 75 years, undoubtedly with challenges, but certainly with various new successes.

The university, with its faculties, is an organizational form remarkably robust, with roots dating back to classical antiquity. The great importance of building knowledge and dissemination is timeless. Undoubtedly, by the 150th anniversary of SBE in the future, VU Amsterdam and SBE will have taken a form different from what we consider modern in 2023 because each era has its own modernity—a modernity each time deems superior. Perhaps everything will be fully digitized by then. Maybe robots will be teaching other robots. Perhaps the university has opened a second SBE on Mars. Maybe the scientific method is entirely automated. Perhaps the economic discipline no longer exists because all scarcity has vanished. Maybe business administration has been replaced by life sciences. Nothing is more uncertain than the future. But knowledge remains the raw material of progress. This was true when early humans discovered the power of fire, and it will continue to be so in the next 75 years. Recognizing this fact is worth celebrating.

Arjen van Witteloostuijn

Dean of the School of Business and Economics