This is an opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter. The author is responsible for the opinions in the article.
At this time of year, many Swedish researchers want to pull their hair out. The semester begins at the same time as the largest research proposals are submitted. For many humanities scholars, success with these applications is the only chance of being able to conduct research at all. At universities and colleges it often happens that you have a job that you have to buy your way out of. It is both a pressure and stressful situation for the individual researcher and a social problem.
Universities and colleges give less time for research in this position, as a lecturer it is usual 10 percent and as a professor around 40 percent. Regardless, you are expected to try to finance this time with external resources. This leads to the formation of two teams, one that teaches and one that researches. That is, those who manage to get research funding and have the time to write articles and books that deserve re-approval, and those who hold the teaching position and therefore do not have time to qualify and are therefore trapped in the role of teacher.
Even for those who are If the applications are successful, the situation will be untenable. The funding usually runs for three years. You may be able to pause the application for a year, but then you have to start all over again and write many applications in parallel. The funding rate in 2025 at Sweden’s largest research funder, the Swedish Research Council, for projects in the humanities and social sciences was 8 percent, i.e. 89 projects out of 1,131 applications.
Newly qualified academics in the humanities have little chance of gaining permanent employment and are excluded from this funding in order to make ends meet. This makes for a long career of writing applications, having a knife to your throat, and constantly competing with your colleagues.
The Research Act 2025 is “based on the goal that Sweden should be one of the world’s leading research and innovation countries and a leading knowledge nation”. Politicians claim that they want to promote research and love keywords such as pioneering work and excellence in research contexts. How excellence can be achieved when researchers spend so much time writing applications that go nowhere when they could instead be thinking, reading, researching and writing – yes, researching – is difficult to understand.
Humanistic research offers a foundation for how we can understand the world and develop areas such as pedagogy, history and philosophy, which ultimately affect what our children learn in school, and how we can understand historical events and translate abstract theories into concrete ideas. Researchers participate in government investigations, expert councils and committees, write on cultural pages and sit on television sofas. They are useful to society, but should also be able to write a book on 18th century philosophy to contribute to an international field of research without direct application.
Free research did not receive any major funding last year, but there were so-called targeted calls, for example from the Swedish Research Council. It is an indirect way to direct research towards topics that policymakers want to prioritize. Among other things, you can apply for funding for research on migration, the Holocaust, democracy and violence in close relationships. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but there are clear limits to what you can research.
Most major funders such as Formas, the Baltic Sea Foundation and Vinnova have clear requirements for societal relevance or that the research must make a direct contribution to a societal challenge. An exception is the claim that “research in the humanities and social sciences is needed to understand and address the current challenges facing society at national and global levels,” as does the Jubilee Fund of the independent Riksbanken Foundation.
This is happening at a time of Political disintegration with a capricious despot who rules one of the world’s leading research nations and repeatedly questions academic freedom. Research is generally questioned for irrelevant reasons, but the humanities have a special status as “unnecessary.” Just as art, literature, theater and other cultures can be dismissed as unnecessary when healthcare is in ruins. At the same time, we know that cultural experiences, free thoughts and ideas support everything from our perceived happiness to democracy.
At a time when resistance to authoritarian developments seems to be the focus, it should be a matter of course to promote free research. As the government itself emphasizes, “one of the most important keys to achieving the best research is ensuring that the best students choose an academic career”. In order to make you want to do this, you need clear and secure career paths. What we risk now is the waste of people and ideas.
