Decisively centralised and unitary from the very beginning, with no formal differentiation in task assignment or mandate between different universities, Sweden’s higher education system is nonetheless as multifaceted and variegated as the others in this study. This is to a large extent a reflection of the historical roots of university formation in the country, where the composition and institutional identities reflect phases in state- and nation-building in Sweden: first as a semi-large European power which from quite early on developed into a centralised nation-state (from the late 1400s well into the eighteenth century), later as an ambitious development state in the mid- to late nineteenth century when the country was rapidly industrialised and its big cities became centres of unprecedented wealth accumulation, and finally in the long twentieth century, when Sweden emerged as the most salient example of a social democratic state with egalitarian ambitions. All of these phases have made their explicit mark on the composition of the Swedish higher education system.

In the first phase, the regional state power manifested itself with the universities in Uppsala and Lund. These universities are comprehensive expressions of the unitary Swedish state, serving in particular the higher ranks of the state with professionals in law, medicine and theology. They have retained the tradition of a vertical hierarchy of independent faculties, with a largely ceremonial steering core and many mechanisms available—prestige, networks, reputation—to keep them afloat in this manner. With those underpinnings largely intact despite the bewildering growth of the higher education system, they continue to serve as national flagship universities, in Thoenig and Paradeise’s (2016) terminology.

Despite its great power ambitions and enormous endowments of raw materials, Sweden was the poorest country in western Europe in the late nineteenth century. Rapid industrialisation and declining political might paved the way for domestic development projects (notably in infrastructure and for energy supply to cater to the growing industrial sector) and an ensuing expansion of the higher education system. The Swedish development state of the nineteenth century was mirrored in the specialised universities of Karolinska Institutet, the Institutes of Technology in Stockholm and Gothenburg, the city universities in Stockholm and Gothenburg, and business schools in Stockholm and Gothenburg. In their totality, they manifested the rise of new industries and socioeconomic patterns, where the state undergirded the rising industries’ needs for qualified scientists and engineers, and supplanted the comprehensive universities in providing for an enlarged civil healthcare system, and where the city bourgeoisie manifested its engagement in the cultivation of Sweden’s two largest cities (Therborn, 1989). What characterised the wide variety of higher education institutions—some public, some private—established in this era was the degree of specialisation; they served specific niches such as medicine, engineering, or the arts and sciences, a heritage that remains largely intact today.

After a long hiatus marked by social and economic instability, with social and economic tensions mounting in the 1910s and 1920s, Sweden made a series of social and political experiments that culminated with political compromise between farmers and workers, between the social democratic government and Swedish industry, and between employers and trade unions—all in the mid- to late 1930s. This, together with the massive armament during and after the Second World War when Sweden matched its neutrality with defence investments that were among the highest in Europe, laid the basis for a surge in investments in higher education and research in the post-war period. In this period, Sweden saw the emergence of no fewer than 20 universities and university colleges. They reflected different waves of the modernisation of Swedish society: two comprehensive universities (Umeå and Linköping) were set up at the height of the strong state, mimicking Uppsala in structure and organisation, four university colleges were set up as outstations of comprehensive ones and later became comprehensive ‘new universities’ in the 1990s, while a string of new university colleges catered to the vocational needs of the expanding welfare state and local industrial interests. In the last decade, two university colleges have been elevated to university status, one in a metropolitan area (Malmö) and one in the Swedish industrial heartland (Mälardalen).

Until the late 1990s, the functional division between universities and university colleges was sharp: colleges did not receive state appropriations for research and could not appoint professors or run PhD programmes on their own, this had to be done in collaboration with one or several universities. Today, these rights accrue to all universities and university colleges. The main difference between universities and university colleges today is that the latter generally receive more limited direct funding from the state for research, and have to apply for approval from the Swedish Higher Education Authority if they want to establish Master’s and PhD programmes.

Altogether, the Swedish higher education system is formed of a complex multitude of organisational identities and directions, with not always clear-cut demarcations between old universities and new university colleges—everything looks more or less the same on the formal level. Looking into the ideals and practices of different universities, a quartet of ‘mission groups’ can be identified for Sweden:

  • The comprehensive universities, some serving as national flagships (Uppsala and Lund), others of post-war origin (Umeå and Linköping). While distinguished and prestigious, their organisational matrixes are complex and also encompass applied and vocational activities. The old flagships generally have larger government appropriations, and are privileged among students and staff due to their leading national position. They also have, by Swedish standards, considerable endowments in foundations and in land ownership. Their missions are therefore quite broad but also distinguished by the privileged positions in recruiting students and in the provision of state funding for research.

  • The old research-intensive universities, which specialise in certain areas but are adamantly non-comprehensive (Karolinska, KTH, Chalmers, Stockholm and Gothenburg). Their missions thus reflect particular interests around their professional profiles, such as the concentration of state authorities around Stockholm, the biomedical industry around Karolinska, Sweden’s large companies around KTH, and Gothenburg’s role as a regional hub for bioindustries and government functions.

