This is the twenty-fifth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that gives a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West.
This guest post is written by Sofia Jeppsson, associate professor of philosophy at Umeå University (or Ubmeje Universitiähta in the local Sami language) in northern Sweden.
Sweden is a country in northern Europe and part of the European Union. The surface area is slightly smaller than Spain, slightly larger than the US state of California – still, only a little over ten million people live here. Originally, Sweden consisted of only the southern 1/3 of the present-day nation. In the fourteenth century, the Swedish crown decided to colonize the north, although this went very slowly until the seventeenth century when the colonization efforts picked up some speed. The crown wanted access to metals and other natural resources up north, and to convert the Sami population to Christianity (although somewhat unusually, they explicitly wanted a diversified economy with the Sami remaining hunters, fishermen and reindeer herders, while Swedes did agriculture and mining). When Norway became independent of Sweden in 1905, this led to further oppression of the Sami; many groups were forcibly relocated, creating legal conflicts about land rights between different Sami groups that persist to this day.
Nevertheless, after all this, roughly 90 % of the Swedish population still live in the southern 1/3 of the country. I did too, until I got my current position in 2018 and moved up north.
Sweden’s oldest universities are Uppsala University founded in 1477 followed by the University of Lund in 1666, both of which persist to this day and are among the biggest universities of the country. Most universities in Sweden are run by the government, and officially counts as government agencies.
Umeå University was founded by the Swedish government in 1965, with the aim of increasing the general educational level in the north. We differ from the big universities in the south in having lots of online courses and -teaching besides what we do on campus.
Higher education in Sweden is done in either a universitet or a högskola, although both institutions are often called universities in English. (Högskola literally translates to high school, but should not be confused with American high schools!) The distinction used to be that a högskola only provided bachelor and master’s degrees, whereas an universitet also offered doctoral degrees and was more research focused. The differences between högskola and universitet are getting increasingly blurred as time moves on, though.
If you’re accepted as a doctoral student in Sweden, the department will hire you with a monthly salary for up to five years (with some teaching and administrative work included). You also have benefits such as a long and paid parental leave if you have a child during grad school (regardless of gender). Another difference between Swedish academic jobs and those of many other countries is that we don’t really have a tenure-track system. You’re either hired for a fixed term, or hired permanently, in which case you have high job security. Permanent positions can be either as lektor or professor. The latter is only for people who are already far advanced and accomplished in their careers. My own job title is that of lektor; we who have permanent lektor jobs usually call ourselves associate professors in English (as I did in the beginning of this blog post). However, it’s also possible to be hired as a lektor for a limited period of time, like 6-12 months, when the university has need of an extra teacher; the lektor position is at bottom a teaching one, even though you have some time for research too.
After defending one’s PhD thesis in Sweden, people traditionally host a big dinner and party for colleagues, family and friends. I’ve talked to American colleagues who have been invited to some such event to serve as an opponent during the thesis defence, and attended the dinner and celebration afterwards, who compared it to a wedding dinner. I think it’s an apt comparison. People give toasts, hold speeches, and present gifts to the new PhD. Furthermore, although the details differ a bit from university to university, there’s often a big yearly ceremony in town for everyone who became a PhD during the year. The new PhD’s, wearing tailcoats or evening gowns, are crowned with laurel wreaths and given rolled up documents stating (in Latin) that one has now become a Doctor of Philosophy in the name of the King (well, there’s much more text than that, but I’m honestly not certain what it says since I can’t read Latin).
External funding provides the means both to acquire more time for research when you have a permanent position, and to keep afloat until you get one (unless, of course, you decide to leave academia or at least the Swedish branch thereof…); permanent lektor jobs are few and far between. I know successful philosophers who didn’t want to move cities for family reasons, but managed to hang on at the same university for ten-fifteen years until they finally got a permanent job, by means of acquiring external funding for one project after another; when you have funding, your chosen university will normally be willing to hire you for a fixed term as long as your funding lasts.
In Sweden, the two biggest funding agencies from which philosophers apply for research money are Vetenskapsrådet/the Swedish Research Council, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (roughly, The Swedish Central Bank’s Commemorative Fund). However, there are also many smaller and more specialized funds that people can get grants from. If you’re a permanent lektor, external funding can be your ticket to doing research four days a week, rather than the baseline one day.
