Dear members of the university community, dear colleagues and friends!
A few months ago, it was widely reported that Finland’s ranking in the international comparison of academic freedom has fallen to the lowest level since the years after the Second World War. There are several reasons for this. On the one hand, anti-science statements have become more common in public debate, and harassment of researchers has become commonplace in universities. On the other hand, as a recent report by the Committee for Public Information shows, perhaps the most significant problem is the practices that have become embedded in the administration and management of universities, through which external political and economic steering trickles down into the everyday lives of individual researchers and research groups.
In today’s academic environment, universities need to continuously improve their operational efficiency, sharpen their profile, and demonstrate their effectiveness through a variety of evaluations and metrics. When a significant part of university funding is linked to predetermined performance indicators, academic freedom starts to erode and a so-called value capture begins to emerge. This concept by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen refers to a situation in which we begin to replace our values with external indicators. Indicators do not necessarily force us to abandon our values directly. Instead, they redefine what success looks like.
What does outsourcing values to metrics then lead to? To many things actually, but in this speech I will focus on a few developments that together lead us to what can be called a disposable university. Fashionable publication indicators and their central role in funding models create a situation in which the production of new research-based knowledge is no longer unambiguously set as the central goal of research activities. Instead, research is instrumentalised to implement externally set goals.
In the latest issue of the journal Tieteessä tapahtuu, Professor Sami Honkasalo writes interestingly about the exponential growth in the number of scientific publications and introduces the idea of disposable science. Current-day universities create more and more hastily cobbled together texts without any deeper meaning, publications for the sake of publishing. This artificial maximization of publication volumes is not only careless but also dangerous. In the same way as harmful fast fashion is shaping the clothing industry, ultra-fast publishing creates new challenges for the core processes of conducting, evaluating and disseminating research. In the worst case, disposable science and its side effects could lead to an epistemic crisis that affects the academic world in various ways.
With regard to education, it is clear that the Ministry of Education’s funding model encourages universities to churn out degrees. The priority is for students to graduate, and especially to graduate within the target time. And this is something that many of us closely follow every spring. There is nothing wrong with graduation in itself, quite the opposite. The problem is that what can be measured has replaced what is important. The content of the degree is not of great importance, but the most important thing is that the student leaves the university before the best before date of the degree has been reached. At the same time, outsourcing the assessment of teaching to simple external indicators weakens trust in teachers’ competence and affects the well-being of the entire university community – both students and staff.
The Vision for Higher Education and Research 2040, currently being prepared by the Ministry of Education and Culture, includes the idea of increasing the proportion of young adults with a higher education degree to 60 per cent. If the latest OECD comparison shows that the current share in Finland is 39%, the change is radical, and it will certainly affect both degree structures and student material. As the recent debates about national economics have mainly focused on cuts and the debt brake, it is difficult to see that the repeated increase in the number of students would be compensated by a corresponding increase in the university’s resources. Doing more with fewer resources can only work for so long. At some point, even increased productivity will no longer be enough, and academic education as we know it will begin to erode. The key problem is that disposable degrees weaken not only universities, but also the democratic societies that rely on them.
In all honesty, I guess we have to admit that the current academic culture will not get rid of degree manufacturing, mass publishing and other forms of hyper-productivity right away. Especially for young researchers, the competition often seems merciless. The responsibility for transforming the university applies to everyone, but it especially applies to us who are middle-aged, middle-class and hold a relatively stable position at the university. As a community, we cannot promote structures in which top researchers identified on the basis of indicators have their own rules and everyone else is interchangeable and disposable. Metrics cannot and should not determine who is important, who belongs to the community, and who can be ignored.
It is difficult to entirely avoid academic value capture, but we can still try to resist it. One effective antidote is students, who repeatedly force us to learn new things and apply what we have learned to new phenomena. Hard times and nihilistic optimisation are counterbalanced by curiosity, playfulness and “gay science”. Intellectual fearlessness and asking difficult questions do not require frowning. This does not mean that we are light-hearted or superficial, but that we maintain joy and spontaneity even when the world feels uncertain, and we ourselves feel insecure. Often, the most important things advance best when we take ideas seriously—but ourselves a little less so.
To conclude, I would like to make one concrete suggestion. What if we started organizing a University Staff Overshoot Say! The Global overshoot day is traditionally celebrated on the day when the ecological footprint of humans exceeds the Earth’s biocapacity. In a similar fashion, the university staff overshoot day could remind us how our operations are not always on a sustainable basis. The collective agreement defines our annual working hours as 1612 hours. According to even conservative estimates, the actual working hours of many of us exceed 2000 hours per year. This means that the staff overshoot day could take place somewhere around the middle of the autumn semester at the latest.
One thing we could do on the University Staff Overshoot Day, is to make the “academic housekeeping work” more visible. This administrative and communal work is often ignored by the latest indicators or does not accumulate your CV optimally. These activities, which are vital for maintaining the university community, are unevenly stacked so that they are mostly carried out by women, early career scholars or community members otherwise in a minority position. By celebrating these forms of academic work at least once a year, we as a community could try to create a counterbalance to the current-day measurement culture that emphasizes a limited collection of individual merits.
At the end of my speech, I would like to remind you that Vappu belongs to everyone. It is traditionally a celebration of workers and students, but it is also a celebration of the fixed-term, part-time and unemployed. You don’t have to climb to the highest tops or exceed yourself to celebrate Vappu. Vappu also belongs to those of us who are a little exhausted, who will call it a day a little earlier today and who already wait for the summer vacation! Cheerful vappu everyone!
Chair of the Academic Board Professor Olli Sotamaa