Author: Vice-Chancellor’s Blog (Page 6 of 24)

On Friday, I (Eva) took part in a dialogue seminar on topical issues organised by the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF). The agenda included an update and analysis of HEI input to the government’s research bill, research infrastructure, the 2030 Agenda and European research policy.

According to the analysis presented by Professor Lars Geschwind of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, HEI input to the research bill reveals a clear consensus on certain issues: the research-education link, research infrastructure and health and life sciences were three major themes that recurred in the input from HEIs. It was pleasing to see that more HEIS raised the importance of autonomy and self-determination than in the past. The need to eliminate barriers hindering HEIs’ development has increased further in the context of international competition. We are also witnessing a tougher environment for academics, who are subjected to threats in Sweden and even more so in other countries. There is every reason to continue to take a clear stand for autonomy and increased self-determination, both individually and together. We chose to make this issue the starting point of our input. However, there was less unanimity among those of who had submitted input on some other issues, including exposure to competition and incentives for collaboration.

An in-depth discussion on research infrastructure came next. I was one of several participants to identify this as one of the key issues for the future in an opinion piece published by the newspaper UNT before Christmas. Funding is naturally a vital concern, with large amounts having been lost due to the weakening of the Swedish krona. The fact that research is an international activity is striklingly obvious in this context. Needless to say, increased costs make it more of a challenge to prioritise national research infrastructure, if there is actually any money to allocate. A heavy responsibility falls on the larger universities, like Uppsala, to cope with the situation. Of course it is also important for Sweden to work on increasing revenue at MAX IV and other facilities.

The afternoon began with a discussion on the 2030 Agenda from an HEI perspective. Olle Lundberg, Secretary General of Forte (the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare), and Johanna Adami, SUHF’s spokesperson for the 2030 Agenda, introduced the session. We noted that discussions on the issue of sustainability tend to focus on the environment and climate, and that the social dimension of sustainability also poses many serious challenges. If the sustainable development goals are to be met, there is an urgent need for evidence and long-term knowledge-building in areas such as widening inequalities, social exclusion and strained health and welfare systems as well. It is important that knowledge based on research is available and finds an audience so that the right measures are taken in society.

The day ended with a welcome discussion on European research policy, a highly topical issue. The EU is the third largest funder of Swedish research and an important platform for international cooperation, so it is important that we are involved in the shaping of policy. The Horizon Europe framework programme, which will come into effect in 2021, has been negotiated and contains much that is positive. The European Research Council (ERC), for example, will continue its mission to support frontier research, and the most important instruments for mobility and infrastructure will also continue. But there is also cause for concern. Financing is currently under debate and Finland, holding the Presidency, has proposed a reduction from 1.11 per cent of GDP to 1.07 per cent. Moreover, Brexit will leave a hole in the finances – though at the same time, it may open up new opportunities in our relations with the UK, which we must be sure to take (read the EUA briefing on Brexit).

In my invited comments, I emphasised the importance of a Swedish voice in Brussels and that the Swedish funding bodies’ coordination function EU-SAM needs to involve the HEIs in its work. Also, Swedish politicians are far too lukewarm in their interest, even though for every krona we invest in research we receive more money in return from the EU. They need to stand up for adequate funding for research and education, both in Sweden and in Brussels. The HEIs act through various university networks, but it would be an advantage to come together and pursue a common Swedish line. This would enable us to contribute things we are good at, such as synergies between research and education, where EU interest is growing, and to bring pressure to bear on important future issues. We should be involved and work for continued openness to the wider world, a long-term perspective in major partnerships and influence on the shaping of policy. The vision of increased cooperation between European universities has so far focused primarily on education, but research and innovation show up increasingly in the rhetoric. At the end of February I will be travelling to Brussels to discuss these issues with my colleagues in the Guild network. So we will come back to this issue during the spring.

A new semester is beginning. Welcome back! We hope that staff and students alike have had an enjoyable and well-deserved break over the Christmas and New Year holidays and feel inspired as they return at the start of a new year and a new decade. Eager new students have arrived to begin their studies at our University. We take this opportunity to remind anyone who can to offer a home to a student looking for somewhere to live at the beginning of the semester, so that more students can get off to a good start at Uppsala University. Do get in touch with the student housing agency, Studentboet!

We have kicked off this eventful year with a two-day conference with the Management Council, focusing on the future. This is a University-wide strategic group and an important interface between the University Management and academic operations, between the three disciplinary domains, between the administration and the core activities, and between students and the University.

