Jacob Christensen

I’m still a bit puzzled by the hatchet job which the Swedish Board of Higher Education performed on the teaching programmes yesterday.

When you look closer at the reports published by the BHE, it turns out that the sweeping criticism of exams, grading routines and grading standards are based on a study of the Stockholm College of Education. The other report which criticises teaching programmes for lacking a base in research is based on a study of a number of regional colleges and Gothenburg University.

I haven’t had the time to look into the publications in greater detail but it seems that the BHE’s study group doesn’t discuss the external validity of the studies in the reports. One point which could be made is that the Stockholm College of Education is a special case, even if it is the largest institution involved in the training of teachers in Sweden, as it is one of very few remaining independent colleges of education and due to be integrated into Stockholm University.

To make a long story short: I think it is reasonable to ask to what degree the reports are a part of the very messy affair which is the integration of Stockholm College of Education and Stockholm University rather than a general study of teacher education in Sweden. Second, some of the points mentioned in the report on exams could easily be said to be applicable to all teaching at the college and university level, not only in Sweden but in most – if not all – countries.

BHE Report 2006:45 – Examination med kvalitet and Report 2006:46 – Utbildning på vetenskaplig grund.

Fact: Economists and sociologists do not mix. Even liberal (in the US American meaning of the word) economists and sociologists do not mix.

Proof: J. Brad deLong does a hatchet job on Anthony Giddens: The Madmen in the Attic.

And I might even be comfortable with Tony Giddens’s having access to metal and not just plastic knives if there was less visible nostalgia for the days when so many sociologists were stooges in search of a…

Don’t miss the comments. They are just as entertaining.

A short note: The Swedish Board of Higher Education does a hatchet job on the school teacher education:

• “One in four students fail”, Op-ed article in DN signed by the Director General of the Board of Higher Education and four evaluators
• Press release from the Board with links to the studies presented in the DN op-ed article

Worth noting for other lines of study is that the BHE appears to favour written individual tests in favour of group exams and project based exams. In the article and the reports, the BHE also questions the validity and reliability in much of the grading made in teacher education – and, one may suspect, other lines of higher education.

In the aftermath of the scandal involving Liberal party officials who broke into the intranet of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, four former officials of the Liberal Party, one Social Democrat and a journalist from the tabloid “Expressen” have now been charged with illegal entry.

Some of the coverage and comments: DN – Sex åtalade i fp-härvan, Ny partiledare kan krävas för trovärdigheten (New party leader may be needed for the Liberals to regain credibility, comment by Henrik Brors); SvT – Pinan för folkpartiet förlängs (The Liberals’ agony is prolonged, comment by K-G Bergström).

What’s really troubling the Swedes this evening, though, is the escape of Juha Valjakkala from a Finnish prison.

In case you thought that Swedes and Danes actually liked each other, the answer is: No. At least when we talk about leftish Swedes and non-leftish Danes who seem to bounce off each other regularly in a most peculiar fashion.

Just to summarise a typical debate: The educated, progressive and globally oriented Swede denounces his Danish neighbours as hate-filled, parochial primitives. A chorus of Danes strike back denouncing the Swedes as do-good airheads who lack any experience with the real world.

Interesting observation: True Swedes do not bother to react when Sweden is the topic of debate in Denmark. Danes react instantaneously and agressively when Denmark is the topic of debate in Sweden.

For a case in point: Stefan Johansson (Editor of Dagens Nyheter’s culture and review section): En kulturjournalistik i reservat. Rebuttal in Berlingske Tidende: Svenskerhår (Svenskerhår is the Danish term for a mullet haircut and, yes, it’s a very derogatory term).

The latest bout actually brought an interesting innovation as a commentator in Berlingske Tidende argued that the seeming Swedish tolerance was in fact borne out of pragmatic realism (as in: realpolitik) while the Danish policies on immigration and freedom-of-speech were based on democratic idealism

My immediate reaction: This could only happen in Jutland.

