ReseaRch Quality assuRance foR the futuRe a ... - Lund University

Part 1 – background
PART 1 – BACKGROUND
A. CONTEXT – THE ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY
1. Research-intensive universities are amongst the great entrepreneurial
centres of the modern world. They are important national assets
that generate a wide diversity of social benefits: as vital sources of
new knowledge and innovative thinking, as major components of
the national research base, as providers of skilled personnel and
credible credentials, as contributors to innovation, as attractors
of international talent and business investment into a region, as
agents of social justice and mobility, and as contributors to social
and cultural vitality. Their exploration of the boundaries of human
understanding through research not only provides a direct source
of innovation in society, but crucially, is the ideal setting in which
the rising generation learn to question interpretations, to reduce
the chaos of information to the order of an analytical argument, to
seek out what is relevant to the resolution of a problem and to do so
by rational argument supported by evidence. They learn not to be
dismayed by complexity but to unravel it, to seek the true meaning
of things, to distinguish between the true and the merely seemingly
true, to verify for themselves what is stable in that very unstable
compound that often passes for knowledge. These are the attributes
that a modern society needs in its citizens, and are the source of
the creativity that is a engine of change for both society and the
economy.
2. Such an enterprise is not easy to manage. It is not like managing
industrial production in response to market demand, and effective
models cannot be directly imported from industry. Its great
strengths are its unpredictable creativity and entrepreneurialism,
which derive from the relative freedom and autonomy of its academics
and the lack of inhibition of its students. The challenge
for a University’s leadership is to implement the changes that are
needed from time to time if the University is to retain its vitality
and relevance, whilst not inhibiting the freedom that makes it a
creative force that will forge the ideas, the concepts and the people
that the future will need. The challenge for government, which in
Sweden, as in Europe, is the principal funder of universities, and for
10