Rector Kaarlo Hildén’s speech at the opening of the academic year 2025-2026
Dear guests and fellow members of the university community,
Three weeks ago, new Uniarts Helsinki students sat in this hall at the opening event of their orientation period. 364 lucky ones had been selected out of 3,600 applicants. The place was filled with the same atmosphere of joy and excited anticipation that I remember experiencing when I started my studies.
When I got into the Sibelius Academy and sat here in August 1989, the world was going through a major upheaval then, too. The evening news gave updates about the fall of communist governments: The election victory of Poland’s Solidarity Movement, revolutions in Romania and Czechoslovakia, the fall of dictatorships in Latin America and the Berlin Wall. Even though I didn’t know much of the historical backgrounds of these events at the time, I felt that we were experiencing an end of an era.
In the same year, Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay The End of History. Its main concept was that the end of the Cold War sealed the final triumph of liberal democracy. He argued that the greatest ideological questions of humanity had now been solved and that liberal democracy would remain the ultimate frame of reference for the evolution of humanity.
The prediction was understandable. It was preceded by the long evolution of liberalism, which began with the French Revolution and pushed through violence, wars and the Holocaust towards the fall of fascism and a global awakening – this can never happen again! What followed was the birth of the United Nations, Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and Refugee and Genocide Conventions. Ideological battles continued in the Cold War blocs until the collapse of the Soviet Union broke the last major barrier. For a moment, it seemed that the course of history towards freedom, democracy and human rights had now reached the end of its developmental arc.
This academic year, too, students start their studies in the midst of an upheaval. But now hardly anyone thinks that our trajectory towards something better is inevitable. Many people look at us older generations and the international community with disappointment, and not without reason. We’re not acting based on the best available information or in accordance with international treaties and the principles of the rule of law – principles that we thought were eternal. We’re aware of how serious the threat of environmental disasters is but we still aren’t agreeing on what do about it. And the international community isn’t taking action despite blatant human rights violations. The only thing that seems to be widely agreed on is the need to invest in arms. In a short time, we have slipped away from a common value base towards the concept of sphere of influence and the pursuit of our personal interests.
In this state of confusion, we’re struck by a question of the meaningfulness of it all. Are we entitled to focus on art in a world that’s burning?
Historian Jenni Kirves said in a radio interview that she had realised that we don’t find purpose and meaning in life by trying to find ourselves, but by looking for a way to someone else. In our self-centred world, trying to reach out to another person is a radical force for change.
Dear students, teachers and researchers, through your art, you have a special ability to create connections between us and to explore the fundamental questions of humanity.
We can never fully understand another person, but this mystery also holds a great opportunity for our own growth. With the help of your art, we can empathise with life stories of people whose circumstances differ drastically from our own. If we don’t have these experiences where we expand our own bubble of caring, it is difficult to promote equity. The more we manage to expand the circle of our compassion and loyalty, the easier it is for us to identify and accept the need for change in our own actions.
We could reflect on the question of the justification of art in relation to our time, which lives in an artificial reality, escapes vulnerability and mistrusts human imperfection.
Art does exactly the opposite and highlights the value of fragility. In its most profound form, the aesthetics of vulnerability, corporeality, imperfection and fragility are also an ethical statement. A statement that declares that being human means accepting being incomplete and making mistakes. Daring to be vulnerable together is radical in a time when many of our societal crises are related to fear and the building of protective walls.
Thinking about the question I asked previously, we could also ask what the justification of the human species’ existence on this planet is in the first place. Without art, civilisation and the cultivation of the soul, we are just farm animals in the economic system, leaving behind a desolating planet and an endless amount of plastic waste. In art, we bring out the core of humanity, the aspects of our species that make it a wonderful, special and valuable part of the biosphere.
Ultimately, my answer to the previous question would mention that instead of these know-it-all and sublime speeches, we need more expressions of the joy of life, raw and lifelike art that makes us laugh at ourselves, cry together and feel alive.
Dear audience,
Francis Fukuyama believed that the ideological development of humanity had reached an endpoint. Now we know that no value, treaty or institution can survive by itself, and instead, they must be recreated over and over again. This time requires us to restate and re-explain why we exist, as a university and as a community, as artists, researchers and teachers, as defenders of art, science, humanity and nature.
All of this is going through our minds this autumn, as we’re compiling a vision for Uniarts Helsinki and verbalising the most profound meanings of our existence in this changing world. I hope that each of you will contribute to this work.
Our work doesn’t lack purpose or meaning, but many things are undermining the working conditions of an artist. In the United States, the executive staff of cultural institutions is changed on political grounds, and museums are harnessed as instruments of power. In Poland, the World War II Museum has been taken under stricter state management to “correct” the narrative. In Germany, the rise of the AfD has increased attacks on the “ideology” of art and universities – and the cultural budget has been halved. In Serbia, there have been budget cuts, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and at our partner university, the payment of teachers’ salaries has been suspended in order to stop student demonstrations.
The freedom of art and science is not self-evident; we must defend it. For us, the freedom of art doesn’t mean a privilege but a responsibility: the courage to question, bring forward different perspectives and defend the value of humanity. Without this freedom, there is no meaningful art – and no functioning democracy.
Dear audience,
We are joined in the passion we feel for art and academia. The passion is strengthened by the conviction that our work has a purpose. When we as a society fail to act on the knowledge and values we already share, it is not ignorance that holds us back but inertia – our culture clinging to worn-out paradigms that no longer serve us. And as we hesitate, we slip into collective amnesia, forgetting history’s hard-won lessons and thus condemning ourselves to repeat its mistakes in new disguises. But art carries within it the power to shatter these chains of forgetting and stagnation. It calls us to remember, to imagine, and above all, to act. If we have the courage to embrace it, art can lead us beyond inertia and amnesia – toward the futures we so urgently need to create.
In the words of the Swedish philosopher Sharon Rider: the mission of art is to make our reality real to us – to give us a more honest look at ourselves and our lives, by forcing us to think again, doubt what we see and become uncertain. Art forces us to look again. It makes the invisible visible, gives a voice to those without one and encourages us to deal with the confusion that comes from more profound understanding.
Dear friends, students and colleagues,
The future is not given. The future unravels gradually, steered by thoughts and actions, both through everyday interactions and discoveries as well as through conscious choices. We’re facing a web of endless alternative futures, where the flap of a butterfly’s wing and our own choices have their own, perhaps surprising effect.
I wish all members of the university community a good academic year. Draw influence from one another, build new connections and make wise choices.