Collegial academic leadership: the pleasures of responsibility

Just over six years ago, I was at Krusenberg, invited by the then Dean of the Faculty of Languages Coco Norén, to talk with young members of the teaching staff at the faculty about taking on leadership roles in a collegial system. We had good and important conversations. When I joined Coco as a dean in autumn 2020, I suggested widening the initiative taken by the Faculty of Languages to include theology and other faculties in the disciplinary domain as well. This led three years ago to five faculties conducting a course on collegial academic leadership. This academic year we are running the course for the second time and now all six faculties in the disciplinary domain are participating. We deans are receiving administrative assistance from the Faculty Office and expert support from Carin Eriksson Lindvall at the Unit for Career and Leadership in Academia. The course is now in progress, with a total of 24 participants from six different faculties. It started with an overnight away day in August and will continue during the autumn and spring with seven half-day seminars on leadership, the University as an institution, collegiality, academic freedom, diversity, communication and evaluation. The course will conclude with an evening at CIRCUS in June 2025.

We six deans who have organised the course are staunch advocates of the collegial model we have at Uppsala University: research and teaching colleagues are those who are best qualified to make decisions about research and teaching and to exercise responsibility for research and education in their own faculties. For us, leadership in a collegial organisation is inspiring and challenging. It is a prerequisite for autonomy and must include taking responsibility for the collegial organisation.

What has inspired me to take on leadership roles and to try to interest others in doing the same can be summarised in three points: what I want a university to be, how I want an academic environment to function, and the pleasure I derive from taking responsibility. I want a university to be a place centred around the quest for knowledge and a milieu in which knowledge is shared. A university cannot be reduced to a facility where individual researchers place their research funding or a school that provides a certain education. A university requires us to pay attention to contexts and connections. A fully fledged academic cannot be solely a researcher or an instructor. Research and teaching go hand in hand. To achieve or maintain this, some people need to take on responsibility and leadership roles.

A well-functioning seminar seems to me an ideal model for a good academic milieu. In a seminar of this kind, everyone has an opportunity to speak, everyone is listened to and good arguments are identified. When the participants in a seminar are valued and able to contribute, this benefits the whole. In the academic community, it is to everyone’s advantage that the people we work with advance in quality, specialisation, breadth and depth. We belong to entities that are larger than ourselves, than our subjects, than our departments, faculties, and so on. We are surrounded by highly qualified people who aspire to understand and explain and improve. However, a little more exercise may sometimes be needed in listening and quite often in making decisions. In the light of my overall picture of what a university is and how I want the academic environment to function, I have chosen to take things on, to take on responsibilities and coordinating duties. These roles have also brought courses and contexts that have equipped me with knowledge and tools.

I personally am approaching retirement and want to convey some of the pleasure that responsibility has given me and continues to give me in the roles I have had. I do this not in order to talk about myself but for two other reasons. First, I want to encourage younger colleagues to make themselves available to be chosen for leadership roles. Secondly, I would like to call on all members of the teaching and research staff to choose wise and knowledgeable people for electoral assemblies and nominating committees. Both of these are essential if we are to continue to be six strong faculties in a well-functioning disciplinary domain at an outstanding university.

Cecilia Wejryd
Dean of the Faculty of Theology