The springboard for our work this year is the revised Mission, Goals and Strategies document that will now be put into practice by many people’s combined efforts. The document sets out goals for our work on developing and renewing our education and research, along with strategies for how to achieve the overall goal of contributing to a better world through education and research of the highest quality and relevance. We had a long, productive discussion on how to succeed in inspiring involvement throughout the University and how to check that we are achieving our goals. It isn’t easy to select the right indicators for follow-up. We want to know whether we are on the right track, without what we measure having unintended consequences or being used in the wrong way. The indicators must be broadly accepted, easy to measure and understand, and be specified at the right level in the University.

Having a Mission, Goals and Strategies document that brings together governance documents that were previously separate, and then incorporating as much as possible of what we want to do in our ordinary operational planning, provides a better foundation for the University’s development and renewal. Conflicting goals will be brought to the surface, which will facilitate necessary prioritisation.

At the conference we also took up all the important news from the disciplinary domains and the University Administration, it’s useful to hear about other people’s challenges, and to discover potential synergies. For example, an investigation into freestanding courses in the humanities and social sciences may naturally interest the rest of the University as well.

The students informed us that they have now formally established the organisation Uppsala University Student Unions, which will give the students a clearer voice (read more about this here). Cooperation between the student nations and students’ unions has also moved forwards, with several joint activities. All in all, this is very beneficial for student influence.

We also had interesting presentations on the ongoing work on Development Plan 2050 and the Buildings and Premises Plan, which between them will set us up well for the development of the University’s spatial and physical shape in Uppsala and Visby in the years to come.

2019 is drawing to a close – another eventful year in the world and at Uppsala University. The January Agreement gave us a government and has influenced politics in Sweden ever since. The climate crisis, Brexit and growing political unrest in various parts of the world have dominated the news. For the first time, we urged students on foreign exchanges to come home, because of the reports from Hong Kong.

Yet, though overshadowed by the headlines, progress is being made around the world, often on the basis of science. Every day at Uppsala University, new knowledge is created that helps to make the world a better place.

A great deal happens at our large University in the course of a year. Our research remains at the forefront. We have done well in the competition for research funding. As usual we were successful when the Swedish Research Council shared out project grants. Particularly in technology and natural sciences, and in humanities and social sciences, Uppsala received a high proportion of the available funding. We also did well in the Swedish Cancer Society’s call. Recently, three new Wallenberg Academy Fellows were approved. At international level, we received several large EU grants during the year. It is particularly pleasing that Europe’s research and development on future batteries is led from Uppsala University in the Battery 2030+ initiative.

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At home, we are seeing more multidisciplinary environments develop, for example in research on sustainability, antibiotic resistance, artificial intelligence, digital humanities and women’s mental health. CIRCUS offers a platform for interdisciplinary research on culture and society. The opportunities for cross-disciplinary initiatives are almost unlimited at our broad University. On Campus Gotland, we are getting underway with a multidisciplinary graduate school.

The internationalisation of education continues and we have an increasing number of students from other countries. The number of applications from fee-paying students increased more than at any other Swedish higher education institution – by all of 50 per cent. More new international Master’s programmes will be starting next autumn, so the expansion is likely to continue. Uppsala University won the Erasmus+ Actor of the Year distinction for systematic and successful work on international exchanges. One measure that attracted special attention from many quarters was the climate scholarships, which enabled exchange students to travel to their destinations by climate-friendly transport.

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The students’ unions and nations are important for Uppsala University. We are pleased that the unions have formalised their close mutual cooperation – this will further strengthen student influence. We support the students’ efforts to draw attention to the erosion of resources for higher education. We are also pleased that the cooperation between students’ unions and nations is progressing well following the joint investigation that was presented during the spring.

Work on the new Ångström Laboratory has continued and the first part, a new wing, is due to open next year. In this context, the Development Plan 2050 project is important for the future development of our city. The report that has been produced will now be discussed within the University to benefit from everyone’s thoughts. Consultations are due to be completed in March, after which the roadmap to the future can hopefully be finalised. The investments in our campus environments continue. Hardly had the partially remodelled Carolina Rediviva reopened before Gustavianum closed for much-needed renovation.

