New call for a top foreign university in Stockholm

Two leading members of the Liberal Party in the City of Stockholm Council, Opposition Vice-Mayor Lotta Edholm and elected representative Richard Bengtsson, have called for the establishment of a branch of a world-leading foreign university in Stockholm.

They said there is a need to turn Stockholm into a “smarter” city by inviting a “leading global university, for example New York University” to set up a campus in the capital.

“The present government and the majority of the Stockholm City Council are now driving the development in the wrong direction. Many of the world’s universities are now establishing themselves in cities like Dubai and Hong Kong,” they wrote in Svenska Dagbladet, a major Swedish newspaper.

Edholm and Bengtsson also proposed that the City of Stockholm should support a number of students through a total or partial waiver of their tuition fees on condition the student undertakes a course that is of relevance to the City of Stockholm, such as town planning or environmental technology.

“Stockholm is one of the most innovative regions in Europe, having strong research clusters and biotechnology. We are a major tourist city. Most company start-ups in Sweden are taking place here.

“Stockholm and Sweden are scoring high with regard to the quality of the physical environment, we have gender equality and well functioning institutions. But the world is changing and we are in need of constant improvement [to maintain] the competitive edge of the City of Stockholm,” they wrote.

Views of university leaders

Anders Hamsten, rector of the Karolinska Institute, or KI, said the establishment of a branch of a top international university in the city would be of interest.

“The core university activities of research, innovation and education are becoming increasingly dependent on international collaboration. The strategy plan for KI emphasises the need for long-term alliances between top-tier universities, and we are also strengthening our corporate alliances.”

He said in parallel, KI, Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology are working towards widening the existing strategic collaborations between the three universities, one expression of which is the Stockholm node of the Science for Life Laboratory.

Astrid Söderbergh Widding, vice-chancellor of Stockholm University, noted that the level of ambition has fallen – from seeking a university on the Stanford level to New York University, which is at about the same level as the three already existing universities in Stockholm.

“Even if a top university should establish a campus in Stockholm, this does not mean that the top level research would automatically be transferred to the Stockholm branch,” she told University World News. “Here, the question of financing is crucial. A top university needs cutting-edge research to offer excellent education.”

Associate Professor Lena Adamson, director of the Swedish Centre for Educational Research, the new governmental authority, said the Stockholm region needed another university but this should be one built on a much stronger integration between education, research and innovation-business than we normally see.

She told University World News: “The aim should be that students develop the ability to use knowledge, ideas and technology to create new or significantly improved products, services, processes, policies, new business models, or jobs.

“But this will not necessarily happen by inviting international universities to create branches here. On the contrary, the gap between the 'mother university' and the 'branch university' students could possibly even lower the quality of education.”

Adamson said if the aim, on the other hand, is just to strengthen research, it is better to recruit “brilliant” researchers and give them the opportunity to build and finance their teams, labs and instruments at existing universities, which she believes is already in process.

Former rector of Stockholm University, Professor Kåre Bremer, said that Stockholm could create its own world-class university by combining the three big universities in the city, the Karolinska Institute or KI, the Royal Institute of Technology, or KTH, and Stockholm University. This would create a top-ranking institution, he said.

“It is my firm view that such a combined top university would create huge international attention, become very attractive and be a great asset for Sweden as a research nation,” he told University World News.

Calls for a foreign branch campus

This is the third time since 2013 that high-ranking Swedish officials have called for a foreign campus to be established.

Former minister of higher education and research Tobias Krantz, now head of education, research and innovation at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, and Maria Rankka, CEO of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, argued in 2013 that the obstacles to establishing foreign university branches in Sweden were extremely high.

“Sweden should have an ambition for the establishment of an international top university branch before 2020,” Krantz and Rankka wrote in the major newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

During the election campaign in the summer of 2014, the Conservative Party addressed the question once more. Anna Kinberg Batra and Tomas Tobé, writing in the newspaper Aftonbladet, said that Sweden should make better use of the international trend demonstrated by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, that since 2012 more than 200 foreign university campuses have been established and another 30 planned at locations around the world.

“The Swedish legislation and regulations for such establishments are ripe for renewal,” they said.