Jacob Christensen

As Svante Ersson is away this Friday, I use this spot to announce my result from this week’s news quiz in DN:

6 rätt av 7 möjliga Bra! Snudd på full pott.

Av de 1134 personer som hittills gjort testet, klarade du dig bättre än 973 (85%).

I even managed to get the sports question right – but it was a long shot. Bordering on icing.

Kieran Healy has reached the moment all university teachers fear – the moment where you realise that the students are young and you’re not.

For me, that moment came some years ago when I began having students born in 1983 in my classes – the year I entered university myself. When I started teaching in Copenhagen in 1992, most of the students in my classes were born between 1965 and 1970 and as I recall I was in fact younger than a fifth or a quarter of the class.

But it’s not just being reminded that you are getting ever closer to senility and death that is troubling, you also loose the common points of reference. I mean, I remember that there was such a thing as the Eastern Bloc. I was an adult when the Berlin Wall fell.

Even worse, I have of faint recollection of hearing the news about the Beatles’ breakup. If I turn on the TV and watch MTV today, I’m completely clueless and with good reason: MTV is made for 15-year-olds and I could easily be the father of one.

Could somebody please get a wheelchair and roll me out of the classroom?

Lars Leijonborg’s demise was swift but unsurprising: If anyone had taken a bet on the party leader most likely to be forced to resign in October 2006, there can be no doubt that politicians, journalists and political scientists alike would have put their money on the Liberal leader.

What went wrong? Of cause the dismal results of the 2006 elections played a role but they were more an effect or symbol of the problems Leijonborg and the Liberal Party faced than the cause of the crisis.

First, the bourgeois coalition in Sweden can be said to consist of one broad (or “catch-all”, if you like) party – the Conservatives – and three parties more or less dedicated to special constituencies.

The Centre Party attracts voters in the rural periphery, the Christian Democrats social conservatives and the Liberal Party … well, who exactly do the Liberals attract?

Social libertarians? Non-conformist teetotallers? Right-wing Social Democrats? School teachers? Pro-Europeans? People concerned about immigration?

Will the real Liberals please stand up?

Second, a top-controlled electoral machine can only take you so far in an organisation which rests on more than one liberal tradition.

And a control-culture can be the undoing of a leadership, especially when party officials blatantly overstep the lines of party competition – and the general laws of the society.

Right now, all signs point to Jan Björklund emerging as the next party leader – mostly in the absence of obvious alternatives. Electing Björklund may not be the answer to all of the party’s problems, though. While he is considered a more exciting person than Leijonborg and have made himself the owner of education as a policy issue, he is likely to have weak support among socially libertarian Liberals, and the question remains if he will or can inspire a more open culture in the Liberal party organisation.

I would just like to note that I have ordered the latest book in Jørn Henrik Petersen and Klaus Petersen’s series 13 … danske velfærdsstat – 13 værdier bag den danske velfærdsstat (13 Values behind the Danish Welfare State).

I know that I have a question about homogeneity and the sustainability of the Nordic welfare states pending but please come back in some weeks’ time and bug me about it.

The Swedish elections last September claim their second victim: Liberal party leader Lars Leijonborg today announced his resignation.

Svenska Dagbladet,  SR – Ekot, SVT – Nyheter.

I’ll get back to this tonight.

As a matter of fact I’m pretty indifferent when it comes to the rivalry between Brøndby IF and FC København in the Danish soccer league – that is, this season there hasn’t been any rivalry to speak of: Brøndby’s performance in the 2006-2007 has been dismal.

Just to add insult to injury, Brøndby today lost 0-3 against Vejle, the weakest team in the league.

The insult? The match was played in Vejle and everybody assumed that Brøndby should at least be able earn some away points against Vejle.

According to a report in Sydsvenskan, the economy of Lund University is now so troubled due to a steady decline in the number of students, that the president of the university has ordered a general review of the accounts and balances between departments and the university.

No redundancies among academic staff have been announced – yet.

Just to put things straight: This is not schadenfreude – on the contrary. When Lund is in this kind of trouble, it is likely that most institutions of higher education in Sweden are experiencing difficulties. The days of expansion in Swedish higher education are over – now come the lean years.

Crown Princess Mary of Denmark gives birth to a daughter. I’m sure that the staff at TV2 News (yes, Danish TV2′s 24-hour news channel is called precisely that) have started the celebrations. Has Ulla Therkildsen been flown in from London to perform her stand-up routine in front of Rigshospitalet? Is the news helicopter circling around the hospital?

Meanwhile, let me just note that the Danish word for Royal is kongelig, not royal. The Royal Family is kongefamilien, not den royale familie. And so on.

Oh, this is all a waste of time: The Danish tabloids and the glitzy gossip weeklies started it all back in the 1990s because the UK and US entertainment press filled endless editions of the Chuck’n'Di-story. Exchanging kongelig with royal in Danish is an sign of the change of the royal family’s role in public life from being a political symbol to being just another part of the entertainment industry.

And the (Franco-)English royal is of cause considered more authentic than the Germanic kongelig. That also says something about Danish society in general.

Note: If you press me on the question, I’m a republican.

A classic problem in public policy is that you create a new problem as you try to solve an existing. The case in point is ethanol which has been presented as an environmentally friendly alternative to petrol (and diesel oil) and which in Sweden is being promoted – among others – by the counties of Västernorrland and Västerbotten in the Bio-Fuel Region.

The problem is that ethanol isn’t without side-effects: People suffering from asthma (like me) will not be happy to learn that one of the consequences of an increased use of ethanol will be more, not less air-pollution, and that in turn will lead to more problems for people with lung-diseases.

Meanwhile, Svenska Dagbladet is happy to tell us that thanks to cheap airplane tickets, week-end holidays to European cities and the Mediterranean are as popular among Swedes as never before.

CO2-emissions? Never heard about that…

At Unspeak, Steven Poole considered the true nature of think tanks. To Scandinavian speakers and readers, I would like to point out that Danish cartoonist Ivar Gjørup answered that question back in the late 1980s.

(In case you don’t read any of the Scandinavian languages: The think tank runs on hot air produced by recycled newspapers and has a capacity of 60.000 average citizens).