Speaker 1: One day last summer, I was rafting on the Flathead River, just outside of West Glacier, Montana, in the United States, and it was a beautiful day, and I could feel the warm sunshine on my skin. But my overconfidence, based on long childhood vacations in boats and on the water, led me to leave off my life jacket. And on the river, I passed through a fast-moving stretch, and the front of my boat got caught under the water, and I went sailing. The powerful flow of the water was stronger than I could have guessed, and I got into trouble somewhere under that capsized raft. I lost my sense of direction. I was briefly unsure about which way was up, and for a fleeting moment, I did not know if I was going to survive. Getting beyond the current became an existential challenge. Sometimes I feel like that when I look at the state of higher education today. Do we know where we're headed? Which way should we turn to move forward? What's it going to take to survive? I've had the tremendous privilege to serve as the rector or the president of two universities, Oslo Metropolitan University, and now the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. And I'm driven in this work by the conviction that the discovery and application of knowledge are the essential roles, the essential tools for the betterment of society. Discovery, that's the heart of both research and education. Research is about discovering things that no one has known before. It's a discovery for humanity. Education is about discovering things that you didn't know before. It's a discovery for an individual. And universities are uniquely characterized by bringing these two domains for discovery together. We're not the only ones who do research, and we're not the only ones who offer higher education, but we are the only ones who do both. And our contribution to society comes through both research and education, especially when they merge into research-based education. That's what we have to offer, and it's the core skill for preparing people to move society forward. But I'm concerned. I'm concerned that the river rapids are leading us astray, and I want to mention three areas of disquietude that I have about where we're currently at and why getting beyond that will make both universities and the societies we serve better. First of all, we're trying to solve our problems through competition. We compete for students. We compete for the best teachers and researchers. We compete for making speedy discoveries and publishing about them in all the right places. And we do that in part to compete for more money to do more research to have more students. And as we increasingly realize how crucial interdisciplinary approaches are to solving our most urgent global problems, we have to let our competition-based approach stimulate instead an approach that's based on cooperation. The urge to get ahead can only be fulfilled together. With respect to education, when our mission is to spread knowledge and build capacity for the betterment of society, then it must become a global enterprise. And collaborations across continents, across cultures, across classes, that's what can turn education into a cooperative strategy for the promotion of peace, which is perhaps the ultimate measure of an improved society. The discoveries and insights that research can offer are increasingly complex and increasingly in need of interdisciplinary solutions that can only be found through cooperation. The challenges we have to meet to develop a sustainable way of living are bigger than what any one university can address alone. Just to take one example, the quest for more sustainable food production is crucial for reaching our environmental goals. But more sustainable food production, that also has implications for forest management, for water distribution, for issues related to the structure of societies. These require many fields of expertise working together in ways that are unlikely in one institution, perhaps even in one country. My second concern is that we're nudged politically to have the wrong kind of focus on higher education as a preparation for a vocation. We don't know what kind of jobs there will be in the future. Not even in the mid to short-term future. One recent estimate suggests that 65% of the children who started grade school this year will work in jobs that don't yet exist. And that might sound like a prediction about a future far down the road, but it will be changing along the way. And even in 10 years, many of you will work in jobs that don't yet exist. The most compelling job skills are therefore not those connected to specific professions, but rather to skills like creativity, adaptability, the ability to effectuate change, innovation. When our elected officials try to manage publicly owned universities down to a level of detail about what kinds of and how many engineers or nurses or teachers we should be producing, they make the mistake of thinking that a university education should be dominated by the acquisition of vocational skills. In fact, most of those can be learned on the job. Now, of course, I don't mean that we shouldn't prepare our young people for working life. We should. But I do mean that even the most professionally oriented educational programs have to leave significant space for developing critical thinking skills, writing skills, and the always challenging skills needed for productive cooperation. It's possible that a view of post-secondary education as the start of a cycle of lifelong learning interwoven with work becomes more dominant and universities become places for shorter and shorter visits. It's a kind of learn-as-you-go model and it stands in contrast with the front-loading view of higher education we have today. Competencies get delivered en masse in early adulthood with the intention that a subsequent career of 40 or 50 years can be built on that initial investment. The third problem I want to highlight is that our work on sustainability falls short. Our students expect more. Our societies need more. Where I work today at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, we've made three important strategic commitments to strengthen our position as an internationally leading sustainability university, all under our vision of investing together in a sustainable future. The first of these is that all employees will have cutting-edge expertise that enables them to contribute to the university's work towards a sustainable future. This requires deliberate enhancement of knowledge and skills among all of our staff. In this way, our academic staff become better positioned in their educational work and their research and our non-academic staff gain not only a deeper understanding of how we bring a focus on sustainability into our educational programs, but they also acquire skills to support our work to manage and operate our university in a more sustainable manner. Our second commitment is to provide educational programs that enable our students to contribute expertise in sustainable solutions across disciplines. For us, this means that no matter what they study, when our students leave us, they'll be equipped to approach working life as a resource on sustainability for their employers and for their communities. Our goal is that sustainability topics are present in every educational program on our campus. Our goal is that every teacher is qualified at high international level in their own field and is also prepared to contribute to relating their course offerings clearly and explicitly to the most urgent sustainability challenges in ways that invite exploration of all sorts of imaginable solutions. And thirdly, following our own quest for discovery, we take the new knowledge that we ourselves develop and put it to active use to make the university more sustainable. To strengthen this approach, we say that sustainability, nature, and climate considerations form the basis for all decision making at the university. And of course, that's mostly about our own university and we work with our own students and employees, but our hope is to collaborate with other institutions to spread the ambitions that we collectively develop. Here in Norway, about 6% of the population is taking a course in the higher education system at any given time. If we can succeed in an ambition to enable all of them, at all universities, to work for sustainable solutions, we can make a significant impact. And if we add to this the ability to interject relevant competencies for those midway in their careers, then we can really have an enormous impact. Universities have to move beyond the status quo if they're going to stay afloat, and we can do that if we follow these ideas and more, if we enhance cooperation and reduce competition, if we can preserve and enhance space in our educational programs for overarching, long-lasting competencies rather than overemphasizing vocation-specific skills, and if we can compellingly and rapidly enhance our focus on sustainability, then we have the hope of delivering to society what we really can, namely new knowledge, discovery, in ways that will lead to the betterment of society. We need a diverse ecosystem of educational offerings to achieve this. Classic, residential, full-time offerings continue to create the conditions for a robust education and preparation to begin professional working life. But competing approaches will emerge. Digital offerings become more and more rich in their content and accessibility. Many are offered for free. They become a source of creativity regarding traditional educational evaluation, assessment, and accreditation. Here contemporary universities are split. Some institutions give real offerings and contribute to progress on digital delivery. Others hold back and focus only on the classroom. This is perhaps the single biggest area in which the lessons of the pandemic have simply been abandoned at great risk, I might add. Micro-courses on specific topics or aimed at specific skills will be a normal part of working life, and universities must adapt to make these offerings as well, or they risk being made irrelevant as they're left with a dwindling market for full-time students. So there is one current to move beyond as in the topic of this event today, and it's temporal. Tomorrow requires a different approach. Rapidly changing knowledge is a cliche, but traditional campus-based education still does not adequately acknowledge that. But there's also another current, and it's the powerful force that pulls us in one direction or another. It's a force that can pull us under, can make us wonder which way is up, maybe even wonder if we'll survive. I felt that last summer on the Flathead River, and I feel it in university boardrooms and classrooms. That's the current that can give us an exciting ride, but skills from years ago are not enough to carry us through. A life jacket is required, and it's time for universities to find theirs and to put them on. Thank you.