  • New universities and most university colleges, primarily specialising in education and research for welfare state professions. Their missions closely resemble the needs and interests of welfare state organisations and professionals, with particularly strong ties to local and regional government.

  • A few of the new universities and most of the university colleges, located adjacent to industrial clusters, primarily specialising in related fields, such as robotics, mining, and paper and pulp. Their missions reflect the adjacent industrial landscape, and their needs for, and interests in, training and supplementary research activities.

Altogether, this points towards a university system which appears rounded and flexible, catering to specific goals: for some national prestige and international visibility dominate, for others the supply of human capital for different sectors. However, it is a system without a clear-cut plan, neither at the systemic nor at the institutional level. From time to time, imbalances surface, as for instance when university colleges of considerable size and research obligations press for university status. Older (elite) universities on their side view themselves as overloaded with missions and tasks, and weakly internally organised as a result (Lund University, 2021). Specialised universities in engineering and medicine are dominated by research. This in turn tends to be dependent on soft money raised by numerous groups of different sizes; they too suffer from weak internal coordination.

To some extent the service function has been a given for Swedish universities from their inception. Historically, Swedish universities, including the large and comprehensive ones, have taken on board social commitments beyond the core activities of teaching and research—for instance in providing for and governing healthcare, secondary education, the arts (theatres, museums, collections) and even local politics (Benner & Sörlin, 2015). While some of these commitments ebbed out as these sectors grew in their own right during the post-war period, an element of ‘citizenship’ has remained a characteristic of Swedish universities. When in 1998 the third mission was mandated on a par with education and research for universities, this codified a practice that was—while far from all-encompassing—frequent among Sweden’s academic institutions: to articulate with their environments, in their different forms. A key element in that is the devolution of politics in Sweden; while the country is often seen as the embodiment of the ‘strong state’, the main political actors in Sweden are actually the municipalities. Local taxes account for around 30% of GDP in Sweden (the highest share among OECD countries), and municipalities and regions have considerable autonomy in organising and funding services and functions, including universities even though they are formally organised under the central state (Erlingsson & Wärnström, 2015). This means that municipalities often form strong stakeholders for ‘their’ universities, in the form of direct support, engagement with the structure of education, provision of premises and similar.

The Rediscovery of Universities’ Civic Mission

All Swedish universities have evolved on the basis of a civic mission, ingrained in them from the very onset. As an example, Uppsala University, Sweden’s oldest, was founded to ensure that the Swedish state could rely on a secure supply of trained clergymen and not be dependent on other countries—including the arch-enemy Denmark, which Sweden had narrowly defeated in 1471 in its struggle for national independence. Denmark was about to set up its first university, in Copenhagen, at the same time, which added to the urgency (Annerstedt, 1877). Similar civic missions guided the inception of the universities in Lund—to train professionals for recently conquered regions that previously had belonged to Denmark, the universities in Gothenburg and Stockholm, which catered to the growing city bourgeoisie and so on. The civic mission reached a peak in the decades before the Second World War: as an example, in around 1920, Uppsala University took on a wide variety of missions beyond education and research: in addition to being the largest university in the country, its missions included fostering a nascent biomedical industry, running a local theatre and a grammar school, hosting a national hospital and several government authorities and supplying the city council with a steady stream of chairpersons (Benner & Sörlin, 2015).

The post-war period saw the diversification of the service role. Some service tasks were transferred from universities to municipalities, county councils and the state, notably for healthcare, culture and schooling. The Swedish state grew rapidly, both in size and complexity, and new forms of service alliances grew concomitantly, where universities developed specialised forms of interaction with public functions, for instance in infrastructure, defence and energy (Stevrin, 1978). Meanwhile, new universities and university colleges were indirect projections of a civic mission, as they were established in settings with little or no experience of higher education, and often catered to regional needs and professions with limited connections to academic training and research, in industry, welfare state services and the like. It might be said that the service function was socialised and professionalised in this period, which began in the early 1960s and continued well into the 1980s, where public missions were translated through state agencies and formed a central part of the research and education profile of the universities.

To some extent, such central steering still forms a vital part of university missions in Sweden. The civic mission is more central for new universities and university colleges, which often depend critically on financial and other types of support from their surroundings (Benner, 2008). Indeed, the new higher education institutions struggle to ringfence academic procedures from an invasion of expectations of direct utility and, indeed, service in a very tangible manner, where municipalities and county councils do not abstain from direct interventions in their activities.

For the older universities, the service function as articulated in services to the state continues to be an important element, as evidenced in the proliferation of new steering models and instruments, targeting a variety of goals broadly defined by the political system and left to universities, authorities and societal stakeholders to define in more detail. Such models and instruments are sometimes highly specified, sometimes more generic, but their motivation is to stimulate and reinforce the embeddedness of academic environments into societal networks, and to infuse those societal missions into routines and practices within academia (Åström & Arnold, 2019).

