Keskustelua

Jos oma menestys ei tyydytä, kannattaa ehkä katsoa peiliin, kommentoi Ljuba Tarvi vuoden ensimmäisessä Acatiimissä ollutta Rod McConchien kirjoitusta.

On Flowers, Mushrooms and Fungi

An academic can broadly be defined as an advanced degree holder who works as a researcher and/or teacher at an institution of post-secondary education. This paper dwells on the reflections of two foreign academics working in Finland, Dr Rod McConchie (Acatiimi 8/2010,1/2011) and Pr Howy Jacobs (Acatiimi 4/2010, 9/2010) on the background of the author’s personal impressions.

Helsinki University is hardly, believes Dr McConchie, a worthy place for an academic since it is “lowly- placed in the THES university survey (about 70 places below my own alma mater)” and even its being one of the twelve LERU universities “should actually be a cause of some red faces.”

Nonetheless, Dr McConchie has worked at the University of Helsinki for about twenty years. But instead of teaching in cozy classrooms, he has been toiling his “sixteen hours a week” in an “abandoned mine shaft,” instead of salary he has been receiving “horse manure” from his “keepers,”, and, hence, he has had to make an extra buck by “revising the English of learned and not-so-learned research of my non-fungoid Finnish colleagues.”

Despite his ‘fungoid’ status, Dr McConchie managed to build up a career of sorts: lecturer – university lecturer – senior researcher – docent – principle investigator. He is, however, not satisfied: “Why should a professional academic [are there ‘unprofessional’ ones?] feel pleased about promotion to a position which anyone with the most rudimentary requirements for a university job elsewhere can get?”

It is not that Dr McConchie never tried to throw off the shackles of his ‘fungoid’ existence – he admits to have applied for career jobs “outside the mine-shaft,” but the attempts proved fruitless — “after all, your eyes need to adjust to the light, and no-one was ever prepared to help with that.” As he confesses, “Endless applications for research funding of my own failed,” because research funding is channeled, “as if by magic, to the client-lists of professorial patrons, and the rest have to beg, irrespective of merit.” Begging, it seems, has not worked – “No-one offered to work with me, or use me in one of the ongoing projects.”

When finally he got into a joint project, “no room at the research unit was offered since, they said, I did not need it because as a lecturer I already shared a room elsewhere.” Dr McConchie was “duly outraged and humiliated” because “Some countries mandate by law that academics must have their own room, not just a shared one.”

It is not that Dr McConchie never tried to do research on his own — he did it, in his own words, “as best as I could, now restricted for spare time and holidays.” But even his interim results often remained unpublished since publications were possible only “within a narrow circle of academic and publishing friends, all of which is a dead hand on creative research and innovation.”

In a nutshell, concludes Dr Mc Conchie, “my chosen university does not share my view of myself.” In vernacular, it means that Dr McConchie, a professional academic, has not become professor. The reason, he believes, is that “Finnish Academia sees itself as a privileged minority, a scholarly upper class into whose ranks only the select few may enter.” As a result, when foreign academics do come to Finland, all they can count on is “polite toleration, but never full acceptance.”

Let us now have a look at a clear case of full acceptance — Dr Howard “Howy” Jacobs has become in Finland a triple professor: Professor of Molecular Biology of Tampere University (1996), Finnish Academy Professor (2006), Professor of the Year (2009). Like Dr McConchie, Pr Jacobs has problems with his publications, but they are of a different sort: he has written four novels, yet has no time to get them published (if you wish to have an idea about his academic progress, just Google his name).

Like Dr McConchie, Pr Jacobs gives his views on the university culture in Finland, but his well-corroborated criticism concerns problems of instruction and is furnished with suggestions.

He, for instance, believes that (reproduced verbatim) the local assessment methods are unprofessional, which can be remedied by importing the British external examiner system of peer-review; that the time taken for students to graduate should be substantially decreased, which can be rectified by assigning every student an advisor from amongst the academic staff; that all university entrance exams should be eliminated except for foreign applicants because Finland has the best high schools in the world; that state funding to universities should be apportioned according to the quality of teaching rather than the quantity of degrees awarded, etc. Pr Jacobs also suggests to replace the current ‘hybrid’ system of using English and Finnish (Swedish) in university-level instruction by the wholesale use of English as the major language of instruction with the Finnish language preserved as a compulsory minor subject for all foreign students.

What a far cry from complaining about the lack of an office of one’s own, or lamenting that the crucial factors for an academic success in Finland are “ethnicity, social background, and the academic patronage available.” What about talent, Dr McConchie? – “Merit is required but it is the poor relation.”

In my opinion, merit in the Finnish academy means a lot. Russian by birth, I have been in the system for approximately as long as the academics I cited above, but unlike them both, I am a product of the system – in 2004, the University of Helsinki granted me a PhD degree in philology, which gave me a chance of performing my lecturing duties albeit outside my native academic system.

During my post-doctoral years, I have been actively engaged in research projects of my own, and I have been busy attending conferences but mostly outside Finland where big forums are quite rare. Having had a chance, however, of observing first-hand how carefully merit is traced and supported at my alma mater, I have reasons to admit that probably I am not good enough as a researcher. As they say in Russia, “Blame not the mirror for your imperfect face.”

Top recap, the Finnish academic system seems to have clearly sorted out the three foreign academics in question by distinguishing Pr Jacobs, shunning Dr McConchie and rejecting Dr Tarvi. By way of conclusion, let me borrow from the late J. F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your university can do for you – ask what you can do for your university.”

Ljuba Tarvi

• Mielipidekirjoitukset osoitteeseen kirsti.sintonen@acatiimi.fi
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