Team Maurseth

I: Overall academic policy values and visions

The Faculty of Humanities (HF) at the University of Bergen (UiB) is an academically strong and diverse faculty. Linguistic, aesthetic, literary, cultural, historical and philosophical perspectives characterize the breadth of the disciplines we offer. As the dean leadership team, we will safeguard this breadth and the diversity the faculty represents. That researchers can freely and independently develop their expertise, within and across disciplines, is crucial for the humanities to make their presence felt and have significance for students and society.

HF at UiB has much to be proud of and has a number of success stories. We will help to highlight and make visible all the impressive things that are happening at the faculty. The diversity of people, the rich selection of small and large academic subjects, the breadth of experiences and practices are the foundation for HF's future.

Diversity may become even more important in meeting the challenges we face now. We must handle the scope of our resources in a critical and constructive way in the years ahead. This requires leadership to be both listening, pragmatic and proactive. We want to be such a leadership.

This will be particularly important in the coming years, when the economic situation seems to be characterized by austerity and cuts. Avoiding internal conflicts in such times can be challenging, but possible. We believe that good communication, and predictable, thorough and open processes will contribute to acceptance of decisions on difficult matters such as budget and staffing plans.

At the same time, we realize that it can be demanding. We are humble. We do not have all the solutions ourselves, but we can find them together. We believe that it is through increased interaction and collaboration that we can solve the challenges we face.

Therefore, we will identify and highlight all the good work that is already taking place, so that everyone can learn from the practices of others. In anticipation of a new HF building, we will facilitate communication across professional environments and management levels through several meeting places, such as general meetings, and other contact points that can be available even in a busy everyday life.

II. Students and education

The students are absolutely central to the existence of the faculty. Awakening students' curiosity, interest in and insight into our subjects is one of the most important things we do. That the teaching is research-based is a cornerstone of the educational offer at HF. At HF, students will meet academic challenges.

It is through a solid professional and academic education that the candidates become relevant to the working world, both in terms of the field of knowledge and competence, but also in terms of skills; analytical, critical, written and oral.

A key feature of good teaching is that it is led by committed, development-oriented professionals who make research-based choices about content and how students can best learn both academic content and the ability to work and think for themselves. We have many skilled teachers at the faculty, and the teaching we offer has great academic and methodological variation. This is a resource we want to utilize even better. Different approaches such as the classic lecture, flipped learning, the use of digital learning tools or problem- and project-based teaching can all promote motivation and learning. We want to pave the way for systematic sharing of good supervision and teaching practices by creating a teaching forum across the units.

Well-being, academic support and social meeting places are important for promoting the joy of learning and professional development – and for making the study period something more than just a race towards an exam. Strengthening the quality of teaching can be demanding in times of economic downturn, but we cannot downgrade our efforts to create academically strong and engaging learning environments. In collaboration with the students, we will continue and further develop fadderuken, the mentoring of new students, and facilitate more social meeting places. In addition, student assistants play an important role in connecting students more closely to the academic environment, strengthening learning and community, as well as the relationships between academic staff and students at different levels of the study course. Continued focus on students' social and academic well-being through measures such as academic mentors and more predictable arrangements with student assistants will pay off in the long term.

Students are also our most important source of income. We need more students for HF, we should keep the students we have, and we should encourage them to study more than they do today. We will actively look at the possibilities of recruiting more students to our subjects, we will direct efforts to reduce dropouts (although we recognize that not all dropouts are necessarily negative), and we will encourage our students to study more with us.

The major subjects provide us with the greatest income, and at the same time we want to maintain a broad study offer. The program portfolio project has been approved by the current faculty board. We will carefully study the project and implement the approved action plan in the best possible way. We will also consider other measures to increase recruitment to the faculty, reduce dropouts and increase students' study progression.

Teacher education
Educating teachers for the school system is one of the faculty’s core tasks. We take teacher education seriously, and it is based on good cooperation between disciplines, practice, didactics and pedagogy. We will continue our cooperation with the Lektorsenteret (the Center for Teacher Training) to organize the five-year teacher-training education in the best possible way and to recruit more students. We will also work strategically to highlight the opportunity to take practical pedagogical education (PPU) after completing a HF degree.

