New Year's interview with the Rector of Tallinn University

Happy new year, Rector Tõnu Viik! Are you the type of person who sets goals for the New Year? What are your goals for 2023?

Yes, I am that type of person. I like to take time off and set goals. I like to think about why and how I do something and also what kind of person I would like to be. When I think about my personal life, then my New Year’s goals are to do more sports, live healthier and develop myself mentally. 

However, I set goals as a rector as well, and more often I wonder if I am dealing with the most important things that need to be done right now, because an endless number of tasks come to my table and I have to prioritize.

When we look back to that time when you became the rector of Tallinn University, it was said that Tallinn University should turn its face towards society. For that you can be praised, because you are active in the media and the public. But it also has its dark side - our employees at the university do not feel that you are present, you are more active externally. What do you say to them?

This is also one of the most difficult dilemmas for me in my work. Of course, I would like to hope that our people at the university, who feel I am not being present, figure that I am useful to them, acting outside the university. My own subjective feeling is that even now, I am not active enough in the public and media. It seems to me that work in the media, work with political parties, work with the Council of Rectors should be done more intensively than what I am doing today, not less.

I'm very bad at saying no. Every time I say no to our committees or delegate some processes to someone else, I see how it sometimes disappoints expectations. I have a very hard time with it. So I often still take on more tasks and after a few weeks I'm in a situation where I can't do anything and then I withdraw. Psychologically, this is the hardest part of my current job. 

I would like to be good and get approval and I want to do everything for that, but I also understand very well that in order to be more efficient you have to concentrate on the 2-4 most important sections.

Which approval is more important to you, the approval coming from outside the house or the approval of your own people here?

It is difficult for me to answer, after all, I am elected by the people of this house and I serve their interests. Ideally, I want people to understand that if I'm not at the university, but I'm in the parliament meeting with political parties, that it serves their interests more than if I participate in the work of some committee or stand ceremonially at an event somewhere. However, I understand that both of these are important. So it's a dilemma that I haven't successfully resolved for myself.

What have you achieved in the time when you have been rector and have rather been facing outwards? What good has it brought to the university?

We've been doing pretty well in that regard. After all, society, taxpayers have made a decision that higher education is important in a situation of various consecutive crises. It is one of the few areas in Estonia, in addition to the defense sector, where the political parties have actually agreed to significantly increase this funding.

I am talking about the 15% funding increase demanded by the Rectors' Council. So far it is a promise written in the coalition agreement, which the current government will definitely keep and the 2023 budget will be made accordingly. But in order for the new government to keep the promise, it will be established only after the next election. So we still have to work hard for it.

If we look at the history of university funding, over the past 7 years we have gained an average of 1 million per year from the state. In 2023, we predict a much faster growth, i.e. 2-3 million. And this is extremely necessary for us, where our budget is in deficit, where we have introduced a tenure system and we want to finance it, which in full would be approximately 3 million per year. It seems to me that the university is in a situation where the sourcing of material resources is a critical issue.

When can employees expect the rector to say a few good words to them?

It can be done at times like now. Also I plan to visit the schools. I have introduced a section in the senate where we talk very openly with the rectorate about what our current goals are and what we are thinking about. It seems to me that I have tried to make management more open. With this, there is fundamental access to decisions, why they are born, based on which argumentation they are born etc.

We have somewhere around 900 employees and I find that it is impossible to reach each person personally, it is not really reasonable as well. I think people must be reached through the development of wider platforms in our media era. In a situation where I have to choose between communicating with a journalist or going to parliament, where there is a working group, or going through a university meeting or opening a conference, I try to think about what is most necessary for the university and do it.

Lately we have had many farewell parties: a lot of our valuable people have started to leave the university. Why is it so?

I think this employee turnover is related to the sense of well-being in the workplace. And this is also a question that I have studied a bit as a philosopher. Broadly speaking, it could perhaps be said that job satisfaction consists of two components: one is the satisfaction we get from the material side, and the other is the perception of one’s own meaning and value, whether they perceive their actions purposeful and necessary. Well, for those who leave, there is something missing in the workplace. And the collectives from which they leave, they have to ask which component is missing the most. 

