Rector’s speech at the opening ceremony for the 2026–2027 academic year: “Maintaining freedom requires continuous effort”
In his opening speech on 10 September 2026, Kaarlo Hildén emphasised that the right of universities to serve as homes of independent thinking is being challenged from many directions. It is important to ensure that our own culture provides the best possible environment for imagination, courage and curiosity.
Dear audience,
I start my speech a bit awkwardly by sharing how I had difficulties getting dressed this morning. As the rector, the dress code has some unconventional features, such as this chain of office.
I thought: “Is it a bit cringe to be wearing such a bling bling chain around the neck?” And how does a traditional symbol of power go together with the critical stance of the arts and academia towards structures and institutional power? Feeling unsure about this compelled me to read about the history and symbolism of ceremonial chains of office. Let me share some of what I learned.
In medieval university towns, students and teachers were often outsiders without local civil rights. Perhaps they had some resemblance to today’s freelance artists and academics on fixed-term contracts caught in an endless cycle of sending applications for funding. To protect themselves from the arbitrariness of local rulers, medieval teachers and students organised themselves into communities comparable to professional guilds.
This laid the foundation for university autonomy: the community negotiated privileges for itself from the Pope or the Emperor, the most significant of which was the privilegium fori, the right to one’s own internal jurisdiction. When the rector put on the chain of office, they did not represent the king or the Church, but the community of teachers and students, and the freedom of research and art.
Unlike the authority of a bishop or a feudal lord, the rector’s authority stemmed from the community itself, from students and teachers. The rector’s primary role was to act as the defender of the community and to maintain internal order.
In other words, the rector’s job description has remained quite unchanged. The rector must protect their community and the freedom of research and art, maybe more than ever before. The need to maintain internal order hasn’t disappeared either.
Looking into the symbolism of the rector’s chains also revealed that their structure contains a message.
The chain reminds us that the rector is only one momentary link in a long tradition of education. It also reminds us of the importance of the community: every student, every professor, every researcher, cleaner, administrator and expert is one of the links in this chain and forms a community that bears the name of Uniarts Helsinki. The chain is not whole unless each of its links is connected to another.
At this point, I would like to address my words to the new students of Uniarts Helsinki. Welcome to our community. Each of you is an important part of the chain. Make Uniarts Helsinki your own.
Chains of office are usually heavy, and quite deliberately so. This chain of office weighs 1.3 kilograms. The weight on the shoulders serves as a tangible reminder of the responsibility and duties of the position. Power is not meant to be easy to carry.
I can assure you that a sense of weight and responsibility is present in everyday life even without the chain of office, but it is still a good reminder.
If responsibility is one side of the coin, freedom is the other. We’ve defined freedom in our shared value description as follows: “Freedom, as a value, means that we ensure the independence of art, teaching and research as well as the space to seek, experiment and express even alternative perspectives.”
The promotion of freedom is exactly the reason why universities were founded in the first place. In medieval universities, every student began their studies with artes liberales, the arts of free people. These skills in understanding language, logic and the universe aimed to make people free. Not free to do anything under the sun, but free to think independently, exercise moral judgement and participate in contributing to the community.
In fact, a free person was someone who was not imprisoned by their own patterns of thought and who could view the world from multiple perspectives. Although medieval universities remained deeply connected to the Catholic Church, their protected walls created new kinds of intellectual spaces of freedom across Europe.
Such intellectual spaces of freedom are truly needed in Europe in today’s world that is irrational in so many ways.
The right of universities to serve as homes of independent thinking is being challenged from many directions. Building walls as protection against external threats is not enough. It is equally important to look inward and ensure that our own culture provides the best possible environment for imagination, courage and curiosity.
Maintaining freedom requires continuous effort to ensure that every member of our community dares to think independently and take part in shaping our community.
A critical attitude can turn into unwillingness to listen to others and the demand of likemindedness can silence some community members’ voices. A strong sense of community can shift to a cliquey attitude. When we successfully first challenge our own prejudices and open up outward, we’re ready to challenge each other and the world around us, as well. As stated in our value description, we foster a community where people who view the world in different ways dare to experiment, learn and make art – and engage with one another in a safe way.
For Uniarts Helsinki, the Swedish-speaking community and culture is an essential part of our identity. Our Swedish-speaking programmes are a vibrant link to the Finland-Swedish and Nordic artistic community, providing us with new perspectives When we foster multilingualism and diversity in the arts, we’re also building a society that listens to a wider range of voices.
