NORWAY
Humanities to be strengthened and made more relevant
A broad consensus was reached in parliament this month on a White Paper on the strengthening of the humanities in universities, making them contribute more to the grand societal challenges and be more relevant to working life.The text of the White Paper explains it is intended to serve as a “starting point for further dialogue with the higher education institutions on how to make their research and study programmes as relevant as possible, how to improve their quality and how to realise the full potential of the humanities”.
It presents clear expectations to the higher education institutions and the Research Council of Norway, and proposes measures to enable the humanities to play an “even greater role in meeting the major challenges of today”.
Among the issues discussed are coordinating course-portfolios among higher education institutions, dealing with high dropout rates in the humanities, nurturing exceptionally gifted and motivated students, patterns in publishing of humanities research, encouraging the study of foreign languages, strengthening the role of humanities in the long-term plan for research, making learning outcomes in the humanities relevant to the needs of the labour market, giving the public access to humanities journals and strengthening the links between academia and schools.
“This is the first political document to give a full presentation of the humanities in Norway. It discusses how the potential of the humanities may be unleashed in order to meet the major challenges of our time,” the paper says.
“Policy changes and adjustments will be necessary, but so will changes at the educational and research institutions themselves as well as in their surroundings: society and working life, which are to absorb knowledge from the humanities in the form of research findings and fresh graduates.”
It notes that the humanities play a key role as the guardian of the fundamental values and essential knowledge on which societies and civilisations are built. And it lists the key challenges of our time that the humanities must help address, including trans-border crime and terrorism, extreme weather events and digital attacks, global poverty and population growth, health services for an ever-larger elderly population and sustainability of the planet.
The White Paper groups these challenges under three headings:
- • Integration, migration and conflict
- • Major technological shifts
- • Climate, the environment and sustainability.
“Properly understanding them calls for analysis of the public discourse in which they are described, as that forms the basis upon which actions are taken, political or otherwise. Humanities subjects like history and media studies have a key critical role to play in modern society.
“The emergence of ‘fake news’, especially on the internet, with hundreds of websites featuring propaganda masked as objective news reporting, makes it even more urgent.”
Reform tempo
Higher education and research are highly prioritised by the present coalition government of the Conservative Party and the Progress Party. The abilities of a young and energetic Minister of Education and Research, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, and the Oxford PhD-educated State Secretary for Education and Research, Bjørn Haugstad, have been an additional driver, resulting in a reform tempo in higher education not seen before.
University mergers and structural re-alignments have been prioritised with a large number of structural reforms realised, as reported by University World News.
While these structural changes, resource distribution models and higher education governance models have been dominating the agenda in the first three years of the present government (2013-16), the humanities White Paper represents the first serious attempt to also reform the content of higher education.
A premise of the White Paper is that too few humanities scholars and researchers have engaged with the serious challenges facing society today, and their knowledge and skills have not been sufficiently brought to bear on these challenges. This also means that budgetary allocations for research and higher education have not yielded as high returns as they might with regard to understanding and solving urgent societal problems.
The paper says politicians and humanities scholars alike have contributed to a polarised situation and a weakening of the links between the humanities and important areas of society. This White Paper aims to “pave the way for reversing this development and re-strengthening these links”.
In the White Paper, the government presents two main approaches to further improving the quality of research and higher education in the humanities.
First, clearer expectations must be formulated with regard to relevance: research in the humanities, in addition to being of high quality, must be relevant to society, and the corresponding higher education programmes must provide graduates with qualifications that are relevant in working life.
Second, research programmes, including those of the Research Council of Norway, must make sufficient allowance for the special nature of the humanities, also in patterns of publication. Thematic and challenge-driven programmes must be so designed as to be genuinely open to humanities projects, historical perspectives and qualitative methods. The humanities must be visible in the programme plan as potential grant recipients, not merely as supporting disciplines.
