In Swedish
Dean's Bulletin
16 April 2012
Dear all,
The faculty management has now visited all the departments, as well as the Science section of MAX-lab, and our conclusions were discussed at an extended management council meeting in the week after Easter. I have already described my impressions as very positive and have found it particularly enjoyable to meet our many young researchers and hear their research plans and ambitions. I foresee no problems with future skills provision and it will be exciting to see how these researchers develop. Our impressions will of course not lead to any drastic changes in the faculty’s operations; rather it is more a case of honing our strategies for the future. I had the opportunity to give a presentation of the faculty to the other deans and the university management at the last vice-chancellor’s management council meeting. The number of our employees is increasing and is now close to 1 000, the number of doctoral students has risen in recent years since the large departments of Chemistry and Biology got their finances in order, and the number of undergraduate and Master’s students is almost 2 000. Our turnover is close to SEK 1 billion. Besides providing figures and statistics, I stressed the world-leading quality of some of the basic research at the Faculty of Science and tried to convince my audience of how important this is as a motor for the whole of Lund University. In this connection, I warned that the belt-tightening which we are facing will hit our basic research and thus in the long run the whole of LU. As you are aware, we have been forced to plan for a rapid liquidation of our agency capital under the threat of confiscation, and a range of initiatives have been decided and announced. All of these are welcome and important to us, but once they have been carried out the total agency capital for the faculty will be almost 0 in 4–5 years’ time. The agency capital at the faculty itself risks going into the red before this. As we all know, it is not possible to run an operation like ours without a good financial buffer, and I tried to explain to the university management why this is the case. On top of this are cuts in our allocated direct government funding and funding for undergraduate and Master’s education over the next few years, at the same time as we no longer have the possibility of applying for funding for expensive scientific equipment from VR and KAW. We will now have to fund this equipment ourselves, using our direct government funding. However, there is no cause for concern; we can deal with these problems.
After a long wait, Margot is finally coming to Lund to take up the post of Chair of the University Board. I have a two-hour meeting booked with her on 25 April and my ambition is firstly to use the time to describe the faculty’s operations and their importance for LU. She will have a very important role to play for the development of LU and it is essential that she really understands how we work. I have never met her, only seen her on television, but she seems to be a pleasant and intelligent individual, so I expect it will go well.
There have been discussions on carrying out a new evaluation of LU’s research, called RQ14. The last one, RQ08, clearly showed our strengths in basic research and we received additional funding for a number of specific research groups. Not all the faculties were commended in the same way, which naturally led to criticism of the whole process. This criticism was to be taken on board in the planning of RQ14, but now the plans are being rethought. Firstly, an evaluation of this kind is expensive, costing SEK 20–30 million, and secondly, it is time-consuming for all those involved. What is more, it is necessary to compare apples and oranges, and this cannot be done without there being someone who feels unfairly treated. Instead, we want to carry out evaluations at faculty level, and then we could, for example, compare ourselves with other science faculties at comparable universities. We will have to wait and see what is decided, but it will most likely not be a new RQ08.
Olov Sterner, dean
Innehållsansvarig: Helena Bergqvist
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Last modified 16 Apr 2012