Jacob Christensen

It’s official: If you want to earn money at a Danish university, you should become a manager, not a researcher or a teacher.

And bigger units mean more managers, not more money to research and education.

Oh, and if you want a say in what you work with, Helge Sander thinks that you really should consider going somewhere else.

I just wanted to call some attention to an article in Monday’s Berlingske Tidende which pointed out that Denmark’s two most important export markets are Germany and Sweden – followed by the U.K. as a distant third.

And so what?, you may ask.

The thing is that when we – or rather politicians and bureaucrats – talk about internationalisation it is always in terms of learning and speaking English and adjusting to U.S. standards in general. The Social Liberal Party recently took this stance to its logical conclusion and suggested that English should be a – in practice the – official language of Denmark.

In the eyes of politicians and bureaucrats, Denmark is too small a country to sustain its own language.

What I wanted to rant against, however, was the narrow focus on English in Danish education policies. In practice, the latest reform of higher secondary education has managed to kill off third and fourth languages.

I would argue that in the long run the decline in linguistic skills will be a liability to Denmark. Say what you will about the Germans, but they are not Americans and neither are the Swedes (even though the Swedes like to pretend that they are the true Americans). As younger generations of Danes lose the ability to speak, read and write German and Swedish, Danish firms also lose some important tools to navigate in the German and Swedish societies.

The irony is of cause that Berlingske Tidende not too long ago renamed its business section from “Erhverv” to “Business” – just to prove that the paper had an international (i.e. American) outlook – and that this rant is written in some kind of English.

The headline is a hidden quote from one of the 18th Century Danish – or was that: Norwegian? – writer and dramatist Ludvig Holberg’s comedies where one of the protagonists despairs at the phony French used by academics and lawyers to impress ordinary people.

The quote in Danish is from Jeppe på Bjerget and goes:

“Tal Dansk, din sorte Hund! saa skal vi nok svare for os”

I have never been yelled at by Germans. Perhaps because I actually speak the language.

In The New York Times, no less:

“There’s a sense that the government has become tired, that it’s been drifting, really,” Nicholas Aylott, a political scientist at Sodertorn University, said in an interview. “It hasn’t been clear where the Social Democrats want to lead Sweden.”

[....]

“The election’s big issue was the poor functioning of the labor market,” Mr. Aylott said. “The fact that so many people don’t have work has to be considered a major failing of the Social Democratic government, given that they’ve presided over such a long period of economic growth.”

And here’s a Reuters report on the Washington Post’s homepage. No Aylott here, though.

Finally, let’s throw in a comment in Die Zeit for good measure and call it a night:

Insgesamt war die Wahl, darüber sind sich die schwedischen Wahlbeobachter einig, ein persönliches Votum gegen Göran Persson.

Sören Holmberg would beg to differ on that conclusion.