Clas Hättestrand: Nine years as Vice President – a time of both centralisation and increased collegiality

In a few weeks, I will be stepping down from my position as Vice President after nine years of service and bidding you all a fond farewell. These have been incredibly rewarding years that have filled me with both gratitude and pride. I am grateful for having been part of the greater whole and for gaining insight into all aspects of the university’s activities, and I am proud of all the high-quality research and education that is conducted here – something we are all part of, whether we work in a department, an administrative unit or the Senior Management Team.

As the end of my term approaches, I cannot help but reflect on my time here, how things were then and how they are now. It is also a time to reflect on the changes that have taken place in the areas for which I have had particular responsibility. I would like to take this opportunity to illustrate these changes with a couple of examples.

I have devoted a great deal of time during my tenure as Vice President to quality issues. I was appointed chair of Rebus (now known as the President’s Advisory Body for University-wide Educational Issues and Systems for Quality Assurance) back in 2015, a year before I took up my position as Vice President, and I have continued in that role ever since. The task was clear. We were to create a university-wide quality assurance system for education! This was needed as part of the preparation for the Swedish Higher Education Authority’s (UKÄ) upcoming reviews that were part of the new national quality assurance system. And it took a lot of work because, in all honesty, Stockholm University did not have a particularly well-developed system at the time. It involved a great deal of collegial work, which ultimately resulted in a quality assurance system for education being put into place, and SU finally receiving approval in the UKÄ’s institutional reviews a few years ago.

One reflection is that the development of the quality assurance system in a way led to SU becoming a more centralised university, as we now have more university-wide rules and processes. But I am also quite sure that it resulted in improvement to the education we provide, and that it actually led to our core activities being given significantly greater ability to influence our central governance, for example through more developed collegial preparation of centrally decided rules and documents.

Another important effect of the quality system work is that contacts and discussions on educational issues between our two academic areas are now a natural part of the ongoing work at the university. To give an example: Before I became chair of Rebus in 2015, I had hardly ever met with a representative of educational issues from the Human Science academic area, even though I chaired the first-cycle preparatory body of the Science academic area for four years! Today, bodies such as Rebus contribute to such meetings and discussions taking place all the time and at different levels, something that is very positive both for us as a university and for our students.

Another issue I have been very involved in during my time as Vice President is teacher education. This is a complex issue, to say the least, but is also incredibly interesting and important for the university and, by extension, for schools and their pupils. When I assumed my position, the Vice President was responsible for university-wide teacher education issues, and I headed (among other bodies) the university’s central Teacher Education Coordination Group (Samordningsgrupp för lärarutbildningar, SOL), which made decisions on various strategic teacher education issues. This was probably a good structure for a while after the Stockholm Institute of Education became part of SU in 2008. But by 2016, I felt that there was no longer such a great need for strong central governance of teacher education programmes.

The distance between the strategic governance of teacher education programmes and the departments that actually provided such education was large, too large. This is why it became my mission to work towards phasing out my role as central manager. Not because it wasn’t rewarding or because I wasn’t committed. Quite the contrary! But in most of our other activities at the university, we uphold the principle that decisions should be made as close to the activities as possible, and this means that we should also have an organisation where teacher education programmes are managed to a greater extent by the programmes themselves.

After various discussions and investigations, this ambition eventually led to the SOL being phased out, subject didactics at SU being reorganised and overall responsibility for teacher training being transferred to Human Science, where the Teacher Education Working Committee (LUB) was established in 2022. The latest step in this process is a recently completed follow-up investigation, which proposes, among other things, that the heads of the departments responsible for teacher education programmes should also be included in LUB. I think this is a good idea.

Although quality assurance and teacher education issues have been two major areas of responsibility during my years as Vice President, I have also had the privilege of being involved in many other exciting issues: higher education pedagogy, working environment and equal terms work, gender mainstreaming, digitalisation and AI, disciplinary matters, and our research stations, to name a few. There have also been many developments in these areas over the years, and I am happy to have been able to work with and learn about these areas, and hopefully also contribute to their development.

In short, these past nine years have been incredibly stimulating, and I have been honoured to work with all these important issues. And, perhaps most importantly, it has given me the opportunity to meet and work with so many dedicated and professional colleagues across the university. I will look back on my time as Vice President with great joy and satisfaction. Thank you very much!

This text is written by Clas Hättestrand, Vice President. It appears in the section “Words from the management“, where the management take turns to write about topical issues. The section appears in News for staff.