Further and continuing education (EVU)
We want HF to become a powerhouse for lifelong learning, also for adults who want professional enrichment, new perspectives and deeper understanding. There is great potential for further development of EVU offerings at the faculty. HF can reach out to and qualify more people across the country and thus contribute to fulfilling our societal mission for all age groups. Such an initiative could also improve the finances of the faculty, but new offerings must be developed in a responsible manner, and we will consider whether EVU revenues should be made more visible in the staffing plan. The faculty board has recently adopted an EVU report. We will follow up on this, and we are ambitious in terms of what we can achieve.

III. Research, research training, and dissemination

We will work to improve the working conditions for all types of research, regardless of how it is financed.

External, temporary grants provide important income for the faculty and units. Through concrete measures based on a stronger culture of sharing, we will learn from good practices and successful applications, increase the visibility of the projects we receive, and inspire more initiatives for new project applications. However, such grants are also challenging, not least administratively. Strengthening the administration’s already strong interaction with the researchers will therefore be important for us.

The faculty has been successful with the research initiative that began in earnest with Sejersted’s deanship in 2017, when Maurseth was prodean. Centers for Excellent Research such as Sapience and the Center for Digital Narratives, as well as several major ERC and NFR projects are the results of targeted efforts over several years. They not only provide significant income for the faculty that benefits everyone, but also contribute to raising the quality of humanities research and offer knowledge that society at large needs to solve complex local and global societal challenges.

In terms of research policy, we want to work to ensure that the importance of humanities research is also made visible in knowledge policy debates both locally and nationally. We will collaborate strategically with other HF deans in Norway to improve the opportunities for grants for humanities research in NFR's programs, and for the establishment of separate programs for humanities research.

Research education
Scholarships and postdoctoral fellows - the next generation of researchers - are particularly vulnerable groups of researchers, not least because of their temporary status. A well-structured support system that ensures equal treatment is necessary for researchers early in their careers. We want more PhD candidates to complete their degree within the prescribed time, but also to help those who exceed the prescribed time to complete their degree. Routines for the final phases and the run-up to delivery are particularly important and should be reviewed to find the best solutions. We will also look into how we can strengthen our PhD supervision expertise and share good practices, in close collaboration with the units and candidates themselves.

How career-building work (pliktarbeid) works for the candidates and units needs a comprehensive review. This includes providing support to candidates with little teaching experience through flexible solutions for university pedagogy courses. International candidates’ opportunities for Norwegian courses must also become an important part of this discussion. In addition, we will look at how we prepare our fellows and post-doctoral fellows for the job market, and strengthen their competitiveness after the doctorate – in close collaboration with UiBFerd: Career Center for Young Researchers

Infrastructure
The language collections, archives and large infrastructure projects such as Clarino, which makes language resources easily accessible to researchers, and Samla, which digitizes several Norwegian cultural heritage archives, have placed the Faculty of Humanities at UiB on the national roadmap for humanities infrastructure. We want to continue our collaboration with the University Library to further strengthen our position in this field, also in collaboration with other institutions such as the Language Council, the University of Oslo and the National Library. It will be particularly important for us to make available and visible the benefits this infrastructure can have for the diversity of research conducted at the faculty.

Dissemination
It is important that research is accessible both to the wider world and to each other. We want to make visible more of the dissemination work that is already taking place. New dissemination initiatives require support; the faculty will facilitate training to colleagues who want to disseminate more – or for the first time. In addition, we want to work to ensure that the importance of humanities research is made visible in knowledge policy debates both locally, nationally and internationally.

IV. Internationalization

International experience promotes intercultural understanding and is of great value to the individual and to the society in which we live. We want to further develop HF as an inclusive faculty with a clear international profile. Among other things, we want to develop more English-language courses to attract more international students. When it comes to exchange in the other direction, we want to look for measures that can stimulate increased mobility for students as well as for academic and administrative staff at UiB. At the same time, we want to emphasize sustainable internationalization by highlighting that this can happen in different ways, locally at Nygårdshøyden, digitally and by people traveling abroad.

V. Collaboration

Openness, dialogue and collaboration will be important in the coming years, to create good working environments and to find good solutions to the challenges we face. This applies across the organization, between faculty management and the units, within the individual subjects and across the subjects, between students and researchers, and between younger and experienced researchers.

The faculty develops primarily from below and it is important that the units have a high degree of independence and autonomy, because the subjects are best run with subject-specific decisions. We are fortunate to have a competent administration, many of whom know the faculty and the subjects well. The faculty functions best when administration and scientific activities collaborate closely on the diverse academic activities that take place in the units.

Bergen, 2025

Anne Beate Maurseth       Laura Saetveit Miles       Åsta Haukås