Our task in the University management is about creating conditions for the continued success of our University. This year we have benefited from the valuable advice of our newly established International Advisory Board, which visited us in the summer. Two major projects have just crossed the finishing line. After a process that started three years ago, the University Board has approved the University’s new rules of procedure. This document sets out the structure of the University’s governance – with management based on collegiality and active student influence – and clarifies roles and responsibilities in the University. At the same meeting, the University Board also adopted Uppsala University’s new mission statement (Mission, Goals and Strategies). The University’s overall goal of course remains unchanged: to conduct education and research of the highest quality and relevance. One change is that a number of medium-term development targets are formulated; another is that the strategically prioritised areas that were previously described in separate programmes – for Campus Gotland, collaboration, equal opportunities, internationalisation, quality and sustainable development – are now integrated in the Mission, Goals and Strategies.

Another important activity this year was to formulate Uppsala University’s proposals and comments on the government’s upcoming research bill. In our input, we particularly highlight the need for enhanced funding for vital but increasingly costly research infrastructure.

We have also started a review of our Appointment Regulations – the document that governs the forms of employment that exist at the University and arrangements for recruitment and career paths. Now we are taking the opportunity to move forwards when it comes to attracting the best researchers and teachers.

While world leaders face increasing expectations to agree on climate measures, we as a university are working to reduce our own climate footprint. The University’s environmental plan is under revision to ensure that our environmental ambitions are at the cutting edge. We welcome the great interest and commitment from staff and students. As usual, though, we would like to recall that the best contribution the University can make to a sustainable world is our research on climate leadership, energy technologies, battery storage, democracy, integration, antibiotic resistance and many other areas. Equally important are the many young people who graduate every year and leave the University to contribute by their expertise to the development of society.

The University can look back on yet another successful year and forward to an exciting 2020. We look forward to the research bill towards the end of the year, which we hope will give us even better conditions for long-term development and for helping to create a better world.

Many thanks to all of you – staff, students, friends and partners – who together contribute to the University’s success. We now wish you all an enjoyable and relaxing break over the holidays.

Eva Åkesson, Anders Malmberg, Caroline Sjöberg

This evening (10 December) we will be at the Nobel festivities in Stockholm. I (Vice-Chancellor Eva) will be wearing jewellery lent by Médecins Sans Frontières to draw attention to the global health challenges of antibiotic resistance and drug-resistant tuberculosis. The jewellery is part of a collection created by alumni of Beckmans College of Design and exhibited at the Nobel Museum. The assignment was to give visual form to the lack of access to vital medicines in certain parts of the world.

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Several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have to do with health. Achieving these goals requires both multidisciplinary research and goal-oriented cooperation between different actors. Uppsala University is heavily involved in this area, notably through Uppsala Antibiotic Center, the international network ReAct and the annual Uppsala Health Summit, which next year will focus on antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance is a serious problem affecting all types of modern healthcare, including cancer therapies, transplantation and prematurely born children. It is a complex issue. While we need to use antibiotics as restrictively as possible to limit the development of resistance, in poorer parts of the world many people are dying because they lack access to antibiotics.

Research to develop effective new drugs takes a long time and costs a lot of money, and as a result the medicines are expensive. If, on top of that, they have to be sold restrictively, the companies either have to set very high prices or sell large quantities. Neither of these options is desirable. Tackling these problems requires a combination of research, behavioural change and a solution to the issue of profitability.

This means knowledge is needed from various disciplines: medicine, economics, behavioural science. Uppsala University has research in many areas, from new drug development and knowledge about the development of drug resistance to research on new business models and behavioural change. Uppsala Antibiotic Center, which is a strategic initiative at the University with doctoral students from several different disciplines, takes an interdisciplinary approach to the issue. This generates new questions, which can lead to new answers as to how to solve the problems.

Uppsala University also has a leading role in COMBINE, a multinational EU project in which 11 partners from academia and industry together seek to pave the way for more effective antibiotic development. Anders Karlén, Professor of Computer-Assisted Drug Design, has the important role of project coordinator. The six-year project has a budget of EUR 25 million and is backed by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) – a partnership between the EU and the EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations).

Read more about the challenge of antibiotic resistance on www.uu.se.

This week we have celebrated the formalisation of cooperation between all the students’ unions at the University. This means better conditions for our students to remain actively involved in the affairs of the University – which is good. A university must listen to its students to keep up with the times and adapt the programmes and courses it offers to meet new needs. Those who represent the students have an important role to play and should be involved in as many contexts as possible.

