Jane Reichel: Trust or distrust – how to meet the expectations of academia?

This year, the academic world has been the subject of unusually intense discussion and debate, both in Sweden and in the rest of the world. The role and importance of academia for society is highlighted as a crucial asset essential to our competitiveness, social development and welfare. In other contexts in which interested parties seek to justify their resistance to change, research results are dismissed as excessively alarmist or as obstacles to the implementation of necessary measures. Higher education is generally considered crucial to ensuring society’s skills supply, but there is an ongoing shift in public confidence in the ability of academics to decide what knowledge is relevant.

Directly or indirectly, this mix of trust and distrust affects all of us who work in academia. The existence of trends in research and education is hardly something new. Yet the situation is different when politics and social debate signal that research results are unreliable and that the content of teaching is irrelevant. As teachers and researchers, how should we relate to such a debate?

One approach could be to hold an open, interdisciplinary discussion. The Human Science Seminar is intended to serve as precisely this sort of platform, a forum at which teachers and researchers in the Human Science Academic Area can share their views. The first seminar, on the theme of activist research, was held on 11 September. Here, committed and objective academics discussed questions about the relationship of politics to research and compared various research traditions’ views on subjectivity and objectivity. The next seminar is scheduled for 4 December, and the topic will be the politicisation of teaching. Issues that may come up include the educational mission in a calcifying social climate, as well as politicians’ views on the content of university education.

The hope is that these discussions will provide support, inspiration and “a-ha” moments to us teachers and researchers, enriching our academic work and perhaps even broadening our perspectives. One of the great strengths of working at such a wide-ranging university is that many of us think about similar topics, but come from different scientific and pedagogical traditions and view things in relation to different student groups and societal recipients. The intention is to continue the seminars next spring, addressing additional issues that affect the everyday lives of academics like us.