Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
President (Rector) Emil Spjøtvoll Presentation
President (Rector) Emil Spjøtvoll, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
From Research Production to Knowledge Provision
The Chair for this session said that she was interested in the different approaches from the technical universities and from a regular university. Unfortunately, I have prepared another talk, not so much related to industry-university relations, as added problems. The reason is that when I was first invited to this conference, I was given the topic over there, which is related to universities as an environment for innovation, tensions between conservative and innovative forces. And then I decided to talk under the title, "From research production to knowledge provision." But this was before Christmas. After Christmas, we got the other title for this session, which, unfortunately, I didn't really care for, so I kept on with the old one. But I will try to connect it to industry-university relations. We are talking about interdisciplinarity these days, so this will be a kind of inter-topic contribution to this seminar.
I have noticed that there are different strategies for presentations--either you cover a lot of material and give a wide perspective, or you keep to your narrower perspective. I think I will try the last one, to have just one message, one point which I am trying to make, but to make it in many different ways. And it is related to what I call "knowledge provision," and the consequences of that for the composition, the qualifications, and the skills of university professors, the people we employ. I am trying to be a bit provocative, but I will return to that during my talk.
Let me just tell you a little bit about my background. I come from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. We have 18,000 students, about half of them in natural sciences, technology, and engineering; we educate about 80% of the graduates in engineering in Norway. But half our student population is in the humanities or in social science. We have an academy of fine arts, and a faculty of architecture, and a music conservatory. So I think we are able to create these multimedia productions as well as others, but I have only brought transparencies with me.
These transparencies show you what you have already seen many times, mass production of knowledge and the major changes we have seen. Under the topic of mass education, we have to discuss the quality of students, and what knowledge they are able to absorb, because we are getting half of the young population. It's a question of what type of knowledge they are able to absorb, whether you have to present knowledge as MTV is doing it, or in other ways. There are many contributors, many who want to disseminate knowledge, or have programs for getting degrees or courses, so this also includes the question of the role of the universities.
I think we have not really started to cope with the mass production of knowledge. We have had a vast increase in the number of publications, scientific publications; I think there is an overload of publications. There has been a vast increase in the number of universities, when all the parts of the world have the same number of universities or higher educational institutions as we have. Maybe knowledge, in the way we are used to it, is just a commodity; it is produced in many places. Maybe there is enough knowledge production, so the emphasis should not be on the production process, but on how knowledge is used. Maybe that is the most important part. The universities would change, not being preoccupied so much with producing knowledge, as how to use it in different circumstances. But how do we cope with all the information we get?
I shall not talk much about the university as an economic factor. We are expected to innovate, we are expected to contribute to regional development. A few weeks ago in Norway, an institution was given the right to give a doctoral degree not only on the basis of the scientific achievement, or the abilities of the professors in that institution, but the argument used by the government to grant the right to give a doctoral degree was that the university contributed to regional development (it was a regional university). The argument about scientific quality was not enough, they had additional arguments.
In a way, we are big operations, so we have to behave like companies and we have to incorporate with others. It can be with universities, but we also cooperate with companies. I think we have to deal with the question of where the border is between the university and the company.
I'll talk about knowledge production and skill, but now let me talk a little bit about strategies for leadership. This is related to the topic of my first talk, and the tension between conservatism and innovation.
I'll move on to knowledge provision. The research being conducted effectively at any given university is only a small part of the research being produced in the world, only a small part of what is needed when you do teaching, when you have industrial cooperation, when you do problem-solving. And I think it's equally important to collect what is already available in the world, to interpret and to disseminate this, and also to be able to have an overview of the knowledge available, not just concentrated in one specialty. There is also a need for a quality guarantee for what is being produced.
Multi-disciplinarity is kind of a buzz word. If you look at the disciplines, they are always defended in the university, but I think that the disciplines are getting too fragmented, the people cannot talk to each other even if they're working in the same discipline. Mathematicians have difficulty talking to other mathematicians. So I think we are getting too fragmented, too specialized. One of the roles of the university is to try to combine knowledge areas to contribute to an understanding of more complicated problems. This is not easy, of course, and we already had a discussion about the gas power plant, and whether this is good for Norway and for the world, and for the global climate. But if you get involved in these problems, you also get involved in politics. We talk about the need to cooperate with industry, but we were told by one of our students that we were prostituting ourselves if we said something in favor of a gas power plant, even if there is no direct benefit of the technology for the university.