This year we celebrate 100 years of democracy in Sweden. A lot has changed since Uppsala Student Union was established in 1849. At that time, there were few students and they came from the upper echelons of society. The first woman student, Betty Pettersson from Gotland, for example, was only admitted in 1872. These days we have tremendous breadth in our student body, and this is a great advantage. Our University is open and international. Naturally, that makes demands on us as a University and on the unions that represent the entire student body. We need the help of the unions to pick up issues from across the entire student body, not least our international students, who bring experience from other countries that is important and useful for us. The unions also face challenges channelling issues that engage many students, such as the climate issue, into arenas for student influence, as well as issues associated with students’ wellbeing.

Meeting students and the students’ unions gives those of us in the University management new perspectives on how best to approach the future. This inspires us and helps us to develop. We hope that the cooperation now established between the unions will give all students a stronger voice.

Today Uppsala University signed sustainability pledges at a ceremony at Uppsala Castle, together with representatives of the region and municipalities, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and County Governor Göran Ernander.

This constitutes a declaration of intent that we will act jointly to reduce our climate impact by various measures. The more actors in the region join this platform on their own individual basis, the greater the effect will be. It provides direction and creates commitment. We describe our undertaking in a joint opinion piece in the Uppsala newspaper UNT.

The climate challenge demands commitment and action at every level: international, national and regional. Others have praised the climate efforts in the county, but to achieve the national targets, we need to raise our level of ambition. We who created a common platform today can create change in our own organisations through governance documents and plans, but together we can achieve more.

A while ago we signed an agreement with Akademiska Hus to collaborate on shared sustainability goals, and the other day I decided on a climate pot to stimulate climate initiatives at the University, with a view to reducing our own climate footprint. We have long participated in the Uppsala Climate Protocol initiative, aimed at making Uppsala fossil-free by 2030 and climate-positive by 2050. Another current development is that we are poised to begin a revision of the University’s environmental plan, an important document to hone our internal efforts. And most importantly: Uppsala University continues to educate students and conduct research, thereby contributing the skills and knowledge required to solve the challenges facing society. Here we have long been at the forefront. But here too, we are taking new steps, for example by identifying areas where we can work in interdisciplinary ways with research, and education, in the area of sustainability. Change does not happen from one day to the next, it happens step by step.

The chairs of all students’ unions at Uppsala University have written an opinion piece headed “The government must save higher education”, published today in the Uppsala newspaper UNT. In it, they take up the erosion of resources that has occurred in recent decades. They object to the fact that the government only addresses research policy in its upcoming research bill and does not even mention higher education. They are quite right. Education is both an integral part of successful research and a prerequisite for the continued supply of new researchers. It is high time to turn the spotlight on the needs of education, preferably in a separate education bill focusing on quality and on the needs of society and research.

The demands the students put forward are absolutely legitimate: stop the erosion of the ‘price tags’ (the allowance per student that higher education institutions receive), scrap the productivity deduction (it’s not possible to learn more quickly now than in the 1990s) and revise the model for calculating the price tags.

One of the proposals we make in our input to the research bill is that 75 per cent of the erosion should be restored over the next four years to ensure the quality of education. To ensure renewal and regeneration, more unrestricted places are needed, in addition to places earmarked for specific educational programmes. It is also important to protect the freedom of education by law, just as research now enjoys constitutional protection. At a time of political uncertainty, it is vital to guarantee the independence of the universities.

Today we installed 25 new professors at a grand ceremony in the University Main Building. The ceremony was the culmination of a week of well-attended public inaugural lectures that gave the audience a fascinating sample of many aspects of our multifaceted University. Read about the professors and their research.

The Inauguration of Professors is a solemn and splendid ceremony in the darkness of November and as always it began with music played by the Royal Academic Orchestra. In the traditional inauguration speech by the Vice-Chancellor, I welcome the new professors to our University. In their new role, they are an important part of the future!

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During the ceremony we heard lectures by:
David Håkansson, Faculty of Languages: Sooner or later – the history and story of Swedish.
Tove Fall, Faculty of Medicine: Shortcuts to new remedies.
Philippe Wernet, Faculty of Science and Technology: Has nature already found solutions to the problem of energy?

In addition, we honoured some of our skilful teachers, who received the Distinguished Teaching Award, and this year’s winner of the University’s Innovation Prize ‘Hjärnäpplet’.

