At the beginning of August, Minister for Education Mats Persson announced in a debate article in SvD that the Swedish Agency for Public Management had received a mandate from the Government to conduct a new analysis regarding the consequences of the administrative tasks Swedish higher education institutions are obliged to carry out as a consequence of regulations and Government decisions. This welcome assignment, which was in addition to the previously mandated review of the Ethical Review Act and the Swedish Higher Education Authority’s task of mapping the effect of evaluations, did not come a day too soon.
Yet as far back as April of this year, Shirin Ahlbäck Öberg and Johan Boberg’s report Ökad kontroll och ökad byråkratisering, En kartläggning av statens styrning av universitet och högskolor [Increased Control and Increased Bureaucratisation: A survey of the State’s governance of universities and colleges] had already been published, within the framework of an analysis initiated by the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions.
Initially, the authors note that the State’s direct governance of Sweden’s higher education institutions was reduced by the higher education reform of 1993. Instead, however, various forms of indirect review, follow-up, and evaluation were introduced. Much of what is described in the report feels all too familiar. Here, qualified researchers describe everything that we have been through – only to have our protestations often be dismissed as whining. The report is pedagogically structured; it deals in turn with the governance of higher education institutions as public authorities, legislative amendments in the higher education field from 1993 to 2023 (of which there are many), appropriation directions and government mandates issued during the same time period, as well as general legislation that affects Sweden’s higher education institutions. The latter, in particular, is food for thought; as the authors write, there is a palpably stifling array of targets set out in this legislation, in which everything is equally prioritized.
Moreover, the increasing inclusion of higher education institutions in the mandates of public authorities threatens our unique character. Each individual mandate is also accompanied by requirements for action plans, systematics, and action reporting. The authors’ conclusion is unambiguous. This equation doesn’t add up, and it affects our core mission: research and higher education. The report makes for alarming reading. Later this autumn, the authors will return with a second report, which will analyse the internal bureaucratisation that results from the over-governance they describe in their first report. We look forward to perusing it, and hope it leads to much-needed political reprioritisation.
This text is written by President Astrid Söderbergh Widding. It appears in the section “Words from the Management”, in which members of the university’s management team take turns to write about topical issues. The section appears in News for staff which is distributed to the entirety of the University staff.