Scientia victrix

I know I've been ranting about this subject before, but the recent news regarding universities, both in media and in the internal communications of my precious alma mater, give no reason to optimism.

The raising of private funds required by the new university legislation lags behind the timetable, the government is effectively cutting the income of University of Helsinki by millions of euros by revoking University Pharmacy's exemption from taxes and the financial situation at the departments is so dire that for example the Department of Classics has cancel to all the tuition given by other than permanent personnel for the spring semester.

In this situation it is tragicomic (although I confess finding it hard to see the comic side) that at the same time there is official worry about the state of research* and the duration of studies. As usual, the goverment is about to handle the last problem by applying the stick to the undergraduates, rather than trying the carrot.

Equal opportunities and investment in higher education rapidly changed Finland from an agrarian developing country into a rich, northern welfare state after the second world war. Some argue that the welfare state is already gone, and it seems to me that the importance of education and research for the nation is only a dead phrase, that nobody remembers the true meaning of.

*The Academy of Finland has in a recent survey found out that the standard of research done in Finland has dropped. As one of the major reasons for this the Academy pinpointed the lack of funding for basic research.

Critical mass

We are back in Amman. The work in the field was intensive but all went well. We even managed to squeeze in some time for seeing sights and visiting friends.

While staying here in the ACOR I have become aware of what an advantage it is for scholars to have an institute like this, especially when run by such friendly and helpful people as the ACOR currently is. The environment itself is stimulating for scholarly work. You casually meet other people in the same field over the lunch and are able to share information. There is a well-equipped library for research. Above all, there is a continuity of research and scholarly community. If you happen to need some information from someone not here, there are probably people who know them and can put you in contact with them.

At the same time I am also painfully reminded of the futility of trying to work on Near Eastern archaeology in Finland. There is no tradition, and no guarantee of continuity beyond the on-going project. It makes me a little depressed.

In fact the problem is related to a larger problem concerning archaeology in Finland as a whole. We lack the critical mass that would give rise to a more dynamic research community. There are altogether around a dozen archaeologists employed as teaching staff on permanent basis in the three universities in Finland offering tuition in archaeology. To have time for research they also have to secure research funding and drop teaching. Only so few can get a temporary fellowship from the Academy of Finland. The rest are left to apply from various foundations, but the sources of funding for post-doctoral research are fewer than stipends for post-graduates, and it generally helps in getting funding if you have an established position with a university. This means that although there are currently perhaps more PhD students in archaeology in Finland than ever, they - that is, we - will find it hard to continue research after we get our degrees.

I wish there were more positions for archaeologists in the universities, but I fear it is unrealistic to hope for that in the foreseeable future. That is why we need the international contacts, both near and far, to bring in fresh winds as well as to have a wider audience for our own research. That is the only way to a better Finnish archaeology. Good science is not made in lonely cells, it is made in interaction with other researchers.

What I did in May

Good news have been cropping up lately:
- my article will be published, after all (my first ever publication in an international refereed journal)
- my paper was accepted for next year's ICAANE in London
- I got a four-month grant for writing my dissertation which means it might eventually be completed

The course in archaeological survey is almost over, the students just need to hand in the final assignments on post-fieldwork. As always, the course was an educational experience for myself in how not to do things. The course could have been better; I suppose it could have been worse. I have learned my lessons and will no doubt do different mistakes next year.

It was also an interesting glimpse into the undergraduate psyche and the pressures today's students are under. Back in the good old days when I was a student you had a certain number of months we were entitled to study grants, and how you used that time was your own business. If you used up the money before graduating, well, that was just too bad. Since then the Study Grants Board has become interested in the progress of your studies. You have to prove that you have been studying diligently, and the only way of proving that is, of course, getting enough credits. The close supervision of credits earned seems to have created a situation where the credits themselves are the end, and not the means to an end. The students do not study to learn anything, they study to get the credits.

The same system that works on the level of an individual student, works also between the Minitry of Education and the universities. The Ministry, which hands out the money for the universities, requires universities to produce a certain number of degrees yearly to get the funds to run their teaching and research. Of course the requirements rise every year without similar input into resources. The universities are effectively treated as if they were factories producing rubber boots for the left foot only. Every year the factories are required to produce more boots out of the same amount of rubber. And they say hey, you can do that if you cut the amount of raw material per boot. The boots won't last any wear, but who cares, as long as the statistics look nice - the end product is useless without the right foot boot anyway.

An appeal for KOTUS

Dear readers, if you have not yet signed the appeal for KOTUS (Research Institute for the Languages of Finland), please do it now. The institute is going to be hit hard by the so-called governmental productivity program I was ranting about in an earlier post. With the new additions to the program, they will lose 34 offices - about a third of the total they have.

