Transitions: Future Trajectories of Institutes for Advanced Study (IASs) in Academia (SCAS Jubilee) - part 1

Published: 14 October 2025

Summary
Looking forward rather than backwards. That was the overarching theme of the SCAS Jubilee Symposium "Transitions: Future Trajectories of Institutes for Advanced Study (IASs) in Academia", held in September 2025. In this first episode on the Jubilee we delve into some of the discussions about the role that Institutes for Advanced Study could - and maybe should - play in the academic landscape. At the same time as remaining a sanctuary where researchers have the time and space to think, the Institutes for Advanced Study can unite to speak with one voice to the outside world to safeguard academic values such as academic freedom amid increasing global challenges.

Keywords
Institutes for Advanced Study, academic freedom, knowledge, intellectual curiosity, academic ecosystem

Transcript of the Episode

Björn Wittrock 00:00
On the eighth of February 1984 I was asked to come to a meeting with the directors of the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the National Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research. In the room were two other invited people, two professors at Uppsala, and during this meeting, we were asked if we were prepared to set aside half our time during one full year to write a proposal about how you could stimulate research in the social sciences and, to some extent, humanities in Sweden, and make it more international and more focused. And this could be done in a variety of institutional forms. And it was by no means clear that it would be in the form of an Institute for Advanced Study, but that was the form that we came to propose.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:11
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. You just heard Björn Wittrock, one of the founding directors, former principal and now permanent fellow at SCAS about how it all started 40 years ago. So how do you celebrate a 40 year anniversary at SCAS? Rather than just bringing out a big cake and cheering for the achievements during the last four decades, SCAS does what it does best, gathering representatives from other Institutes for Advanced Study and from universities and funding agencies, as well as current and former fellows and many friends of SCAS to discuss difficult questions at a two day symposium.

Christina Garsten 01:53
Warmly welcome every one of you. Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, valued scholars and dear friends. It is indeed an honor and a privilege to welcome you to this symposium. It is an invitation to examine where academia stands today, but also an opportunity to chart where we are heading, and as we gather across disciplines, institutions and geographies, we find ourselves at a critical juncture. Academia is undergoing a profound transformation, and with it too, so are the spaces and organizations that sustain and shape its most ambitious work. Among these, Institutes for Advanced Study hold a unique and essential place - I'm sure you would agree to that - originally conceived as, let's say, sanctuaries for unfettered inquiry, they, or I should say, we, have involved into dynamic nodes in a global infrastructure of research, knowledge seeking and intellectual exchange. Our institutes are vital components of a living, breathing global system, a system composed of people, ideas, practices, organizational procedures and guiding visions that reach across borders and that matter for our future. Now, before we start, let me share what Bo Gustafsson once wrote about the challenges of an Institute for Advanced Study. "There are many pitfalls to be evaded. One of them is complacency." Indeed, to advance research and the role of Institutes for Advanced Study in this endeavor, we should avoid being caught up in smug satisfaction with the existing situation. Institutes for Advanced Study are living processes and continuous transformation and transition. As we pursue this mission, we are also approaching a contemporary version of Max Weber's ideal of science as a vocation. This conference is essentially about aspiration. Let us approach our task with intellectual curiosity and moral clarity. Let us chart ways forward that serve our mission. Let us imagine what Institutes for Advanced Study can do, how they can serve as laboratories of thought, homes for global scholars and engines of cosmopolitan academic life. Thank you and welcome.

Natalie von der Lehr 05:19
So there you go. The topic of the symposium is "Transitions, future trajectories of Institutes for Advanced Study in academia". And you just heard some of the welcome speech of Christina Garsten, current principal of SCAS. And this is the first of three podcast episodes about the Jubilee symposium that took place in September 2025. To start off with, I gathered some of the speakers in the studio to dive deeper into the topic.

Edward Kirumira 05:48
I'm Edward, Professor Edward Kirumira. I'm the director of Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa.

Helga Nowotny 05:56
Helga Nowotny, I am a professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies at ETH Zurich and the former president of the European Research Council.

Bruce Carruthers 06:06
I'm Bruce Carruthers. I'm a professor of sociology at Northwestern University and also a long term fellow at the Swedish Collegium.

Natalie von der Lehr 06:13
Thank you. So this is actually the first time we have representatives from three continents in the studio, which makes me very happy.

Helga Nowotny 06:20
The global role of SCAS.

Edward Kirumira 06:23
Exactly.

Natalie von der Lehr 06:24
Yeah, I think this is lovely. So then the topic of the symposium is looking forward, like future trajectories. Then from your respective experience and background, what role can and could - maybe should - the Institutes for Advanced Studies play in the academic landscape?

Edward Kirumira 06:44
I think that the role or the place of Institutes for Advanced Study is still the same, looking in the future, trying to think through problems of now, but for the future. A lot of what is happening now is problem solving, solving the problems of today. And I think that increasingly, we're being asked to think of tomorrow, not just the younger generation, but also in terms of where do we want to go? So that the problem we are having now, we don't solve it for now, but we solve it for the future.

Helga Nowotny 07:20
I think the need that Institutes of Advanced Studies have fulfilled is still there, namely, to have time and space to think and to reflect as part of a small community. And the next step for me is to somehow come to terms with this, what I call, you know, the structural ambivalence with universities, the ecosystem, the academic ecosystem, and, of course, the wider system in which the institutes are embedded. But the IAS were founded in order to compensate the deficiencies of universities. And so this created this structural ambivalence, and I think we have to work out almost a new social contract between the universities and the institutes. What is it we give to the university? What is it the university gives to us, and what are the respective roles? This would greatly help, also to create a new space for taking up topics that the university being too big, being too heterogeneous inside, etc, cannot really tackle well. And then you have this privileged space of a small, wonderful environment where in small groups, you can start to take these ideas further, discuss them, you know, without vested interests being right up front or conflicts being right up front, so I think we should move in this direction.