We’re facing a threat to our ability to remain creative and curious: namely, the erosion of young people’s mental health and confidence in the future. Each year, the Finnish Student Health Service (FSHS) carries out more than 30,000 treatment needs assessments due to mental health reasons. The number of anxiety disorder diagnoses has increased by 40 per cent since 2023.
Although students increasingly feel the pressure to perform well and succeed, I do not believe that the required workload is the primary cause of these problems. Rather, anxiety stems from uncertainty about where that effort will lead and about what purpose all that hard work will ultimately have in a world that is, in so many ways, broken.
This generation has been given an unreasonable task: they must find a justification for their existence and reimagine the world as a place worth striving for.
Our vision – Uniarts Helsinki creates futures – tackles this challenge. We want to offer an environment where people can live with uncertainty, ask the tough questions, create new stories through art and create meaning in world that is about to lose it. Ultimately, our happiness doesn’t rely on fulfilling our own needs but on being able to make other people’s lives more meaningful through our work and creativity. Art is a powerful medium for that.
Mental health is a serious matter but fighting for it doesn’t always require a heavy heart. A recent Harvard University study looked for the factors that build a young person’s flourishing and wellbeing. The results showed that one factor stood above all others as the most powerful. Any guesses on what it was?
It was laughter. The results showed that laughing with peers had the strongest correlation with overall wellbeing. And if you think about it, it makes sense. You can only share a light, genuine laugh when you feel safe. It requires a community built on trust.
They also found that when teachers use humour, students thrive more. Which makes me realise I really should have hired a comedy writer for this speech. So, even if I’m short on jokes today: please, force a laugh every now and then. Statistically speaking, you are literally improving your own health.
But it’s no laughing matter that both university institutions and students are being pushed to achieve ever more at an ever faster pace. Over the past ten years, funding per degree awarded at universities has fallen by around 30 per cent, and even more at universities of applied sciences. Financial pressure has led to a race to see how cheaply studies for degrees can be organised. Entire degree programmes are now offered through remote teaching.
Increasing the proportion of higher education graduates from the current level of just under 40 per cent to 60 per cent has been set as an important national goal in order to revive weak economic growth. Yet no political party has proposed funding for this massive expansion of higher education. Instead, the debate revolves around index freezes.
If the university index remains frozen for even a single government term while inflation stays at 3 to 4 per cent, it will reduce funding for Finland’s universities by at least €250 million. That is equivalent to wiping out an institution the size of the University of Turku from the university sector entirely.
Increasing the number of degrees awarded will not solve the problem if the level of expertise they produce declines at the same pace. The combination of funding cuts and higher degree targets is the worst possible solution in Finland’s current situation: the quality of education has been undermined, while students’ mental health and staff wellbeing are already under strain.
Enhancing efficiency doesn’t align with the process of growing into an artist, which Uniarts Helsinki highlights in its description of values: “Learning a skill and honing it to a high level is a long-term, delicate and demanding process … it requires time and repetition, space to experiment and the courage to face our incompleteness.”
We should stop fixating on declining PISA results and instead, dedicate our focus ambitiously on fulfilling our educational mission. When a young person develops in a balanced way, the indicators will reflect that. But no indicator of educational efficiency can measure human growth or cultivation. Metrics tell us only how fast we are running, but they do not tell us where we’re going.
More than a century ago, Snellman defined the concept of Bildung and self-cultivation (sivistys in Finnish, bildning in Swedish) as a process of becoming a better human being. In his view, a person had to determine the most important goals for their own development in their own time. To quote Snellman: “An individual’s knowledge is entirely without foundation and does not deserve the name of cultivation if the knowledge has not been acquired and deliberated independently and shaped into a coherent whole of one’s own.”
This message is something to take seriously in this age of AI. The more capable technology becomes, the more human wisdom we need to guide it.
Our duty as a community of education is to breed this wisdom. We must ensure that the next generation does not learn only to meet the needs of the labour market, but also to question critically which needs are truly worth serving in the first place.
They must learn to hone their imagination and ethical judgement alongside their knowledge formation.
Learn to foster a sense of community, critical thinking skills and self-knowledge.
Learn to create powerful yet delicate art that resonates deeply and makes us smile, cry and think.
Learn to imagine an alternative world and be present with another person with the kind of raw realness that no algorithm can ever achieve.
It is with this goal in mind that I wear this chain of office today. Not to represent institutional power, but to stand up for our mission, for our community, for our values and for the freedom of art and research.
Let’s hold on to one another – each link of the chain – and laugh together every now and then, both at each other and at this absurd world. A community is able to create futures only when it’s strong enough to remain open and wise enough not to take itself too seriously.
A great academic year to you all!