The state has the policy for giving at least BA level education to 60% of each age group. At the same time they are heavily cutting down the number of civil servants - the governemental sector has traditionally been a large employer for those with education in humanities or social science. Young people, don't do like I did and train for something you will never get a job in. Go to vocational training and learn to be plumbers and electricians! At least those jobs cannot be outsourced to China.

More ranting about university policy

Today's Helsingin Sanomat again made me choke on my morning coffee. University of Helsinki is going to cut the number of different departments from the current 80 down to 40. The aim is to get departments with at least 10 professors each. (Here a link to the news at the University internet site, in Finnish only. I tried to find it in English but apparently this is not something the University wants to make internationally known.)

This massive amalgamation of departments is ostensibly related to the change of the legislation concerning universities. After the new law comes into force the departments will become financial units, which is argued to justify this shake-up. The people responsible for the decision also claim that it will enable more flexible resources for teaching and research and improve the possibilities for departmental co-operation with external partners. Bulls*t.

Let us take an example from real life. Several years ago now, the departments of archaeology, ethnology and folklore were incorporated into the Institute of Cultural Studies, and to this cocktail were added the fields of museology and marine history, which have no professorships. This statistically raised the number of professors within one department from one to three. However, because the three fields are rather different from each other, it did not in any way influence the resources available for teaching. Each field continued to teach and research as before. It did not become easier for students to do minors in the other subjects within the same department. I have understood that the fight about who gets the money did intensify, though.

What I would see as a reform beneficial for teaching and research would be getting more teaching and research staff in a particular field. I can't help turning black* with envy every time I recall the number of staff at the University of Leicester School of Archaeology and Ancient History.

*According to a friend of mine, being green with envy means just feeling envious. Black with envy embodies also feeling murderous.

Virtual teaching

or: If a tree falls in a forest but there is no-one to hear it, will it still make a sound falling?

I am not convinced by my experience in virtual teaching so far. For one thing, it is a really dreary monologue for the teacher, who has no means of judging how the audience is responding. If it is as dull for the students, they are probably half-asleep, or else most of them have left and gone home. All potential for interaction is lost by the fact that the students are sitting in a classroom and each group has only one computer for communicating back to me and to the other groups, with no microphone, so the only means of asking questions is by typing them. Finnish students are not famous for being communicative anyway, quite on the contrary, but in comparison with this virtual course the discussion on the other one I have been teaching is lively. Despite all the technology involved, I feel this is going backwards in time, to the good old days when a professor would enter the classroom, give his lecture and leave, without any interruption from the students intent on absorbing his words of wisdom.

However, in the light of recent discussion revolving around Finnish university policies , I fear I am really witnessing the future. The government is also planning to cut down thousands of governmental jobs in the name of a productivity program - as if e.g. social security or educational sector is a company operating by the laws of quartal capitalism*. That is so absurd it would make you laugh if it was not real. So, I can see how alluring the idea must be for the decision-makers: By employing one teacher only you can teach (in a very broad sense of the word, but who cares as long as the statistics look nice?) students anywhere in the country with negligible material costs. Lo and behold, we have invented the next best thing after the duck laying gold eggs.

*And see where that principle has led us... It never fails to confound me how these companies can make more and more money by constantly closing factories and kicking out workers. In the past having to close down factories would have been a sign of impending disaster for the company but now it just causes their share price to soar. I confess my utter and absolute bafflement.

Brain drain

I recently read in Helsingin Sanomat (the leading Finnish newspaper) that Finland is one of the few OECD countries to suffer from brain drain. After reading the article, I have had a couple of discussions with colleagues, and they have confirmed my initial reaction to the news. It is no wonder that educated young Finns pack their suitcases and leave the country, when there is so little chance for a person with a doctoral degree to find a decent job!

Finnish free education system is held in high regard. Our schoolchildren get top results in PISA, although I dare say the same quality is not quite met in the higher education where the emphasis seems to be mainly on quantity rather than quality - maximum number of degrees for minimum input in terms teaching staff and facilities. (In fact, considering the ridiculously low numbers of teaching staff in universities we are not doing THAT badly...) What I find incredible that we have this free education system with good-quality schooling up to the doctoral level and then we just WASTE it.

My own experience comes from archaeology, of course, but I have understood the situation is much the same regardless the field. As long as you are a wanna-be researcher doing your PhD, you may get funding through grants or a PhD school (if you are lucky and in a suitable field likely to get that kind of funding). But when you emerge from the university, a fledgeling researcher, you will find out that nobody will fund your research. The reason is that while there are quite a few grants for PhD students, there a significantly fewer of those for young researchers - to get post-doctoral research funding you have to be at first established in your field, but how to achieve that in the first place? Moreover, no employer wants you. You are considered over-educated, too theoretical and alienated from "real" work. Besides, heavens forbid, you might want to have a bigger salary because of your higher education! If your background is in humanities, there is the additional problem of being a specialist in a non-productive field. Here in Finland we have a firm belief in education also in that sense that you are not fit to do anything else than what you were educated for - unless, of course, that "else" is working in an institutional cleaning company.