This week, MIRAI held its third and final MIRAI seminar at Uppsala University and Stockholm University, on the theme “Moving together towards a sustainable future”. Minister for Higher Education and Research Matilda Ernkrans spoke at MIRAI’s welcome reception and nearly 200 participants were present in Uppsala earlier in the week.

We listened to speeches by Johan Kuylenstierna from the Swedish Climate Policy Council, superstar Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai, founder and CEO of Cyberdyne, and our own battery expert, Professor Kristina Edström. The day concluded at Norrlands nation, where we enjoyed a sustainable dinner (vegan/game), keyed fiddle music and a Lucia procession (!). The week continued with workshops at Stockholm University. There were a large number of participants from Uppsala University: myself (Eva), Professor Lars Lannfelt, Dr Kristin Franzon and Dr Sara Ekmark Lewén (Public Health and Caring Sciences), Specialist Physician Shinji Yamamoto (Surgical Sciences), Lisa Åkerlund (Engineering Sciences), Dr Malgorzata Blicharska and Professor Anna Rutgersson (Earth Sciences), Professor Kristina Edström and Dr Haidong Liu (Chemistry), Dr Petra Jönsson (Physics and Astronomy), Dr Hanne Fjelde (Peace and Conflict Research), Björn Ingemarsson, Cecilia Nilsson, Dr Göran Lindström, Hillevi Englund, Jenny Nordquist, Per Kjellin and Dr Malin Graffner Nordberg (UU Innovation), Dr Johan Eriksson (Art History), Professor Leif Kirsebom (Cell and Molecular Biology/Art History) and Dr Ryoyo Ikebuchi and Professor Ulf Landegren (Immunology, Genetics and Pathology).

MIRAI (www.mirai.nu) is a Swedish–Japanese project that has been running since 2017 and focuses on early career researchers under the themes of Ageing, Material Science, Sustainability and Innovation. A total of 15 universities have participated, seven from Sweden and eight from Japan. Would you like to learn more about the forthcoming MIRAI 2.0? If so, you can contact Ulrica Ouline at the Division for Internationalisation, ulrica.ouline@uadm.uu.se

Public debate is increasingly a debate about research. Scientific findings rapidly hit the newspaper headlines and television news and spread – sometimes in distorted form – via social media. This is because research concerns all aspects of the life of society: plastic in the oceans, access to new vaccines, new batteries for electric vehicles, or the effect of measures to promote the integration of immigrants.
Research findings and their use are often controversial, and rapidly become the subject of political debate. How extensive is pollution from microplastics? Should new prohibitions or fees be introduced? Should the expansion of wind power be limited? Should a vaccine be made obligatory?
To a steadily increasing extent and in constantly new ways, research shapes people’s everyday lives, whether this concerns the content of education policy, GPS navigation, or the fact that more and more people have a supercomputer in their pocket: their mobile phone, which is a telephone exchange, a bank branch office, a travel agent, a juke box, a radio, a cinema, a health centre, a diary, a library – all rolled into one. It can be used to warn citizens in the event of an emergency, to establish a social and political forum for citizens – or to monitor them. Modern societies cannot function without the mobile phone, and research keeps adding new functions.

Research does not just affect the things people use – it also shapes their thinking. Concepts that only occurred in specialist journals ten years ago have now passed into everyday usage – words like ‘nanotechnology’, ‘laparoscopic surgery’, ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and ‘gene therapy’. Everyday language is also full of concepts from previous generations’ research – from ‘acceleration’ and ‘cold front’ to ‘blood pressure’ and ‘GDP’. Such concepts moreover have spread globally.
In a word: research and research findings have become the most powerful socially transformative force. This is reflected not only in improvements in the countless conveniences of everyday life and in language, but also in the great global epochal changes – the word ‘anthropocene’ is used for the age in which we now find ourselves, where human beings’ own activities are changing the Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including the climate.

When both the physical and the social world are increasingly transformed by human beings themselves, a lack of knowledge becomes a growing risk. How are we to respond to the next outbreak of Ebola? How quickly will the sea level rise, and what will the consequences be for human settlement, food production, the water supply and migration? What has Sweden learned from the forest fires in summer 2018 to prepare the country for the next time? How will self-driving cars change patterns of production and labour markets? Can technological measures be used to counter the danger to democracy presented by ‘fake news’? How is the next financial crisis to be overcome? What happens when bees die?
When such questions arise, it is worth remembering that it was many years of basic research on retroviruses that made it possible to quickly identify HIV at an early stage of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Without knowledge, infrastructure and research preparedness, society will be more vulnerable in the face of new challenges and unforeseen developments: countermeasures will come too late. And they will be expensive – the price of not knowing is high.
At the same time, this underlines the fact that research policy must provide ample scope for the free quest for true knowledge that we call basic research – and which provides a preparedness to meet different, unknown futures. Sweden – and the world – is reminded of this every year when the Nobel prizes are awarded: it often takes time, a long time, from award to application. It took ten years from the discovery of nitroglycerine by Professor Ascanio Sobrero to the invention and patenting of dynamite by Alfred Nobel.