Man dies after being hit by ten cars.

For some reason, Denmark has been hit – if you excuse the pun – by a series of hit-and-run accidents recently, but this surely must be one of the most awful accidents on Danish roads.

Cars are dangerous, trains unreliable, long-distance buses unavailable, cycling not recommended during the winter – and in any event many roads do not have bicycle-lanes.

Hmm. Getting around in Denmark in a safe manner is difficult.

In Danish, you can ask someone – usually a politician or a high-ranking civil servant – to “shut up retroactively” (“holde kæft med tilbagevirkende kraft”). For some reason, I can’t recall ever reading or hearing a similar expression in Swedish or English, so maybe this tells us something about the Danes.

In any event, the former political spokesman of the Liberal Party (and winner of the celebrity “Stagelight” competition on DR TV 2005) and present manager of TV2 Radio, Jens Rohde, in an interview with the tabloid BT managed to comment the Social Democratic leader, Helle Torning-Schmidt, in a rather patronizing way and has now been told by the General Manager of TV2, Per Mikael Jensen, to shut op – preferably retroactively.

It should be noted that Rohde’s appointment was met with raised eyebrows among the opposition and political commentators: Choosing an active politician for a high-profile media job in a state-owned corporation appeared to fit in a line of appointments of managers with Liberal or Conservative credentials – not that the Social Democrats were ever strangers to politically motivated appointments in the media sector.

Just as background: What Rohde said about Ms. Thorning-Schmidt was, that he didn’t see her as a credible candidate for the Prime Minister’s office and that the media would have torn her apart, had she been a man.

A little excitement in today’s Danish Gallup poll: Compared with the 2005 elections, support for the Liberals (26,3 vs. 29%) and the Danish People’s Party (11,5 vs. 13,3%) is down while support for the Social Democrats (29,5 vs. 25,8%) and Socialists (8,4 vs. 6%) is up. All of which means that the opposition (including the Social Liberal Party) in the poll is supported by 50,7% of voters, while the governing coalition is supported by 48% of voters.

The next election isn’t right around the corner – even if Danish political journalists have begun to talk as if that was the case – but it is the first time since 1999 that winning popular support doesn’t look like a walk-over for the Liberals and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen

The crisis which hit the Danish Social Democratic Party during 2005 and 2006 also affected the Social Liberal Party (Det radikale Venstre). The problem the Social Liberals faced, was that they on the one hand risked going down with the Social Democrats and losing all prospects of parliamentary influence, if they stuck to the cooperation that had existed between 1993 and 2005.

On the other hand, the Social Liberals couldn’t credibly offer cooperation with Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party as the Liberals’ and the Social Liberals’ positions on immigration and integration policy and on tax policy differ markedly. In both cases, the Social Liberals – strange but true – seemed to be closer to the Conservative Party than to the Liberals or (major factions within) the Social Democrats.

This led to the dramatic announcement earlier this year that the Social Liberals would not seek formal agreements with other parties before the next election and would promote the party’s political leader, Marianne Jelved, as its candidate for Prime Minister. Given that during the 100 years of its existence, the party has always favoured holding the median legislator to gaining large shares of the vote or holding government office, that announcement was a surprise.

It also had a taste of desperation to it: Basically, the Social Liberals lacked partners, didn’t know where to find them, and were divided internally.

The “go-it-alone”-strategy hasn’t been a complete disaster – the decline in the support for the Social Liberals in recent opinion polls has more to do with the resurrection of the Social Democrats – but it hasn’t helped the party in the parliamentary or the electoral arena either.

Now, the Social Liberal leadership is trying to paint itself out of the corner it painted itself into. According to reports in Information the party’s executive committee will scrap the call for Marianne Jelved as Prime Minister and downgrade its demands on integration, welfare and tax policy from ultimatums to priorities.