No wonder there have not been any Nobel prizes in science coming to Finland since A.I.Virtanen in 1945. Those bright enough to do so leave the country and do not come back. In fact, even if they wanted to return, they will find it very hard because the experience and skills they have gained abroad is not valued - not in the sense of money nor in the sense of job opportunities. (This insular attitude is, of course, even more pronounced when it comes to foreigners, but that is another story.)

Somebody tell me, how can we afford this?!

PS. Btw, I've been considering trying to get a post-doc post abroad when my doctoral thesis is finally finished... Specializing in any field in archaeology in Finland seems to be a career suicide. Well... you might actually say that studying archaeology is a career suicide. :)

Rafting on the river of Hades

Time flies, one week has already gone past. We work from the break of the day until the sunset, except for a four hours break for siesta in the afternoon. My job here is pretty boring to be honest, just augering to get soil samples. When I tried to show more interest, immediately after we came here, I was told (not quite in these exact words, but the message was this) that it is not my work here to think. Oh, great. Can you hear my motivation soaring?

So, instead of thinking, I went rafting on River Acheron today with some people from our field team. As you may or may not know, Acheron is the river of Hades. We managed to avoid the three-headed dog (well, actually he only had one head and looked pretty lame) and were safely back on the shore when I realized Kharon had extracted a payment for the trip, after all: my phone in its presumably water-tight plastic bag was dripping wet. I hope the ferryman will enjoy it as much as I did, in case it does not miraculously return to life.

But in case you try to text me, here is the explanation to why your messages are not getting through.

Probably the worst movie I've ever seen

I went to see "10 000 BC" with a couple of my archaeologist friends. It was a must, of course, since it is set in the past. Having seen the earlier films by the same director my hopes were not high. Even so, it was worse than I expected.

The story itself is a bundle of clichés. The main character belong to a tribe of Palaeolithic mammoth hunters. A man who is not especially bright or brave falls in love with a woman. She is robbed by the bad guys and of course he sets out to rescue her with a couple of helpers - a young boy, a brave soldier and a wise old man. On the road (a journe through a most unlikely geography which might or might not be Europe and Africa...) they meet other people (Neolithic tribes) who help them to overcome the bad guys. The only way the scriptwriter has found to motivate the people to act seems to be the fulfilling of some prophecy, which abound. Finally it is revealed that the bad guys are actually the people of the lost Atlantis, ruled by some alien! By this time, at the latest, you realize that 10 000 BC is not a movie set in the past, it is pure fantasy, or some kind of paleo-scifi.

The dialogue is almost non-existent, being replaced by a most annoying narrator. The characters are so thin that you could not care less whether they live or die. Through the two hours of suffering (in part of the audience) the movie seems to try to build towards an epic climax which never comes. In short, the movie did not touch anything in me.

Archaeologically, there were some nice details, like the care with which the material culture of the mammoth hunters and the farmers was portrayed. But if this much money is wasted on producing a film, could not someone have paid the scriptwriter a little more to get a proper plot?

From creating a national past towards sharing it

Yesterday evening I was eating out with friends from the Jordan project. After a couple of glasses of wine I launched into one of my favourite rants concerning Finnish archaeology, namely, why do we not publish our research in international journals?!

While studying in England some years ago I, for the first time, realized that although we do not have here in Finland things that would really capture the imagination of the public, like Roman villas or Egyptian pyramids, we have something that might capture the attention of other archaeologists: very well-preserved hunter-gatherer dwelling sites dating to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic and even later periods. I understand that in Central Europe and in the Mediterranean these are rare because of intense cultivation, erosion and such. Dozens if not hundreds of these sites have been excavated and documented with care in Finland. The information available from those excavations might be very interesting and useful for archaeologists interested in prehistoric hunter-gatherers worldwide. So why the hell do we not publish our research more widely?

Why are we happy to write about our research just to each other? The Finnish community of archaeologists is not big, let me tell you - even by the little I have told about myself in my blog I'd say most archaeologists in Finland who have ever met me already know who I am. If they don't, they know somebody who can tell them.

But back to the business: In my opinion (you may disagree) this disinterest towards reaching an international audience is largely due to the historical background of archaeology in Finland. Archaeology of Finland was started as a part of the nation-building program in the 19th century. It was aimed at creating a past for the Finns, and at present day it still carries that ballast. I dare argue that most Finnish archaeologists doing archaeology in Finland have the underlying idea that they are studying the past of the Finns (or, in some cases, the past of the Sami) although they might not even be conscious about having it. And that, I would claim, is why we do not see that resarch on our Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer sites might actually have something to give to a larger, international audience, who don't give a damn about whose prehistory it is, but would dearly love to achieve a better understanding about hunter-gatherer sites. It is just a matter of viewpoint.