What can I do as a rector? I can influence the salaries, and the fact that our salary level is not always competitive, that I consider my problem. This is also why I prioritize fighting for financial resources.

There are also several posters at the campus signaling that our people are overworked and their salary is not enough. What is your plan to resolve this situation?

The issue of overworking is really big and it has gotten bigger over the last decades. 40 years ago, it was enough for a scholar to inspire students with their knowledge. When they did a good job as a teacher, then it guaranteed a place in the academy. The obligation of research was added to this 20 years ago, and now we measure everyone's research, we force them to do more. We force them not only to do research, but we want personalized learning methods, we want teaching methods based only on motivation, we want future skills - in addition to professional knowledge. And now we also want work done in the direction of society, we want visibility in society. Contribution to the community, your country, language, culture. This all adds up to the burden of academic staff. No wonder they feel overwhelmed.

The solutions can be either increasing salary motivation, increasing ideological motivations, or reducing the workload. To reduce the burden, we must come together and decide what we stop doing, and this is the difficult question that we have been dealing with postponing for a long time. I don't think we can avoid this question anymore.

We need to think about how much teaching we do so that it is sustainable and we don't overburden our people with it. What else do we want to do? Do we want our people to be active towards society, if so, how do we measure and motivate them to do so? If we want to reduce overworking, then it is clear that we have to start with regulating the amount of work.

In order to reduce the amount of work we must narrow the possibilities of educational activities, do I understand it right? Last year, the university closed six study programmes. How many study programmes are you planning to close this year?

How many study programmes are closed is the decision of the senate, based on the proposal of the academic units. Last year we really closed some study programmes at the proposal of the rectorate, I still consider such a move exceptional. I think that the rectorate and the rector are not the ones who would do this job well. Reducing the amount of study programmes by top-down administrative force is possible, but it is not done precisely and well. Greater consensus is needed and this decision must come from the academic units themselves.

Do you believe that, for example, any head of study programme will voluntarily agree to close their programme?

I do not believe that, but I believe that the unit can think through what can be done well and without burning out with the existing funding and then take the necessary steps to implement it.

Moreover, closing study programmes is by no means the only way to reduce educational activity. When I was the director of the school of humanities, we reduced the number of subjects in the study programmes. We created a similar structure for all the study programmes and we also established a common study volume for all subjects. The value of all subjects is 6 points, and thus we can start cross-using modules between study programmes. As a result, the amount of teaching decreased because we reduced the amount of subjects, but the number of study programmes stayed the same. We made them more interdisciplinary and, honestly, maybe through this our students' skills are better suited to today's labor market as well.

Therefore, one solution could be that the number of study programmes remains the same, but there are less subjects that can be studied within the programme?

This is one possibility, yes. Essentially we are talking about the volume of teaching that the university wants to carry out. I wouldn't measure it by the number of study programmes, because then we will reach really drastic results.

At Tallinn University, we teach one curriculum with 2-3 times smaller financing than the University (UT) of Tartu or TalTech does. And that doesn't seem like a good idea in the long run. But the best indicator of the volume of our teaching work is the number of subject courses we undertake to hold each year. If we reduced it by a third without reducing the number of study programmes, then we could create a situation where all our specialties would be preserved and the amount of teaching work that we would have to allocate to our academic staff would be smaller. This would be another possible and, in my opinion, better way to reduce our academic staff workload.

Reducing the number of subjects - how is this consistent with the goal of the new development plan to create more individual study paths?

An individual study path does not mean that subjects are created individually for one student. This means that the student can choose their subjects more freely than allowed by today's study programmes frameworks. And also that their former work experience and experience of studying elsewhere are better taken into account.

Let’s talk about national professorships too. There are national professorships at the UT and TalTach. This means that the state pays the salary of some professorships itself. Do we also have a plan to apply for something like this?

Yes, there is a plan to start applying, but we cannot say how successful we will be in this. If I know correctly, then TalTech has 8 state-funded professorships and UT 12. 

