Sixteen Volts

Universities are another thing in which the Finnish and North American cultures differ quite a lot. For example, would it be possible in some American university that the local organization of students sets up a welcome party for the new students, in which boys and girls would sit together in the sauna and some of the professors and TA's also attend, everybody happily chatting while sipping beer and cider? I guess not, since that might be more like a Lifetime Movie Of The Week starring Mariska Hargitay, as my wife (who is Canadian) once commented. Or perhaps the next American Pie movie, depending on how you want to think about it.

Smirking aside, of course these two cultures have extremely opposite social codes regarding public nudity. In fact, even in Finland it is somewhat uncommon for sexes to be together in sauna, but for some reason, this practice has become a perfectly normal part of the university student life. I would also point out that even when the women are young coeds, the whole thing really is a lot less exciting than what it might perhaps sound. Honestly. And nobody is forced to attend anything they don't want to.

There might be an slight attitudinal difference here. In Finland, university students are considered to be normal adults like any other non-student and therefore expected to live accordingly in total freedom. The university as an institution is not responsible for them in any way whatsoever. For example, there are no dorms where the students would live under the watchful eye of the representatives of the university in loco parentis (see how I learned a new five-dollar term), but students either acquire their living quarters from the free market or rent a shared accommodation from the local student organization. If a student gets in trouble or is a victim of a crime, the matter will be handled by the police in the normal fashion, exactly the same way as it would be handled with the non-student population.

Oh yeah, and of course there is that itty-bitty difference that all universities are free, courtesy of the taxpayer, and each student actually gets paid a small monthly stipend and if that's not enough, still has the government-guaranteed low-interest student loans available. You still have to actually get in the university by participating in the competitive entrance exams. Because the competition to get in the best schools and most prestigious fields of study there is fierce, many medicine or law students have actually spent several years studying and preparing for the entrance exams before they finally get in. I have to admit that this is a pretty wasteful practice.

But once you are in, you can stay pretty much as long as you like and take courses in your own pace. In Finland, the concept of "academic freedom" applies to students too, not just the tenured professors. There is no concept of "academic probation" or anything else like that: if you fail a course, then you just failed it but can try again another semester, until you either get it or decide to give the whole thing up. I think there was or is some rule that if you fail three times, you have to "discuss it with the professor", but I don't think that this actually entails anything else.

(The medical school, which students enter right out high school and which then lasts six years, by necessity lacks such academic freedom, since there the rigid study schedule is given to students by the school. The military university is another exception, since it is almost like it's the military or something in its rigidity.)

In some schools, students actually have to sign up for courses, but for example in the technical university where I used to teach, the students just basically showed up in the first lecture. I don't remember at least the department of computer science where I taught ever turning any students away: lecture halls are big and there were plenty of advanced students available to run the labs as TA's. I guess that it was no wonder why each year, this department was number one in course credits given and by far the lowest in cost per course credit, kind of an economy of scale.

Moving on. I often keep reading about this thing called "affirmative action" or "positive discrimination", terms that sound rather Orwellian to me. The technically more accurate term for this might be something like "compensatory favouritism", which to me would sound neutral and succintly describe what the whole system is about, but the name "affirmative action" is a bit like if somebody named a policy that they advocate "the goodness policy against evil". Like, what kind of defective person could possibly oppose that?

In the Finnish system, the idea of letting members of some groups in easier than others is virtually unthinkable: I can't even imagine anyone, not even the looniest leftists, seriously proposing something like that. Of course, Finland has very few ethnic minorities in the first place and especially no numerically significant ones that were historically mistreated, and I kind of doubt that any minority would want to embarrass itself by demanding easier treatment in the entrance exams. The same goes with the idea of the university organizing special tutoring and "learning clinics" to any students who can't properly read or write or handle mathematics at the university level. Any students asking for this would pretty much end up being instant laughingstocks. Fortunately, the K-12 system does not even let them proceed that far: the idea of a high school graduate being unable to read or write is also unimaginable.

In fact, another important difference between the Finnish and North American K-12 school systems is that after the first compulsory nine years of school, the Finnish system divides the students in two tracks so that about half go to high school and the other half continue in trade schools. Of course, the difference in the general athmospehere between junior high and high school is pretty much you would expect from this. High schools used to be the university track, but the increased student intake has caused that many students coming out of high school either go on to trade schools or polytechnics, which have recently humorously started to pretend that they are real universities, including the degrees they give and the names they use to talk about themselves, especially in English translations. (Any British readers that I have might at this point recognize the concept of "new university".)

Oh yes, one more difference worth mentioning. In Finland, the universities don't participate in sports by having sports teams composed of "student athletes" who take easier courses and get many other kinds of special treatment from the university and other students. This particular aspect of American universities has perhaps always been the most puzzling for me personally, since I just don't see what business universities have being in spectator sports in the first place. Of course I know that the whole thing is really about money, as was depicted and explained in the excellent novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons". Perhaps there are, or at least used to be, some nobler-sounding reasons behind it too, such as providing useful education for those potential players who won't make it to the big leagues. But if so, here's a question: why do the basketball and football professional leagues supposedly need the university system, but the professional baseball seems to do pretty well without it?

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 5:22 PM