The report was written by Shirin Ahlbäck Öberg and Johan Boberg at an Uppsala University centre called Higher Education and Research as Objects of Study. The report is very interesting and provides valuable insights into political control over State-owned universities in Sweden. In brief, the conclusion is that universities have been made more into public authorities and brought further down the bureaucracy track than before.
Hans Wiklund, University Director.
Photo: Mattias Pettersson
From the 1990s onwards, several political reforms have taken place to the academic organisation, for instance the deregulation of faculties and faculty boards. Any freedom following this deregulation has only been granted from certain forms of legislation, however, not institutional autonomy in terms of freedom from political control. As a consequence, State-owned universities have been run more and more like regular administrative authorities, and the internal academic organisation at universities that previously countered political control has been debilitated.
The move towards making universities into authorities has also entailed an increased bureaucratisation. Rather unexpectedly, though, the origin of all this isn't the Swedish Government's annual funding target agreements for universities. Since 2010, the number of assignments and reporting requirements in the funding target agreements has reduced. Instead, the Swedish Higher Education Authority generates substantial amounts of administrative work for higher education institutions as a result of the authority's regular inspections in combination with an ever-increasing number of remits from the Government.
Beside this, political ambitions in the general running of public administration cause a huge deal of administration. Each may be a reasonable initiative – such as demands for systematic work environmental and equal opportunities management; systematic environmental management; systematic data protection management; systematic information security management; classification analyses; and risk and vulnerability analyses – but all in all, they mount up to a hard-to-manage requirement of processes, policy documents and regular follow-up. More often than not, certain administrative functions also need to be introduced to meet those demands.
The administrative progress in numbers over the years. At a conference about university administration held in autumn 2023, a presentation of how university administration has developed over time was given by Stephen Hwang, then Vice-Chancellor of Halmstad University. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of employed research and teaching staff increased by 17 per cent, while other employees – mainly administrative staff – increased by 6 per cent. This according to the Swedish Higher Education Authority's 2023 annual report. The indirect (administrative) costs of conducting research and education at universities has reduced somewhat for the same time period, according to data from the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF). This means that a larger proportion of resources goes to the core activities research and education.
According to data by Statistics Sweden, the time that university teachers spend on administration clearly reduced up until 2015, and has, since then, been more or less the same. Currently, professors; associate and assistant professors; and lecturers estimate that they spend 14, 12 and 10 per cent respectively of their working hours on administration. Simultaneously, the content of administrative support seems to have changed, with more highly-educated administrative employees, and a reduction of simpler forms of administrative support.
Trust-based governance at Umeå University. At Umeå University, we base our work on the idea of trust-based governance with the aim to award a higher level of independence for faculties and departments to adapt planning and follow-up to the conditions that apply at their part of the organisation, and hence reduce the administrative burden. As a consequence of this ambition, it's rewarding that Umeå University today has comparably low indirect (administrative) costs.
Among the 33 universities that were included in the SUHF report of indirect costs for 2023 , Umeå University has the lowest indirect costs for research, the ninth lowest indirect costs for education, and the fourth lowest indirect costs in total. Furthermore, Umeå University with its 9.9 per cent has the lowest proportion of costs for premises in Sweden. Altogether, this means that a larger proportion of Umeå University's resources go to research and education activities compared to several other national universities.
It's important that we're aware of and have a living discussion of principally important issues when it comes to university governance, and that we safeguard the institutional autonomy of universities based on the increased political control that has taken place over time. Even if the proportion of administration of the university's activities seems to have reduced somewhat in the last ten-year period, and that Umeå University is doing well in national comparison, it's still important that we strive, step by step, to develop and make the administrative work more efficient and avoid bureaucratisation in its popular science sense.
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