The debate regarding the service function is perhaps less articulated in Sweden than in the UK and Australia, and one reason for this may be that universities have quite broad missions, including the national flagships, and that they build on a heritage of engagement. It might also be argued that the Swedish state with its wide societal mandate affords less leeway for universities to pursue service missions (Esping-Andersen, 1990). However, provoked by issues of cleavages in society, some universities engage rather vividly in their vicinity, and the push from students to engage more widely on matters pertaining to sustainability and equity beyond their role as students is another reinforcing element. In addition, universities are also mandated to engage in civic missions in the contract with the government, for instance on issues of diversity, sustainability and social engagement more broadly, under the banner of social entrepreneurship. As a result, the service function can no longer purely be seen as something ingrained in the universities, and/or dealt with by other institutions in society, but also as part of their mission in a matter relevant to the critical issues of today.

As mentioned, the service function has been inherent in the missions of Sweden’s universities, albeit in different forms. The most challenging political issues in Sweden currently are the widening disparities between centres and peripheries, and—albeit limited by international comparisons—widening income differentials. Sweden is particularly vulnerable to socioeconomic cleavages between those born in Sweden and immigrants, which in its turn reflects rigidities in the labour market, in the provision of housing and schooling opportunities, driving a wedge between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in Swedish society (SOU, 2020, p. 46). The older universities are by and large located in affluent areas with low unemployment and stable socioeconomic conditions, while many of the university colleges and new universities are located in more vulnerable settings. Hence the new universities and university colleges have been propelled to take on a wider role, beyond the education-research axis. As an indicative example, Mid Sweden University, located in an industrialised area heavily dependent on the paper and pulp industry, took on an active role together with the Swedish Public Employment Service and the municipality of Sundsvall to compensate for the closure of a major plant in its vicinity. This included the provision of training adapted to the need of those laid-off, and potential corporate relocations to match the gap created by the closure. As another example, Malmö University, located in a city with large income disparities and some of the highest unemployment figures in the country, engages in community-based collaboration for combatting diabetes—with high incidences especially among the city’s poorest, and for introducing particularly vulnerable groups such as immigrant women to the labour market (university deputy vice-chancellor, personal communication).

How Swedish Universities Responded to the COVID Pandemic

Swedish universities’ response to COVID showcases a mixture of adaptation and acceleration of initiatives already under way. Adaptation shows in a quick transition to digital learning and a rapid deployment of various techniques for digital examinations (and a massive hike in reported fraudulence followed by improved techniques for identifying misconduct, UKÄ, 2021). Some of these digital-led transformations were already underway, as the dependence on large classes (up to 500 students at the same time) for some training programmes had been in question for a while, as can be evidenced in some of our COVID stories. Universities began experimenting with blended learning models, combining generic large-scale modules with tutorials in smaller groups. Hence, the pandemic accelerated what was already evolving. Experiments with international and collaborative learning models were also triggered, for instance in the form of COIL (collaborative online international learning) courses and substituting travel for participation online for international exchange students (UKÄ, 2020).

Universities saw their position not weakened but rather reinforced during the pandemic, for two reasons—as a way to reduce temporary unemployment through new courses and study places, and as a way to stimulate the economy through new programmes for research with particular relevance to different sectors (in particular those pertaining to sustainability). Indeed, expenditure on education and research increased during the pandemic—study loans for those unemployed, temporary courses within universities with a life-course learning bent, support of new educational methods—altogether accounting for another 100 million Euros of state funding per year during 2020–2024 (Regeringen, 2021). The perhaps most striking aspect is that state funding of universities has been propelled during the pandemic, especially in the form of time-limited study places to meet increasing demand for higher education (applications surged in 2021, up 30% in comparison with the year before, UKÄ, 2020), but also in the form of COVID-related research initiatives (Regeringen, 2020).

For universities, this has caused something of a disarray, as increased resources have been difficult to utilise, and they have accumulated large parts of the extra income rather than using it as a vehicle to start new programmes or forge new destinies. This in turn is related to the peculiarities of budgeting in Swedish universities, as they cannot transfer resources between activities (funding for education and for research is strictly separated), and because universities are constrained by several different steering ambitions, including rigid forms of employment and temporary flows of resources. This combination has constrained universities’ capacity to actually use resources over the last decade, even though the government continues to invest in the sector (SOU, 2019, p. 6).

This leads to the final reflections, namely the constraints on leadership in Swedish universities. The government has a penchant for time-limited, accountable, piecemeal steering signals, based on a mistrust of universities’ capacity to engage without ringfencing resources, while universities express constraints in the operating space, based on the same piecemeal steering of their activities and resource flows. The attempts that have been made to resolve the tension between steering and autonomy have so far failed, and Sweden’s universities have not been able to translate the unique opportunities afforded by the political response to the pandemic—expansion rather than austerity, faith rather than mistrust—into their own directions for an adaptation to the new ‘power paradigm’ of universities (see Chap. 1) but rather continue to muddle through on the basis of an increasingly bewildering variety of atomistic missions. The government on its side has failed to reconcile its plethora of steering ambitions into a coherent policy for Sweden’s universities (Schwaag Serger et al., 2021). The outcome may not be that bleak, but falls somewhat short of the expectations one might have of one of the most ambitious reformist political systems, where rationality and pragmatic yet futuristic problem-orientation have reigned for over a century (Lewin, 2006).