Philosophy is probably the most internationalized of the humanities subjects in Sweden. For the last hundred years or so, Swedish philosophy has been mostly influenced by anglophone analytical philosophy, although I think this is slowly changing (in part, I think, because the analytic-continental divide has become less important to philosophers over time, not just in Sweden but all over the world). I have worked at three different departments in Sweden, and in all of them, English has been the working language and the language we hold seminars and do presentations in. However, although we use some English-language textbooks from the start, we teach in Swedish for the first semesters, and only mix Swedish and English teaching (depending on the teacher’s language) from the third semester or so. For this reason, advertisements for new lektors will sometimes demand that the applicants already know Swedish, or at least already know Norwegian or Danish (which are very similar languages). If the university does not need one more person who can teach in Swedish immediately, the position will be open to non-Swedish speakers too. At our department, we have post docs and lektors from a number of different countries, like Australia, the USA, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.
I teach different student categories – both students who have chosen to study philosophy in particular, and medical students, teacher students, and others who are required to take more narrow philosophy courses relevant to their future profession. My impression is that most students by far are highly interested and motivated.
In Sweden, it’s unusual for people to study a wide array of subjects – if someone majors in literature, for instance, it would be very unusual for them to take a physics class, and the other way around. The literature major will probably only read humanities subjects and perhaps something within the social sciences, whereas the physics major will stick to the natural sciences. An obvious disadvantage of this is that students become less widely read and get less of a general education. An advantage from the standpoint of the philosophy teacher, however, is that you don’t get students who take a course in philosophy because they figured they needed a humanities course as part of their degree, and then picked philosophy almost at random. Rather, students who study philosophy tend to take a real interest in it.
Most universities in Sweden divide their philosophy courses into “practical philosophy” – political and moral philosophy and connected fields, and “theoretical philosophy” – metaphysics, logic, epistemology, and adjacent areas (of course, some topics and areas straddle the line, and said line also tends to be more blurred at an advanced level). At Umeå U, we only teach courses in “philosophy”, but our job advertisements still tend to ask for a person who specializes in practical philosophy if it seems like the department currently leans too much theoretical, and the other way around.
Most people in Sweden seem to be uncertain of what professional philosophers do, but they’re generally interested when they hear about my job, ask questions and want to learn more. I have occasionally been invited as a guest to radio programs or talk shows on TV to talk about matters such as free will, criminal justice and punishment, forgiveness, and human enhancement – even though I’m by no means a famous intellectual.
Higher education in Sweden is free of charge (at least for EU citizens – foreigners from outside the EU taking a course at a Swedish university can be charged tuition fees). You can also take student loans to support yourself while you study; the rate at which you pay them back is fairly leisurely. Often, people still work extra, in particular with today’s high rents, but the monthly payments given to you from CSN – the government-run student loan agency – still contributes significantly to cover the costs of living. At the current exchange rate, CSN loans plus the CSN allowance (not all of it is a loan that you have to pay back) amounts to the equivalent of roughly 270 Euros, 320 US dollars, or 230 pounds sterling a week.
I’m personally grateful for both the tuition free university system and generous student loans, since I come from a working-class family where no one had attended university before I did. In 1996, at age nineteen, I moved to Stockholm (the capital city) to attend university. At the time, it was still relatively easy to get a dorm room even in the big cities and university towns (it has since become much more difficult to get both regular flats to hire and dorm rooms); unlike dorm rooms in many other countries, a Swedish dorm room is similar to a regular flat, except you share kitchen and living room with other people. You pay rent each month, you can live there all year if you wish, and you’re on your own – there’s no staff in the building. Since I grew up not just in a working-class but also rural environment, moving to the big city and going to university was a bit of a culture shock at first, and my road to becoming a professional philosopher was far from a straight one. For various reasons, I dropped out of university and worked as a nursing assistant for several years, before I picked up my studies again. During my doctoral studies, I was still uncertain about many aspects of academia and how it works, unlike those of my peers who came from long lines of academics. When I was going from one fixed-term job to the next after getting my degree, I found the job market extremely stressful, and desperately applied for jobs not just all over Sweden, but all over the world, thinking to myself that if I had known how harsh the academic job market could be, I might have gone to nursing school to become a full nurse instead.
Nevertheless, here I am, and I don’t think I would be if I had lived in a country where higher education is costly. I’m now thoroughly happy with my current position as a lektor at Umeå University.
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