Denmark’s corporate university management ‘needs democratising’

Has democracy ever existed?

I keep with Prof Haldrup. It is a major problem namely: the politicians and the industry leader don´t know how ther universities were developing during the last 200 years and the internal logic of research based on academic freedom. The situation may change drastic as first the dionysian ten the apollonian (ref Szentgyörgyi in Science) researchers will draw back and then you may imagine what will follow. I think it is about tight controll ower universities and academia I experienced this under Ceausescu in Roumania it´s really wrong direction.... At the moment in Sweden the situation is somewhat better.

<The country has also been part of a wider shift towards competitive project funding, which has squeezed the time and space left for self-directed research. “It makes it impossible to have research freedom,” said Professor Haldrup, adding that 75 per cent of Danish researchers got less than 50,000 Danish kroner (£5,800) a year directly from their department.> Quite so! Here in the UK at my university we get a paltry 1,000£ per annum for research (e.g., conference fees, accommodation or travel expenses, proof reading support, analytic software, scholarly books, interview transcriptions or whatever). Everything else is dependent on winning grants for this or that. Academia must be the only profession where you have a contractual requirement to perform a task that is a substantive part of your job (about 30-50% of your time), but the employer does not provide you with (sufficient) means for doing that part of the job. Instead, you are supposed to fund that part of your job yourself by finding external sponsors (i.e., wining grants). We are in fact salespeople pitching our ideas to funders and satisfying their demands (and priorities). We are rarely independent thinkers speaking truth to power these days. But this is precisely what the marketisation of academia (with its competitive logic) was supposed to achieve: discipline and control.

Not all aspects of research activity are funded by internal or external funders. Unless you are willing to pay from your own salary, it is not worth it pursuing certain lines of inquiry.

It's not just a Danish research issue, UK universities are now run along corporate managerialism lines, with the suppression of 'academic freedom' one of the first things to be limited, with the long term aim to extinguish it. Our 'corporatist' 5th column has rewritten our statutes in the most undemocratic way, only announcing them when approved by privy council, the UCU is now fighting a rear-guard action to stop the removal of tenure, academic freedom and more, so much for transparent consultation...