Dear John,

a short summary of my comments is: "a big thank you"

when you came to Groningen in 1993, alfa-informatica was a small
department with only 4 lecturers. Three are still around: George,
Gosse, me.  The study program lacked a propedeuse, students would do a
first year in an Arts topic before they could come to us. There were
only small numbers of students. Now we have a full-fledged bachelors
programme in Information Science, with 50 new students each year, and
master programs in Computer-communication, Digital Humanities and
Information Science.

In research, CLCG established as an important center for anything
"linguistic" in the faculty, with Computational Linguistics now one of
the four groups of CLCG, and perhaps one of the most successful ones.
We have a endowed chair, growing number of students, growing number of
lecturers, and as of last wednesday, we have among us the best teacher
of this university. And yesterday, once again a cum laude PhD degree
was awarded to one of us!

I worked under your guidance almost 20 years. Very stimulating. On my
own, I would never have dared to apply for NWO Pionier grant. Obviously
this had a major impact on my career!!

Also: you protected us from budget cuts in several ways - e.g., by
doing statistics courses for the faculty.  

Your management style was perfect: stimulating, made us do things. You
were in particular very succesful in getting PhD students to finish
their work.

But not a dictator: you could listen too (for instance in discussion
about potential merge with computer science). 

I only had three minutes, so I am going to refer to a piece of text I
wrote together with Gosse and Martijn. It is the preface of a
Festschrift that was initiated by Martijn Wieling (you know how
insisting Martijn can be).  This turned out to become an amazing
success, which is telling a lot about your popularity with colleagues
here in Groningen, former colleagues, as well as colleagues from
various parts of the world.

The number of contributions speaks for itself: 41 chapters, 68
co-authors!!  We had to keep them strictly to our max length, or the
book would be unprintable.

I know you have been busy last two years mostly to get rid of all your
books, for this one you have to make an exception!

Published by "College Publications" in their "Tributes" series, edited
by Dov Gabbay.

Special thanks to Martin Kroon, former ReMa student, who volunteered
to do much of the editing - including manually converting some Word
submissions into LaTeX.

For people interested: there are free copies at the exit. If we run
out, please send me an email including your surface mailing address
and I will send you a copy.

I am going to hand it to you now. 


Thank you!