(Original Swedish post published 2 October.)
The Management Council has spent a very busy day visiting Durham University and now we’re on our way home to Uppsala. Durham and Uppsala already cooperate in several areas and forums, and we are both members of the Matariki and Coimbra university networks. Staff can travel to Durham as Matariki Fellows.
Durham University has taken stock of its cooperative arrangements around the world and has then chosen a few universities in Europe and a total of ten worldwide that they want to enter into strategic partnerships with. Uppsala University is one of the higher education institutions they have asked to be a strategic partner. We do not have such a clear strategy when it comes to choosing who to cooperate with and how, but there are a number of universities that we can identify relatively easily as prioritised or strategic partners with whom we cooperate extensively across all three disciplinary domains. The Advisory Board for Internationalisation is making a survey of the cooperative arrangements prioritised by the disciplinary domains. The idea is to obtain a clearer picture of our map of the world based on this.
Durham University has recently produced a strategy for the period 2017–2027 that includes their work at local and global levels, education, research and the ‘wider student experience’. We particularly noted how clearly they have laid out a roadmap for the period with well-defined milestones, and also how they have set out criteria for success in terms of international students, ranking, percentage of women, income and contactable alumni. On the way home we discussed how our Mission and Core Values function, with the structure of programmes and action plans. Perhaps the next version of the Mission and Core Values should include the programmes to create a better whole. To sum up, it was an instructive visit and we intend to draw up an agreement that builds on existing cooperation but also shows that we want to develop more joint summer schools, programmes and various types of exchanges, including the students’ unions. The fact that students are represented in the Management Council at Uppsala University made a big impression – it’s a palpable expression of the strength of student influence here.
