The measures that faculties, departments and so forth take within the framework of work on balanced finances differ but often involve restrictions on doctoral admissions and teacher recruitment, a larger overhead withdrawal on external grants, more and improved grant applications to more external funders, and termination of contracts for premises. The latter is only effective for universities as a whole if contracts for entire buildings can be terminated. The two areas of human sciences and natural sciences have therefore, in collaboration with the university administration's property management office, initiated a local optimization project to jointly handle this issue.
In the Natural Sciences area, since 2013 we have appointed 47 associate senior lecturers on four-year contracts and another 10 on six-year contracts. Of the 47, 27 were promoted and a little more than a handful received attractive international offers, quit for other reasons or were denied promotion. The area has developed a procedure for voluntary interim evaluation where the idea is that the 10 associate senior lecturers so far who have six-year appointments will receive feedback and advice before continuing their work. The very successful recruitment path through the associate senior lectureships has unfortunately diminished in recent times due to financial challenges which are primarily due to rent increases. Through two major investments from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and with SU's funds for strategic research areas (SFO funds) for SciLifeLab, however, investments are being made in new associate senior lectureships, with strong start-up packages. As the external grant income has also increased in general for the university as a whole, there should be room for an increase in doctoral student recruitment, which is very important too.
In recruitment and promotion, it is especially important that gender equality issues be monitored. In 2021, both of the university’s science areas worked on these issues, which resulted in a proposal regarding gender equality training for teacher proposal and promotion committees, and for research leaders. External evaluations were also made of the areas' gender equality work. In the Natural Sciences area, proposals are now being discussed for a pilot study with gender equality observers in teacher proposal and promotion committees, taking an inventory of the range of mentoring programmes for research and teaching staff and examining the distribution of “academic housework” within departments.
The strategic development work within the framework of balanced finances may be important, but still pales into insignificance against the terrible things that are now going on in Ukraine. Even in our sector, people are fleeing and need support to be able to work and study. Individual employees and departments at Stockholm University are showing great commitment, commendably investing resources and work to the best of their ability to help Ukrainian colleagues and students who are now in very vulnerable situations.
This article is written by Henrik Cederquist, Deputy Vice President for Science and professor at Fysikum (the Department of Physics) at Stockholm University. It appeares in the section “Words from the University’s senior management team”, where different members of the management team take turns to write about topical issues. Words from the University’s senior management team appears in every edition of News for staff which is distributed to the entirety of the University staff.