Universities are expected to shed light on important problems, and I think we have a responsibility in that way. We are saying that we should educate students to have a wide knowledge, to be able to cope with important problems, to be able to go into the working world. But what about the professors? It is all right to be specialized in one narrow field; that's fine. You get promoted. But if you have a wider view, that's not so fine, and that's no so easy. We talk about formation of students, but what about formation of university professors? Socrates was mentioned yesterday. I don't know how many papers he wrote, I don't think he wrote any, but he was able to communicate with people and take up important problems. I think universities as organizations have that type of responsibility for the future.
Society is giving us many responsibilities to create companies and to bring innovation into society. For instance, in the European Union, a commission has come up with a paper called the "European Research Area." The important argument, to start with, is that there is too little innovation in Europe compared to the United States. In Norway, the government is using the same argument to compare Norway with other Nordic countries. The universities are expected to be able to create that type of innovative person.
Now I come to the skill part of it. As I mentioned, we have a mass education system, and the people, the students are expected to get knowledge. We should give them knowledge in important areas, of course. In connection with the creation of our new curriculum for engineering students five years ago, we asked employers about the abilities of the students. They said they liked communication skills, they liked the ability to work in a team, and that they were very good in their engineering fields.
But we can go too far in getting the students closer to getting work experience. We can do interesting things when we cooperate with companies. And I think we should do that, but we have to be clear about what we do. For instance, in Norway, in petroleum engineering we now have all the data they have about a certain oil field in the North Sea: all the data, all the seismics, an enormous amount of data. The students are permitted to work with it. They can do a lot of experiments, a lot of serious projects. But the motive of industry is that when the students have this experience, then they are easily employable. The oil company doesn't have to train them, rather they are trained at the university; the students already know the system, they know the work, and so on. We have the same thing with a global company doing risk analysis for ships. It's very interesting, very expensive. But, of course, the students learn these type of things, but maybe there are other things they don't do. So we have to be clear in our mind about this. They're also cooperating with industry on project management, using distance education with companies at the new universities in other parts of the world. This type of cooperation is something that I think works very well, working with industry and with universities in different parts of the world.
We are expected to be entrepreneurs, and the students are expected to be entrepreneurs. They are also expected to think about life-long learning. One interesting thing that some of our students have done is to create a kind of dossier, a file for this student. When a student takes a course, he should think about why he takes this course, what he learns. Then a computer system, or a program system, is being created so that a student can make up his own file, and if he wants to, he can make it available for employers.
We need to diversify faculty qualification. If we are going to do everything that is expected of us, we have to have researchers that are very good at research, but they also have to have an entrepreneurial attitude, they have to be able to work in cross-disciplinary teams, they have to have communication skills, they have to have a responsibility towards society and be able to communicate with society, and, of course, they should monitor global research. These are many tasks given to the university professors. And I think the emphasis will move away from research towards the ability to monitor research, to take part in cross-disciplinary themes, and to communicate the knowledge you have. One professor alone doesn't need to do everything, but the composition of the faculty should be able to do all these things.
So to finish, I think the challenge for universities is to define what they are, and how universities are different from other knowledge providers. We have many advantages: we have a broad range of disciplines, we have high quality activities, we have education on a high level. We should keep our independence and objectivity, but we also have to show our value — to be a creative and constructive and critical contributor to society. I've seen a lot of creative and constructive people here today, although maybe not so much critical in terms of analysis, especially where this might lead us and what is wrong with the university.
So what type of learning organization is a university? I think it is a research-based learning organization, in the sense that it is based upon research results, either our own or others', and which together give us an understanding of complicated cultural, technological, and societal issues.
© 2006 UC Regents
Last modified: 15 April 2006 | e-mail