A lot more students than ever before knock on the University gate, but once they’re in, the resources are not enough. Instead the University’s operations are more about scientific research excellence, and which is far from the students’ every day life. But if Lund’s dream about world class and international attractiveness should stay alive it is time to rethink.
This is what we call capability development. It is Wednesday before lunch and it is close to eleven o’clock. At the LTH Union House there are about 150 introduction course students present at the economics course. Facebook feeds are being scrolled, and the air is lulling. A woman on the seventh row has succeeded in buying a T-shirt at Tradera.
– “Then we have to think about the activity structure and the activity pattern”. The lecturer’s soft but monotonous Scanian goes on. The clock’s minute hand moves as slowly forward as it usually does when three hundred pair of eyes follow its movement. An ardent passion for the subject is hard to find. A living and committed meeting between student and teacher is difficult to discover. But then again nobody can claim that the conditions for an excellent tuition is optimal.
Since 1994 the costs for almost all introduction courses have increased a lot more than the university capitation allowance paid by the government to finance the operations. This has resulted in fewer lectures, less contact with the teacher and bigger teaching groups. The students’efforts might to a certain extent also have gone down, because studies have shown that there is a correlation between the number of lectures per week and how much time spent on self-studies. The more there is of one thing, the more it will be of the other. –”If you have too few lectures you will not be enough stimulated,” says Mats Ericsson, chairman of SULF (Sveriges universitetslärarförbund). The answer to why the resources are becoming smaller can partly be found in the university capitation allowance paid. This should also cover all peripheral costs – that is, everything from wage-increases, rents, white board markers and computers. The universities are said to being compensated, but at the same time they have to increase their efficiency and production levels).
–”We are supposed to rationalize our operations, but explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity takes as long today as it took 40 years ago,” says Mats Ericsson. Also, the allocations given to the different introduction courses are based on resource calculations made 50 years ago – and there is no doubt the needs have changed since the end of the 1950s.
Five minutes walk from the assembly hall at the Union House, but light years away from the students of economics and their resources, we find Max Lab – the national laboratory for nuclear and accelerator physics doing research with the help of synchrotron light. On their web page the countdown is ticking and getting closer the inauguration of MAX IV – the billion-dollar investment plant, right now built on the northern plateau of Lund. In 2016 this will be finalized and ready with the best performance in the world of its kind. This will at the same time be a feather in the Lund university cap. However, in this two-floor brick house where Max Lab is doing their operations, the number of students are easily counted.
– “All together we have a lot of research and very few students at the Faculty of Science. The consequence is that we have a hard time to be individually qualified as the qualifying system is built on the number of hours you teach,” says Christian Stråhlman, a postgraduate at Max Lab. The trend is that while the introduction courses are benched the science excellence plays the first chain of formation in the university rink.
The Swedish Higher Education Authority presented in a report in October 2013 that the income of Swedish Universities regarding research had increased with 19 per cent since 2008. Up to 2016 the increase should be four billion Swedish kronor every year.
–”I would say that research has experienced a revolution in recent years while education is the same as it was in 1984 when I began my university studies,” says Mats Benner, research policy professor at Lund University. Mats Benner is worried about the development, and to lose the close bond between research and education dictated in the Higher Education Act.
– The risk is that this is two parallel worlds, or even contradicting worlds. In theory you would think they harmonize and a research intensive university has a fantastic environment in which you are activated in a thrilling project from the first day. The tendency is rather that they are separated, unless there is some good idea of how to keep them together. Why did this happen? Perhaps we should start with polemical article published in Dagens Nyheter, August 2008. The Minister of Education, Jan Björklund, and the Minister of Research at that time, Lars Leijonborg, wrote that Sweden as future nation of knowledge needed a clear signal of a break in the trend: the research bill from 2008 should exceed everything that the Social Democrats had done in the field and doubled the sum from the earlier research bill. Furthermore a number of so called “strategic research fields” were designated to get most of the money. These fields were considered to solve important social problems, and at the same time had a chance to hold their own ground in the international competition. Thereby the researchers within medicine, technology and climate became the major winners and the Lund University scooped most allocations of the universities in Sweden. The history repeated itself during the next research bill in 2012, but now with the slogan that jantelagen had to be set aside. This time the focus would most of all be at excellence, that is, the best would get more to become even better. The faculties based on research became even more focused on research while faculties with many students continued in the same way. The asymmetric relation between education and research became even clearer.
The complaints came quick. The Social Sciences and the Humanities felt forgotten and questioned on what grounds the analysis of the future had been based. Would really society’s future problems be solved by technology only?
– “The Social Sciences is at present not highly prioritized neither on the national nor on the university level”, says Ann-Katrin Bäcklund. She is dean of the Social Sciences faculty and as such the person who has signed the risk analysis of the faculty in October. In the analysis the management, the board, the head of the departments and the students have listed risks that have a high probability of happening and at the same time to give large effects. One of the effects is a reduced magnitude of the Social Science research at Lund University.
