Swedish journal publishes AIT president’s vision for universities of professions
AIT President Said Irandoust recently had an article published in the Swedish journal, “Universitetslararen” (“Journal for University Teachers”).
The article, written in Swedish, responds to one of the debate themes on the criteria to be used in evaluating university colleges in transferring to full-fledged university status. In the last few years, a number of applications were submitted by university colleges to the government requesting to be converted to full-fledged universities. However, the applications were not reviewed and there was no feedback provided. Recently, the Swedish minister of higher education has announced that he will appoint a task force whose task it would be to develop appropriate criteria which could be used to review the applications. Sweden currently does not have such a criteria and process in place so the initiative from the minister is a most welcome one, the article maintains.
As former rector of the University College of Borås and for the past year as president of AIT, the president explains in the article that he is in a unique position to combine both experiences and to provide some perspectives on this issue.
The Asian region is currently undergoing tremendous changes, and is very dynamic, with a lot optimism, innovation, and development orientation such as in India, and Korea among others. However, the article notes, there is not much debate on some of these issues in the Swedish Higher Education setting. It is timely to work away from culture of uniformity in universities and encourage diversity, new thinking and innovation, Prof. Irandoust argues. Under the new concept there must be flexibility as to the view on what universities are with no prefixed notion or concept. Such a new and innovative way of looking at the university concept will also catalyze economic growth.
One way to do so, the article suggests, would be through the concept of a university of professions. The task force appointed by the minister must be open minded and brave enough to diversity and take in new perspectives and view points. If this does not happen then we will see more of the same with a lot of new universities acting the like old traditional ones. This will only lead to dilution of available resources. We must allow for a new concept with an open minded approach which would also challenge traditional universities which is positive for the development of research and education and that which would also serve as a catalyst in the process, the president wrote.
Faculty and staff from AIT are encouraged to submit stories to general-audience publications as well as scholarly journals. For assistance with English editing, gearing the articles to a general audience or submitting articles, e-mail pssu@ait.ac.th.
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