Paradoxically, the growth of knowledge can create a lack of knowledge. The use of knowledge that research gave us in earlier times can weaken our ability to act today. The simplest example is antibiotic resistance. This is not due to our knowledge about antibiotics having become invalid. But the use of this knowledge, which was gained nearly 100 years ago, has so changed human beings’ bacterial surroundings that medicines are losing their efficacy. Consequently, our knowledge is inadequate. And this ignorance entails a great new danger.
The situation is similar in many areas. For example, the ubiquity of combustion engines has made transport and communications by land, sea and air easier – but has now become a major source of global warming. This is an unintended – and undesired – consequence. And this development has to be turned around to save the environment we live in.
Research can therefore be made obsolete by its own success. The knowledge community is self-transforming in the sense that the use of knowledge generates problems that can only be solved by new research and new knowledge. This is evident in the economy as well, where technological innovations threaten to exclude a growing part of the adult population from the labour market and a meaningful life. Because the labour market is not something that is – it is something that, through research, innovations and other factors, is constantly changing and becoming something else.

In a society in which the growth of knowledge makes current knowledge obsolete and undermines the competence people possess through everything from robotisation to artificial intelligence, education must provide skills that last for life: concepts that endure, codes for interpretation and abilities for action. Without this, the explosion of knowledge leads to the very opposite of mastery: confusion, anxiety and perplexity.
When knowledge and research play a larger role in people’s lives, public debate also requires an enlightened public sphere. The sharing of knowledge and participation in the critical use of knowledge has a democratising effect. This is an idea that goes back to the Age of Enlightenment but it has taken on renewed relevance because of the increased pressure from new, global communication networks, social media and ‘fake news’. These new circumstances demand a population capable of intellectual resistance and able to assess everything they can now read, see and hear to identify what is valid and tenable. Familiarity with scholarly standards for the open exchange of opinions and an ability to exercise critical judgement is one of the most important contributions of research to a free public sphere.

However, when knowledge plays a larger role in people’s lives, people also need to be able to feel confidence in research methods and findings, and confidence that researchers are driven by data, not by dogmas. This means that more weight must be given to the integrity of research – solid standards for scholarly procedures, publication and rational debate – in other words, to ensuring reliable investigations, trustworthy analyses, accurate reporting, transparency, peer review, factual debate, correction of errors and respect for all participants and people concerned. The primary prerequisite for public confidence in researchers is that researchers have confidence in one another. And when research breaks the boundaries of the possible, this must be accompanied by a humanistic tradition and ethics that set limits for what is permissible.

This must also underlie students’ introduction to research: the ability to wonder and ask new questions, the ability to formulate possible explanations for their findings, and the ability to investigate whether their explanations hold up through source evaluation, experiments or observation.
This kind of thinking is within everyone’s reach. And it is essential in a society that is becoming ever more research-driven, and where education and learning are changing from a phase in life to a way of life.

In the years ahead, we in the Nordic countries and Sweden will have to live more and more by our wits. The material foundation of welfare depends on our ability to gain and use knowledge with imagination and determination – on the ability to master the societal consequences of growing knowledge and to ensure sustainable development. This being so, Sweden needs to have research that is strong enough to take its place in the international research networks in which new knowledge is produced, reviewed and applied.

Ignorance is dangerous. Ignorance is expensive. Research and knowledge are among the most fantastic things human beings have learned to do together – ideas that are developed are transmitted across generations and transcend all borders by combining tradition and innovation. Research is necessary, not just to secure the prosperity of the nation but also to give citizens rich, exciting and meaningful lives.

Gudmund Hernes has been Chair of the University Board of Uppsala University since 1 May 2017. He is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology, former Minister of Education and Research in Norway (1990–1995) and member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

*From time to time the Vice-Chancellor’s Blog publishes posts by other contributors. Please address any questions about the contents to the guest blogger.