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UCPH social sciences: 41 per cent of staff do not have confidence in their dean

Dispute — New workplace assessment shows a major decrease in trust in the Office of the Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Employees speak of a poor working environment, and several researchers have left the Department of Political Science because of poor management.

The level of confidence in management at the Faculty of Social Sciences is at an all time low.

According to the results of a new workplace assessment (WPA) from 2022 less than one third of all staff have confidence in how the dean’s office manages the faculty. This is a 17 percentage points decrease compared to the previous 2019 study.

41 per cent reply directly that they have little or no confidence in the dean’s management.

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen was appointed dean of the faculty in 2019 after a number of years as head of the Department of Political Science.

Compared to other faculties at the University of Copenhagen, the figures from the Faculty of Social Sciences are below par on several parameters. This applies to questions on overall job satisfaction levels, as well as questions on stress and staff development. At the Faculty of Science, for example, only 11 per cent of staff replied that they do not have confidence in the Office of the Dean’s management.

Two departments at the Faculty of Social Sciences have particularly notable numbers: the Department of Sociology and the Department of Political Science. Only one in four employees at the Department of Political Science agrees with the statement that they have confidence in the dean’s management.

Anders Milhøj, vice-chair of the Joint Collaboration Committee and staff representative, who is also an associate professor at Department of Economics, believes that the results are due to the management style of the dean since he was hired in 2019:

»The dean centralises the faculty, and tries to determine what goes on at the individual departments to a greater extent. This means that all departments become less autonomous and have lost some of their administrative employees. And the staff do not like it,« he says.

Management has ‘turned sour’

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, said in a news item on the faculty intranet that dissatisfaction with management was expected and that it was a »healthy reaction to the changes in the organisation«. According to the Dean, it is due to the fact that the survey was carried out in the middle of a period of restructuring and staff redundancies in the months of March and April.

»There is a poor collaboration atmosphere at the faculty«

Staff representative Anders Milhøj

 

During a round of layoffs in this period, ten employees were dismissed, while ten others chose to leave voluntarily. This has set off unrest at the faculty, according to staff representative Anders Milhøj. He says that he understands the decision by management. But he also finds that this has meant that some staff feel exposed in their present employment. Not only due to the round of layoffs, but also due to the government’s recent relocation agreement, which has meant that some study programmes have received a smaller intake of admitted students. This has created a bad atmosphere, according to Anders Milhøj:

»There is a poor collaboration atmosphere at the faculty. I think there are faults on both sides. But it’s not a nice place to be, and there are, actually, people who are scared.«

Anders Milhøj also believes that some of the dissatisfaction can be traced to the fact that the Office of the Dean, in parallel with the round of layoffs, invested in a new research centre for public policy at the faculty level, the Center for Public Policy. The dean has the right to do so, but there has been no support for the new centre among employees.

The staff representative believes nevertheless that employees have had the opportunity to express their criticism, and that management has done enough to face up to its critics:

»I actually think that enough is being done. Unfortunately, the result has been that management has turned sour, plain and simple.«

Dissatisfaction at the Department of Political Science

The University Post has spoken to several researchers who have left the Department of Political Science within the past three years due to what many call poor management. Only one of them is willing to go on the record with his criticism. Ian Manners was Professor of International and European politics at the department from 2014 to 2020. He was one of the department’s most cited researchers. Today he is a professor at Lund University in Sweden.

He says that he applied for a job at the University of Copenhagen due to the world-renowned research environment in international relations. But he left due to a high degree of micro-managing and top-down management under Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen as department head.

Ian Manners points to two episodes that had him contacting his trade union for help in dealing with his conflict with management. In August 2017, his office was moved while he was on leave. Suddenly he received an urgent call for a meeting with the head of department. Here he was verbally scolded and accused of an administrative error, in a way that he experienced as an attempt to set up a false basis for dismissal.

»In some workplaces, they have introduced a greeting rule when you walk past each other in the hallway, so you don’t walk past with your eyes glued to the floor. If you don’t say hello to the people you disagree with, this does not promote a collaboration climate.«
Staff representative at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Anders Milhøj

Collective research environments are important

Shortly afterwards, Ian Manners — together with his closest colleagues — were recruited to devise a strategy for research grants that could help the department get its hands on large grants. This was something that he and a colleague had both previously been successful with. As part of the strategy, all employees were encouraged to apply for more funding agencies.

Following the presentation, Ian Manners and other colleagues requested a signature from the head of department on an application for one of the major grants from the European Research Council (ERC). But suddenly the head of department would not support multiple applications, as he would rather focus on one researcher’s application to the National Research Foundation.

»When you do one of these applications, it is your entire life. You work nights, weekends, your kids forget your name. That kind of stuff. To be told that your application will not be signed is unheard of. Particularly when you have just held a presentation saying that all members of staff needed to be supportive and active in making applications. By then it was too late for me, I was already applying for jobs elsewhere.«

When you are one of ​the best departments in Europe, you really need to think: Why are we losing people?

