Vision without doers?
The university can be understood as an organisation and institution. Realising this in the past helped me categorise how the university’s different tasks and structures are set up.
The university as an institution can be considered a place built on academic communities and leaning on collegial decision-making, where researchers adhering to centuries-old rules conduct researchers in pursuit of the truth. In the university institution, the best argument wins. The interest is in the qualitative aspects of the operation. Academic freedom means intellectual freedom to choose a research subject. The university as an institution has changed minimally over time. The university organisation, on the other hand, has facilities, a budget, a strategy, a funding model, and objectives. The university organisation has rectors, university colleges, faculties, and various services. The interest is usually in quantitative matters. Unlike the institution, the university organisation is typically shaken up to match the preferences of those funding its operations in different times.
From the university sector union point of view, the university as both an organisation and an institution is glued together by staff, with teaching and research staff serving as both researchers and teachers and employees of the university organisation. Sometimes, combining these roles is a challenge.
The Ministry of Education and Culture’s vision for higher education and research for 2040 is a hefty planning package for measures in the higher education sector in coming years. A wide variety of actors from the higher education sector participated in tweaking the vision across several rounds of comments.
However, looking at it from the staff’s point of view, the vision appears a bit strange. The higher education institutions devise, build, and improve. But the STAFF of those institutions is actually the actor that builds and improves. The vision admirably worries about the students and tries to improve their wellbeing. Meanwhile, staff wellbeing in a world of core funding is not even mentioned. Educating the population is essential for Finland, so visions and entrepreneurial spirit are important. Perhaps it is not essential to emphasise the position of staff in the vision for the future, but that aside, taking care of higher education institution personnel is absolutely crucial.