In the new development plan, the university holds a slogan of “Promoter of intelligent lifestyle”, and if I'm not mistaken, that's the slogan you formulated?

Yes, I came up with that slogan when we were making the previous development plan. There are two things that fascinate me about this slogan. One part is that knowledge concerns a person as a whole and a person's life as a whole. Knowledge has an impact on the quality of life, knowledge has an impact on a person's cognitive abilities and has the ability to change whether one is more or less happy. In other words, knowledge has the potential to change life and lifestyle as a whole. 

The other side is that knowledge can be shared and communicated. The traditional role of universities has been to bring knowledge to students, and the new mission accepted by all of us is to bring it also to the public. It’s also connected to the fact that the more knowledge-based our society is, the more likely we are to live better.

When you became rector of Tallinn University, president Kersti Kaljulaid gave a speech at the inauguration ceremony and she expressed the hope that TLU could become an education valley where people from all over the world come together to learn the higher art of being a human. How is the creation of the education valley going?

What she probably meant by this was that TLU should be the frontrunner of educational thought both in Estonia and in the world. And that's still the goal we're aiming for. We want our educational researchers and their knowledge to be more visible. And it is necessary to invest more in it. I myself have contributed to it by having a vice-rector for educational innovation, and this should be a clear sign that this is an important topic for this rectorate.

Since you mentioned the vice-rector of educational innovation, let's talk about the rectorate. When you became rector, the university's rectorate expanded significantly. How is this in line with the austerity policy we are trying to pursue?

I think that this larger rectorate gives the impression that we have also increased the rectorate in terms of financial obligations, and then it seems that it has nothing in common with the austerity policy. But if we compare it more precisely with the previous rectorate, then in the previous rectorate we had 4 vice-rectors and a rector. Right now that’s the same. However, we have brought the heads of the fields to the rectorate. They will continue with their current work and they will just be present in the rectorate. 

However, there is one new position in the rectorate, it’s the position for the Business Cooperation and Knowledge Transfer area. This need is related to the fact that we not only have to transfer knowledge into the society, but in the coming years a new period of research grants in this area. Thus we need a person who will be present at all processes and mediate them at the university. Very large amounts of money are moving there, and the hope is that it will be of greater benefit to us.

How have you managed to make the new rectorate work?

With varying degrees of success, managing a larger team is always more difficult than a small one. But it seems to me that by today we are able to function as a pretty good team. It seems to me that the advantage of such a large team is that more knowledge is gathered around the table. It means that we make fewer decisions that need to be adjusted based on feedback from the outside, we already have the necessary information at the table when the decision is made. The hope is that decisions will be well thought out thanks to broad input.

At the end of last year, the rectorate decided to lower the temperature at our campus and the university was closed during the holidays, longer than usual. The result was that the students wrote publicly that the university has become a morgue because it is simply so cold to study here. So, do you consider this decision successful?

I also read the story where the university was compared to the morgue. But I must say that lowering the temperature was not a decision of the rectorate, I took it to the senate, to get a broader confirmation of whether to go ahead with it or not. The senate found it morally as a right thing to do, since everyone around were engaged in similar savings, and we even have a nationally strategic goal of reducing our energy costs, so it seemed like a necessary thing to do in here too. And I do agree with that.

Finally, to continue on a brighter note. Tõnu, you are a philosopher. Maybe you can share some book recommendations from last year with our staff?

As a philosopher, I haven't been able to read anything and I'm afraid to watch how my professional literature accumulates and I don't get to read it. I'm happy to read fiction though. A couple that I remember from last year are Marju Lepajõe's translation of Innocentius "Inimolu viletsusest". Also on a similar topic, Fernando Pessoa’s notebook style book, which’s name I can’t seem to remember...

What else do you wish for your university family in the new year?

I wish us endurance, strength, joy and a successful new year. It would also be very good if TLU could be the promoter of an intelligent lifestyle in such a crisis situation. Namely, being able to react to crises in a dignified, exemplary, stoic way and turn it to your advantage and remember why we are here together. Why do 7 000 students gather here every day, what are we doing? What are the core values of our activities?

And of course I wish a happy new year to all of you!