“A university should not be managed like the local kennel club”

The chronicle was first published in Dagens Nyheter, and republished in Universitetsavisa with the chronicler’s permission.

The intense debate about the state of academic freedom in Sweden has come to touch on issues such as the occurrence of a culture of silence where critical voices have no place (or with a term imported from the USA, cancel culture). It is of course not easy to measure the degree of academic freedom, but the most serious attempt that has been made shows that Sweden is in a very poor position compared to other European countries.

Education Minister Mats Persson’s (L) attempt to correct the problem by asking the universities themselves to assess how they handle this problem has obviously failed. Asking the perpetrators to decide for themselves whether something wrong has been done rarely leads anywhere.

In this matter, one must ask the basic question why do we have universities at all? Why should theoretical physicists, theologians, political scientists and mathematical biologists work within the same organization at all? Why don’t businesses, interest organisations, religious communities, political parties and ideological struggle organizations finance their own needs for new knowledge and education?

One can really, as has been expressed, ask oneself what the hell one as a taxpayer gets for the money from this business if, as is often claimed, it only functions as an instrument of power for already privileged groups. It is not a question of small sums, the higher education sector costs the country’s taxpayers almost as much as the defence.

One reason for the public funding is that the university idea has been extremely successful in creating wealth. Research into the history of ideas shows, for example, that up until the 16th century the educational institutions in the Arab-Muslim world were far more prominent than was the case with the Western European universities. What caused the latter to pass by and leave the rest of the world’s universities far behind, was precisely that they came to possess an institutional autonomy in relation to both secular and religious authorities.

One of the most prominent researchers on the position of science in the world is Jonathan Cole, former chancellor of the renowned Columbia University in the USA. In his much-discussed book about the strong position of the top American universities, he emphasizes that the basis for the many key research results that have been produced has been precisely academic freedom. But Cole interestingly adds that “some of the most subtle threats to academic freedom come from within the academy itself.”

My experience is precisely this, that a fundamental problem is that a very large part of those active within this sector do not understand what a university is. Many cannot distinguish the activities of their university from that which would apply to a company, a think tank, a lobby organisation, an ideological struggle organization or in some cases even from the local dog club.

The basic principles for what should distinguish knowledge production at a university from the aforementioned type of organization are unknown and/or foreign to a large part of Sweden’s university teachers and researchers. These principles are of course not set in stone, but are well established in various international university declarations, of which the Bologna Declaration from 1988 is the most established. In it, a number of principles are highlighted, such as, for example, that the business must be “independent of all political, ideological and economic power combinations”, that research freedom is the universities’ “fundamental life principle”, and that one must “fight intolerance and always be open to dialogue”.

Perhaps the most famous philosopher in this area, Robert Merton, has pointed out that universities differ from other knowledge organizations in that it is what you do, not who you are, that should count. This means that things such as status, ethnicity, social background and gender should not be decisive principles for how people’s research results should be assessed.

But at Umeå University, a principle seems to have been established that only people with a Sami background are allowed to research and teach about Sami culture. At the Linnaeus University, the management claims that it is perfectly fine to prescribe which theories should apply in research when professorships are advertised. From the student and researcher side at these educational institutions, there is a silence of indifference about these questions.

The in and of itself well-intentioned debate that has taken place on this issue has concentrated to a far too large extent on individual abuses that have taken place. The more fundamental problem of the researchers’ lack of knowledge about what should distinguish the activities at a university has not been problematised to a sufficient extent.

One possibility to remedy these conditions is to use the university’s foremost and best means of achieving change, namely education. The research training should include a separate course where you have the opportunity to analyze and reflect on the university’s idea and the principles behind academic freedom, for example through a month’s training.

Today, these young researchers have to spend considerable time (at my place of study ten weeks) on courses in higher education pedagogy. During the almost 30 years I have been active in research training, I have never heard anything positive from any PhD students about these courses. On the contrary, they are generally considered to be of poor quality and consist mostly of trivialities.

The time could have been better spent, for example on a qualified education about what specifically characterizes the type of organization they will be working within.

The chronicle has been translated from Swedish by ChatGPT, the translation reviewed by Tore Oksholen.