Professor Howy Jacobs: A Manifesto for UTA

Some thoughts on the award of an ERC Advanced Grant to my laboratory, and of a major project grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the laboratory of Per Ashorn, December 2008

Professor Howy Jacobs. Photo: Pasi Järvenpää

The award of large research grants, whilst an occasion for satisfaction and congratulation, also imposes obligations. First and foremost these obligations are placed upon us, the principal investigators to whom they are awarded, and on our teams of researchers who perform most of the work. We have to deliver on the trust invested in us. I plan to be rather busy for the next 5 years.

Major project grants such as these are not purely the product of the individual investigator's brilliance or good luck. They are a reflection of the support provided by the local environment, and their successful execution requires that environment to continue to be supportive. So, what is needed to create and sustain a supportive environment for top-level research?

At the risk of sounding like an election manifesto, here are my thoughts on the matter. I should preface all this by stating that I am most definitely not offering myself for election in the upcoming rectorial elections in our university – I now have far too much to do in research! However, what I am putting forth here does represent my hopes and expectations of whoever succeeds the current rectors, for it is upon their shoulders and via their policies that the future success or failure of our university, and its top researchers, will ride.

First of all, the university must earmark those units in which prestige projects such as ours are embedded, as major strategic priorities. If it doesn't do so, those projects will not succeed and their leaders, as well as their more junior associates, will finally look elsewhere for a properly supportive environment. Strategic priority doesn't mean that the University spends some extra money on those units, if it is available after all existing budget commitments have been satisfied. It means, in fact, the opposite. It means that the university puts an audaciously large investment into those units, then sees what it has left to satisfy other budgetary needs; if necessary, making actual cuts elsewhere, in the less productive units, to balance the books. It means that University of Tampere must be Toyota, not General Motors, because no-one is going to bail us out when we waste all our budget on the old at the expense of the new.

Second, the university must identify and invest to just such a high degree in new initiatives that can generate future investments from the outside. It must replicate the success of IMT and the global health programme of the medical school by identifying other strategic priorities, other key areas into which the university can enter the top league. To aim to be quite good is a guarantor of failure. Only aiming to be the best can give us a chance to succeed at all. One way to do this is via a recruitment programme which self-selects those priority research areas, offering the best young investigators in the world, in whatever field, a truly unrivalled relocation package, thus ensuring that we have a new pool of local talent that has a good chance to attract ERC and other major funding in future. This will also provide for the essential renewal of our faculty. Many other universities are already thinking along such lines. There is no time to lose. If we don't offer substantially more than they are planning to offer we will just fade away. Tampere, despite the advantages which are obvious to all of us, clings precariously to the world map, and needs constant inflow of talent to develop a competitive academic profile.

Third, our university's leaders should be lobbying hard at the national level to ensure that Finland implements such policies nationally. In particular, this means investing in our national research infrastructure to maximize our chances of success for obtaining competitively awarded international grants, for which we are doing well but could do much better yet. Research infrastructure doesn't just mean fancy machines. It means creating a proper career structure for young scientists that enables them to pursue top research without too much teaching or admin, and without constantly needing to be applying for the next job. It means developing properly remunerated posts for technical support, so that PhD students and other researchers can focus on the intellectual content of their projects. It means streamlining the education system so that we train better and use our time as teachers more productively, both at bachelor as well as postgrad levels. Being a student in Finland must become a strictly time-limited, full-time activity, with properly focussed content, an opening onto the labour market and an outcome that can be failure and diversion to another track in life, as well as success. For the most gifted students, university education must also provide foundation training in research, a model we have pioneered in IMT.

Finally, recognizing that in the not so distant future all university income will be based on the quality of our research and our degrees, and no longer just on the raw numbers thereof, we need to implement a comprehensive evaluation of all components of our university, and act upon its findings. Each faculty, department and research unit needs to have its courses and its research activity internationally peer-reviewed, using the top 100 institutions worldwide as a benchmark. This must be as objective and transparent an exercise as possible, with the absolute minimum of tiresome bureaucracy. Future funding should follow quality. Units with no internationally competitive research should be terminated. Degree courses whose content is outdated, poorly delivered or inappropriate, should be eliminated from our portfolio. Those that are not yet excellent, but are perceived to have possibilities to develop to an internationally competitive level, should receive funding targeted specifically on making the necessary improvements. Those that are already delivering the goods should be strongly supported to improve yet further.

I predict that in 25 years time there will be only two proper universities in Finland. One will undoubtedly be University of Helsinki. I would like University of Tampere to be the other; or at least to be its most important and vibrant component.

Howy Jacobs