Confidential advisors
If you are confronted with undesirable behaviour or suspect a breach of integrity at TU Delft, you can go to one of the confidential advisors for support and advice. The confidential advisor will listen to your story and help you explore the steps you can take.
All confidential advisors have a strict duty of confidentiality. If necessary, he or she can refer you to, for example, a university social worker, a student psychologist, HR or a legal advisor. If informal solutions are not sufficient, you can decide to submit a formal complaint or report. Also in this situation, the confidential advisor can provide advice and support.
Anyone who works or studies at TU Delft can turn to the team of confidential advisors. That is to say: staff, students, external doctoral candidates and researchers/teaching staff with a hospitality declaration.
Team composition
The team consists of nine internal confidential advisors and one external confidential advisor. Internal confidential advisors are employed at a faculty or university services department; their work as confidential advisor is a university wide role in which they have been appointed by the Executive Board. The external confidential advisor is not employed at TU Delft.
All confidential advisors can provide advice to anyone at the TU Delft. This means that it is up to you to choose to whom you want to turn, depending on your question and preferences. This can be an internal confidential advisor or the external confidential advisor. If necessary, the confidential advisor that you approach can refer you, after consultation, to a colleague within the team of confidential advisors with specific knowledge and expertise.
What types of issues?
You can contact the confidential advisors for questions relating to:
- Academic integrity. Issues in this field may touch upon a broad range of research related themes – from questionable methodologies and issues related to collaboration and authorship to violations such as plagiarism, falsification and fraud.
- Social integrity. This category includes undesirable behavior in the form of, for example, bullying, discrimination, sexual and other types of intimidation, stalking and violence.
- Organisational integrity. In relation to this domain one can think of violations related to, for example, ancillary activities, financial fraud, theft or abuse of power.
Within the team of confidential counselors, expertise is available in all of these domains: three of the internal confidential advisors are specialised in academic integrity, whereas the other six as well as the external confidential advisor focus on the domains of both social integrity and organisational integrity.
Of course, it is not a problem if you are in doubt about the category (or categories) to which the issue that you would like to discuss belongs. The confidential advisor that you turn to will think along with you and can refer you if necessary.
On this page the team members introduce themselves.
Information and management advice
In addition to their primary role as point of contact and sounding board, confidential advisors contribute to prevention and awareness in two ways:
- They provide information to staff and students;
- They provide solicited and unsolicited advice to the Executive Board and management about trends and developments within TU Delft.
An example of the latter is the yearly report of the confidential advisors. The 2022, 2021 and 2020 editions can be found here (texts are in Dutch).