Former professor at the Department of Political Science, Ian Manners

He says that as a result more researchers retreated to individual research activities and stopped engaging in collective projects. This, he believes, is a misunderstood management approach to research:

»Most successful research is collective. It is not individual. I know that universities thinkthey are looking for the next Nobel Prize Winner, but every Nobel Prize Winner sits within a collective research enterprise. It was the collective of researchers at the Department of Political Science that made it one of the most successful departments in Europe in the field of international relations,« he says, adding that six permanent associate professors and professors have left the department over the past few years:

»When you’re one of the best departments in Europe, you really need to think: Why are we losing people? One person like myself can be due to personal factors. When you are losing many, however, then this is quite a dramatic hit,« says Ian Manners.

»It is like saying that university researchers have brains like goldfish«

The new workplace assessment comes at the same time as a parallel debate about the state of independence of research at Danish universities. Researchers at the Department of Political Science have been at the forefront of a ‘Set Research Free’ campaign demanding a commission to investigate the independence of Danish research, which has received signatures from 2,252 researchers over a short period of time.

Professor Ole Wæver, a chairman of the committee that last year wrote a white paper for the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, has criticised the leadership structure of Danish universities. He says to the University Post that the dean’s interpretation of the workplace assessment is mildly insulting to staff. The results of the new assessment were sent out to employees under the positive headline: »WPA 2022: We find our work tasks meaningful, and we are proud to work at UCPH,« instead of a more balanced interpretation that also took into account the significant increase in mistrust and decrease in well-being.

Ole Wæver is particularly offended by the dean’s argument that dissatisfaction is only caused by the recent round of layoffs:

»It is like saying that university researchers have brains like goldfish and therefore only respond to what has happened over the course of the past week. When we have had a steadily growing debate and criticism of the way things are going, and a very widespread dissatisfaction, then we, of course, base our responses on a general perception of how things have evolved over the years,« says Ole Wæver.

There is a widespread perception that the system is becoming more and more top-down and distant.

Professor of Political Science, Ole Wæver

 

Wæver reckons that the dissatisfaction is because of an increasing distance between management and employees due to the leadership structure, where heads of department and deans are recruited from the top, and where employees are involved in important decisions only to a minimal extent:

»There is a widespread perception that the system is becoming more and more top-down and distant. There is definitely a difference in how bad it is from department to department and from faculty to faculty. When I talk to people from many different places, the experience seems so widespread that we found it important to make the general public and the politicians aware of it.«

»But when I talk to my colleagues in [the faculty’s old, ed.] municipal hospital buildings of CSS, it is clearly my impression that we are one of the places where many people experience that the decisions taken from above come from a completely different world, where we are not involved in the process,« he says.

Campaign against rudeness

The latest episode in the conflict-ridden climate at CSS is the campaign #pleasedontstealmywork where PhD fellow Maria Toft accused named senior researchers of taking credit for her work. Last week, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen released a statement concerning the collaborative atmosphere at the Faculty of Social Sciences. He welcomed the principled discussion, but distanced himself from the tone of the PhD student’s criticism. This happened after Maria Toft had sent a letter to the university’s central Board, which was also leaked to the press.

The University Post has contacted all staff representatives and members of the Working Environment Committee at the Faculty of Social Sciences. They all refer to staff representative Anders Milhøj, who will not comment on the case of the PhD student.

But Anders Milhøj recognizes that there is poor communication at the Faculty of Social Sciences. This, according to him, is both due to management and to staff.

»There is something wrong with the tone of the Faculty of Social Sciences. The dean, myself and the Working Environment Committee agreed that after the summer holidays, we should make a campaign for a more civil tone. Something similar to: ‘Don’t say anything you would not want to have referred to your mother’. I have heard a Head of Studies say something similar to tutors before an intro course.«

Is the tone not civil in people’s daily working life here?

»In daily life, communication with management is sometimes poor. There is the rumour going round about this, anyway. It’s not good if management verbally attacks an employee in the manager’s office. That kind of thing,« says Anders Milhøj and adds:

»In some workplaces, they have introduced a greeting rule when you walk past each other in the hallway, so you don’t walk past with your eyes glued to the floor. If you don’t say hello to the people you disagree with, this does not promote a collaboration climate.«

Dean responds to the criticism

The University Post has presented the criticism of the working environment to Dean Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen. In a written reply, he writes that the Office of the Dean takes the criticism in the workplace assessment very seriously:

To me, the most important thing is that we in management continue to focus on how to improve trust and the working environment at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Dean Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen

 

»The results are not satisfactory, for obvious reasons, and we need to take the criticism in the survey seriously.«

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen writes that the Faculty of Social Sciences has launched a number of initiatives to deal with the problem:

»We are constantly taking initiatives to improve the working environment and improve confidence in management. This will continue, including, among other things, a greater focus on the collaborative environment at the Faculty of Social Sciences.«

To Ole Wæver’s reply to the dean’s interpretation that the increasing mistrust is due to the fact that the survey data was obtained at the same time as there was a round of layoffs on the Faculty of Social Sciences, he writes:

»Layoffs affect the atmosphere in a workplace, but it is rare that these things only have one cause, so this is hardly the case here.«

»As dean, I have a responsibility to take the criticism seriously. Just as I also fully accept that there are always several sides to an issue, and that things are rarely perceived in the same way. To me, the most important thing is that we in management continue to focus on how to improve trust and the working environment at the Faculty of Social Sciences.«

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