When is a faculty a faculty?

A little over a month ago, I attended the Conference of Humanities Faculties at Stockholm University. The conference is held annually and brings together representatives of the humanities from Sweden’s higher education institutions. Different institutions take turns hosting; in recent years we have gathered at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, at Karlstad University and at Linnaeus University’s campus in Kalmar. This time, however, it was Stockholm’s turn. The theme of the conference was “Methodological development in the humanities”, but the discussions centred just as much on the role of the humanities in the Swedish higher education landscape. Two members of the Swedish parliament from RIFO, the society of members of parliament and researchers, were specially invited to give their views on education and research policy, but also participated in discussions with deans, heads of department and senior faculty administrators who emphasised the importance of both humanistic knowledge in today’s society and independent universities.

As the faculty conferences bring together participants from higher education institutions around the country, there are also multiple opportunities to exchange experiences. Swedish higher education has expanded quite considerably over the years, meaning the faculty conference today brings together around 50 participants – all from different types of higher education institution. The discussions often touch on the differences that exist between different higher education institutions, and I will make some reflections here based on these discussions, among other aspects.

Firstly, it is clear that not very many higher education institutions actually have a faculty of humanities. Here in Uppsala, for example, the old Faculty of Humanities has been split into two since 1999 – the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Languages – but at many other higher education institutions, if anything larger units have been created. Humanities subjects may then be co-located with the arts, social sciences, education or nursing and health – the latter often labelled as human sciences.

Secondly, it is not obvious what we mean by a concept like “faculty”. The word has been used in Swedish since the early 17th century to designate “each of the (main) departments in which a university is divided according to the affiliation of the various sciences and with regard to academic teaching": “In Academia (shall) all these four faculties be kept together, which are Theologica, Juridica, Medica and Philosophica.” The Faculty of Arts was eventually divided into a humanities and a mathematics and natural sciences section. This division took place in two stages: first through the creation of two sections in the last quarter of the 19th century and then with the establishment of two separate faculties in the 1950s. During the 1960s, the next division took place, when the social sciences were separated from the humanities and formed their own faculty. This arrangement remained in place until 1999, when the faculty boards were replaced by disciplinary domains as units for state resource allocation. Since 1999, it has thus been possible for the country’s higher education institutions to organise the humanities subjects in units other than humanities faculties, and the so-called Autonomy reform in 2011 led to extensive deregulation of how the country's higher education institutions are organised. This meant, among other things, that the provisions of the Higher Education Act on faculty boards ceased to apply. Whereas previously both its existence and its tasks had been regulated by law and ordinance, it was now up to each higher education institution to define the subject areas and tasks of a faculty.

At our disciplinary domain here in Uppsala, the six faculties have a collegial decision-making structure where each faculty board is responsible for the quality of education and research. However, the faculties are also part of the University’s decision-making chain, with delegation from the Vice-Chancellor and Vice-Rector to the Dean and Head of Department. This dual system is not always replicated at all higher education institutions. This structure has several advantages – not least that responsibility for quality and decision-making authority go hand in hand – but it is not an entirely standard construction.

In other words, it is clear that we not only attach different meanings to the term “humanities” but also have different ideas about what it is to be a faculty.

David Håkansson, Dean of the Faculty of Languages