–”The problem is that there’s neither logic nor fairness from the state or the universities on how to share research funds between the fields,” says Ann-Katrin Bäcklund. Further problems occur when you are working at a university, that together with third parties have decided to build the world’s prime synchrotron light source.
– “The government listened to the universities criticism about the fact that we not only can have strategic research fields but also have to have money for basic research. In 2015 the universities will get 900 million kronor of free research funds, but as it looks right now the faculties in Lund will not get any part of those funds,” says Ann-Katrin Bäcklund. All indications say that the money will fund the big research plants like Max IV, ESS and Medicon Village. The same applies to the 90 millions that should have been shared among the faculties in 2104.
–”There might be 5-6 millions left of the 900 millions, but this is a small sum in comparison,” says Ann-Katrin Bäcklund. In comparison to, for example, the Faculty of Science the problem is suddenly reversed. A system with many students and little research doesn’t generate any winners either.
Sven Strömqvist is pro-Vice-Chancellor with research responsibilities at Lund University. The title made him move from the office at the Language and Literature Center, where he as humanist and linguist had his nest. Instead his files and piles of paper now crowd the second floor of the magnificent University building. He is happy about seeing us. Loves to talk about how he wants strong bonds between education and research.
–”I would like to argue that this is the essence of the whole university world. Sometimes you get to hear that in research you find the new knowledge and in the teaching you mediate it. I think this bond as far too weak”. That is why Sven Strömqvist also understands why the Faculty of Social Sciences thinks the ventures done right now are rather ratty.
–”This is nothing to dodge about, but the government’s demands on us as co-financiers give us no choice”. But he doesn’t agree that the humanities and social sciences are forgotten on behalf of scientific excellence.
–”The strongest research environments at Lund University are science, medicine and technology and this has been the case for a long time. It is not relevant to compare these with the humanities and social sciences in Lund. Instead the social science subjects ought to be compared with the equivalent subjects in Helsinki, Oslo and Cambridge”.
This is however that the risk analysis from the Faculty of Social Sciences has in mind. If the rest of the Swedish universities now give higher grants to social science research while the research in Lund doesn’t get any, they will face a negative development. The probability of attracting qualified researchers drops, and at the same time it will be harder to keep what you already have. How would it then be possible to create this close relation where research and education flourish in symbiosis?
–”I do not understand that nobody cares about the asymmetrical relationship at any level,” says Ann-Katrin Bäcklund.
Too many researchers in relation to the number of students. Or too many students in relation to the number of researchers. This will not be able to produce a world class university for neither students nor teachers. To succeed in resisting the international competition from students and become that global teaching environment, nowadays more of a rule than an exception among visions and strategic plans, something has to be done. Earlier this fall a student outside Europe, a fee-paying student, was noticed as the student complained about the education at the University of Mälardalen.
–”This is the effect of inferior education and we have to be prepared to face that criticism,” Mats Brenner thinks. If you have put a price tag on something you shouldn’t be surprised when students ask: “How can you charge one hundred thousand kronor for this”?
– Everything is so standardized and packed in modules when it comes to education. There is no idea on how to systematically develop and improve the education, and that is necessary.
To become a top university it is therefore high time for the Lund University to change focus and put the student in the center.
–”At American top universities they put 60 to 70 per cent of their turnover in education and they never hire somebody just to get more resources,” says Mats Benner.
–”These universities are based on doing research, but this is created in an education centered environment. In Sweden we also have to find it great to have students in the laboratories instead of seeing student contact and education as something the cat has dragged in, which you are forced to do, if you not can buy out teaching with grants. Even if it all the time is repeatedly said that research and education are two separate issues with regard to finances they are inevitably connected. Even a future Nobel Prize winner has started his or her university life with an introduction course, lukewarm beer from the hallway kitchen, and exam anxiety.
–”Researchers recruited internationally always ask what they are going to teach. If the answer from the Swedish university is ‘no, you don’t have to’ they are totally flabbergasted. If they still are successful in getting a course to teach, the course looks the same as in the 1980s”, Mats Brenner says.
The idea of being isolated all the way to a Nobel Prize is absolutely unrealistic. Of course you have to be focused, but being focused is not the same as not teaching. On the contrary, to be focused means that you don’t spend time on repetitive and standardized items and instead are questioned by your students.
At the Union House the clock is soon close to 11.45. Eyes that aimlessly have wandered round the lecture hall suddenly become alert. A sudden hawking, and then the timely words, fifteen minutes earlier than expected:
–”I do think we can finish for today, the rest can be read online”. A mumble is spread among the benches, and the silvery computer screens are slammed together. Students sitting in the middle suddenly and impatiently get up to hurry those sitting at the brinks. Hardly hearable in the duvet rustling you can hear a comment on the lecture hall’s speaker.
–”Or was there someone who had a question”? No, no question. On the other hand you hear a bitter comment on the stairs down to the exit. “We have to read 300 pages for tomorrow, it’s fucking unbelievable“.
Text: Annika Skogar
Translation: Lars Jansson