The paper concedes that there is a natural tension between allowing academic freedom, which universities require, and the “responsibility to recognise the needs of society and respond to them, in this case by identifying areas where knowledge and competence from the humanities should be applied to urgent problems, as well as in teacher education and schools”.
A draft of the White Paper was published by the minister of education and research on 22 March and sent out for consultation at the end of March.
The 120-page document assesses the status of the humanities in today’s working life, analyses the publication patterns, the contribution of the humanities to societal challenges and the role of the humanities in the school system, and sets out the priorities the government has identified, in order to develop a new policy.
In developing the White Paper, the ministry asked for input on the relevance of the academic fields in the humanities in relation to originality and international position; relevance for society; relevance for the working life and contribution to education and teacher training.
In total, the ministry received 70 such proposals, many elaborating their views in great detail.
One example is the proposal from UiT The Arctic University of Norway to concentrate future work around research on languages, literature, history, archaeology, religion and culture in the (sub)-Arctic area.
“This would also include a continuation of the already strong investments in Sami- and indigenous people-related research, and research on other linguistic and cultural minorities and languages, among them Russian,” UiT said.
The Norwegian Association of Researchers said in a 20-page letter that the research policy is too general and one-sided, with the use of the same set of means independent of academic discipline.
“The humanities contribute to an entirety and hence have a special role for and in the civil society that is not captured well with the use of the incentive structure of today. The humanities contribute to an understanding of what we are living for and not only what we are going to live by. This broader relevance for society makes it especially difficult to formulate a policy for these academic subjects only based on relevance for economic value creation, technological development or great societal challenges,” it said.
Changes endorsed
The White Paper was met with enthusiasm generating a large number of seminars and conferences and many interventions in the press.
With an election due in September and with polls showing the present government in danger of being voted out, the White Paper has been treated more seriously by the parliamentary committee on education, research and church affairs than it perhaps otherwise would have been, since the positions taken in parliament may help build a profile for higher education in the election battle.
The majority of the 15-member committee – headed by Trond Giske, a former minister for education and leading figure in the Labour Party – supported the view that the humanities have a crucial role to play in the societal challenges of climate change, new technology, conflict resolution and integration and migration.
The committee also recommended that the ministry express clear expectations to higher education institutions that they should engage actively in more challenge-driven humanistic research and education.
The majority of the members agreed that all students at university should have a basic introduction to scientific methods, basic theory of science and research ethics and academic reasoning, as a basis to develop the ability for critical thinking and to work across scientific disciplines, and that this is so important that one cannot assume that these needs will be fulfilled in each academic discipline alone.
A minority of committee members, from the Labour Party, the Centre Party and the Socialist Left Party, proposed a vote by parliament that all higher education institutions should organise their academic subjects in a way that provides for the ability to develop critical thinking, theory of science and cross-disciplinary approaches, but this was not endorsed by the committee.
The committee was, however, in full agreement that it is very important for students in the humanities to be better connected to working life throughout their education and asked for more internships and work placements during their studies, and that students should be assigned writing tasks that are related to working life, preferably arranged in collaboration with representatives from working life.
This message was also selected as a separate vote by the committee but was not endorsed by a majority in the parliament.
Challenges ahead
State Secretary Haugstad told University World News that “integration of working experience, internationalisation and collaboration with the working life” must be customised to specific courses, making it clear that international cooperation and internationalisation are essential to improving global knowledge development and to “ensure quality”.
The head of the National Union of Students in Norway or NSO, Marianne Andenæs, told University World News: “The humanities White Paper contributes more attention and recognition for the academic disciplines in the humanities at a time when their relevance is questioned.
"To secure strong academic milieus and good courses, NSO thinks that it is very important that cooperation and sharing of work between higher education institutions are initiated, as we now see that some institutions are doing within languages.”
She said the government has delivered on many of its objectives within higher education. For the students, the expansion to 11 months of financial support and the historical investment in new student housing have been key. But the fight for the establishment of a student ombudsman “is not over”.