It is very likely that Danish political journalists will make a lot out of this, but basically the Social Liberals are trying to shed an intrasigent image while keeping its policy positions. That the Conservative have rejected Social Liberal advances should not be a surprise: Could you imagine a party publicly disowning its present government partner?

Coverage in Danish media:

DR Nyheder: R aflyser krav om Jelved som statsminister, K afslår regeringssamarbejde med R.

Politiken: Jelved skifter kurs mod sin vilje, Jelveds bagland bakker op.

Rule #1 for politicians wanting to become party leader is as follows: Do not make your ambitions known publicly too early. So when Carin Jämtin in an interview with Swedish Radio on Saturday declared that her ambition was to lead the Social Democrats in Stockholm to victory in the 2010 local elections, then, well yes…

Worth noting is that Jämtin came out in favour of a full Swedish membership of the EMU, something which is controversial within the party and politically complicated following the clear rejection of EMU membership in the 2003 referendum.

More coverage here: Svt: Jämtin inte kandidat, SvD: Jag kandiderar inte, DN: Jämtin “Svårt se sig som partiledare”.

Back in the old days, the succession in Nordic Social Democratic parties was almost always a clear-cut affair with the designated leader standing in the wings after being picked – or at the very least heavily promoted – by the incumbent party leader, but from the early 1990s onwards, the process have become almost as messy as the selection of a candidate for the office of Federal Chancellor in the SPD.

One particular problem for the Swedish Social Democrats this time is that two parameters are salient in the election: 1) Should be new party leader be a “traditionalist” or a “moderniser”, and 2) should the new party leader be a man or a woman.

If you want a female moderniser, Margot Wallström would be an obvious choice. Wallström also has the advantage of having international experience as an EU commissioner. The only problem is that she has been based in Brussels since 1999 and if she were to become party leader, she would not have a seat in the Swedish parliament and could not engage in direct debate with Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

I’m pretty sure that some Social Democrats would wish that Sweden had an English-style electoral system which would give the possibility of catapulting Ms. Wallström into parliament by the means of a by-election.

(Ms. Wallström even has a blog!)

If Wallström declines, Carin Jämtin would fit the bill nicely, even if she hasn’t held a major government office. It is worth noting that Ms. Jämtin held on to her seat in parliament even after she was chosen as the leader of the Social Democrats in the Stockholm City Council.

The chairman of the Swedish TUC, Wanja Lundby-Wedin is more difficult to place on the “traditionalist-moderniser” dimension but this could of cause be an advantage as she could appeal to both sides. On the other hand, Ms. Lundby-Wedin just like Wallström has no seat in parliament.

But then, you may want to ask just how important a seat in parliament really is in Sweden. Margot Wallström or Wanja Lundby-Wedin could rely on substitutes for parliamentary debates and concentrate on the party and electoral arenas instead.

How about the men, then? The most obvious names are former Finance Minister Pär Nuder, former Justice Minister Thomas Bodström and former Industry Minister Thomas Östros. All three hold a seat in parliament and would probably be closer to the moderniser pole.

The problem is that both Mr. Nuder and Mr. Östros have the charisma of chartered accountants and while the 44-year old Mr. Bodström still has a boyish charm and hard-liner credentials in Justice policy, he lacks the experience in other, heavier, policy areas which Mr. Nuder and Mr. Östros hold.

This leaves two long-shot candidates: Ulrica Messing who is only 38 but still has 10 years of government experience and – tadaa! – Mona Sahlin who is famous for not becoming leader of the Social Democrats back in 1995-96 after one of the weirdest scandals ever seen in politics.

It has been claimed that trade union leaders manœuvered to block the appointment of Ms. Sahlin back in 1995, because she was seen as too much of a moderniser – the “Toblerone affair” was a pretext for her downfall – and if we look solely at her policy track record, she could be considered a safe pair of hands. Her problem is that image is as important as substance in contemporary politics and Mona Sahlin definitively still has to fight an image as a sloppy organiser.