Bruce Carruthers 09:04
Well, I agree with everything my colleagues have said, and I think what I'll add is that professional training and teaching is often very much bounded by disciplines that we have inherited from the past, and one of the things that these spaces offer is the opportunity to transgress those boundaries and really look at the synergies that there are between disciplines. And rather than spending a lot of time policing the boundaries, you simply avoid them, you transgress them, you go across them, and it makes possible all kinds of interesting conversations and research possibilities that are very future oriented, because we know that over time, these disciplinary boundaries shift, and a Institute for Advanced Study is a place where you can begin to explore how that might work and what might be gained by bringing together, you know, what would appear to be curious pairings of people.

Natalie von der Lehr 09:57
Bruce, you have been a scholar at several institutes, and. You've been going back and fro, and you described yesterday your stays at the Institutes as a sort of breathing opportunity, and time to time to think, as many people say. What are you really missing at your home university and in your usual academic life?

Bruce Carruthers 10:18
When you're in your regular job, there's a kind of a set routine. There's lots of demands made on your time. I have a fire hose of emails that I have to deal with. It's very difficult to kind of protect my time and my kind of mental space from all of these things. And they are, you know, because I'm in that situation, these are literally people knocking on my door. So they're very hard to ignore, and I don't want to ignore them. But in order to kind of have the space to think about something else or to catch up on reading, I've a, you know, all these people around the table understand the amount of reading that I have to do that is by necessity, things that I must read, files I have to go through, things for a promotion or a review, like I could spend my 24 hours a day reading, but I would never have time to read things that I actually want to read, except if I escape to a place like an IAS. So I think that I feel obliged to do my job, my regular job, as well as I can, and to devote myself to my students and to help my colleagues and so forth. But all that means is there's very little time left over for myself and for my own intellectual development. And I find that physically removing myself and going somewhere in a, you know, context of a residential fellowship does that for me. And everyone understands, oh, Bruce is on leave, Bruce is off in Sweden. Let's leave him alone. You know, crossing an ocean is a great way to kind of become scarce.

Helga Nowotny 11:46
You found the right escape route.

Helga Nowotny 11:51
I would like to come back to a point that you now raised. I mean, how many like you can do what you do? You know, it's a tiny, tiny, fraction that any Institute can accommodate. So the, I call it, you know, the low ratio between the beneficiaries and the demand that is there. So what is a way of getting out of this at least a little bit? And I think it should be shorter stays. Not replacing the longer stays, but consciously deciding, you know, a certain percentage of fellows at the Institute should have a much shorter stay. And in Paris, we have the experience with one month fellows. That works beautifully, because you can get even the most high level people, because everyone can spare one month. And you know, even if it's your vacation, you can allow yourself to get away for one month. And it has also a couple of very unexpected effects on the community of scholars, because every month, somebody new comes or two or three new people come with completely different topics. And at one point, we also started to include practitioners. And I tell you, I was really shocked how little most academics know about the world outside academia, I found it really shocking. So if you have a practitioner in there, from the side of the practitioner, may also be a shock to discover this academic world. But I think this is something you can experiment with.

Edward Kirumira 13:37
I think going back to that, is that Institutes for Advanced Study need to constantly imagine the fellowship program in a way that that fellowship program structure speaks to the broader environment. And so if we started with long term fellowships, you find that if you stay with those ones, you might have a selection bias of fellows that come into your space. There will be, probably, in our case, in the in the southern hemisphere, there will be retired professors who can afford to spend a whole year plus. And so you lose out on the active scholars, because the universities cannot let them go for that for that long. So with STIAS, we decided to have two semesters rather than a full year. But even within that one semester, we do take fellows from two and a half months, well minimum two and a half months, because also you deal with the issue of disruption of the cohort, if people are moving in and out, and so it's really you have to balance. But I agree that longer term fellowships may not be the way to go, given that, I mean now the success rate for STIAS is already 12% and so it's going to be also very difficult to justify. You know why you you know you stay. So I think that creativity, without necessarily, you know, losing what it is, because if somebody is coming for one for one week, it won't really help them, but that's something that we have to we have to really think about. And I think also that the Institutes for Advanced Study could very easily be provide convening space for the architects of the broader scholarly environment so funders, networks, a yearly meeting of those that give the money to experience the space and therefore inform the way they are funding research and scholarship can be very helpful.

Bruce Carruthers 15:54
Another thing occurs to me, Edward, in terms of a biased sample, as it were, of participants. You know, the Institutes for Advanced Study were established in this kind of yearly fellowship model was put in place, where a lot of academics were men, and the idea that, you know, you could just pick up and bring your family to Princeton or whatnot, and the wife would come along, and all of that kind of worked, and that is not how academia works. And so a lot of people are in two career households, and there's children, and so the shorter stay, I think, is something that kind of accommodates all the other demands that there are on households, and doesn't privilege this idea that there's just one career in the household, and that person, if they move to Princeton, well, everyone else kindly comes along. Yeah, that wouldn't work in my household, for example. But I think shorter, you know, shorter periods offer more flexibility to kind of take into account all these other constraints on people's lives.

Edward Kirumira 16:54
That's very true. I think academic mobility is a huge thing. You know, people being able to move, visas and all these different things. And I think that somehow, maybe through, you know, networks of Institutes for Advanced Study or networks for European Union funding, some of these need to be addressed, because, you know, the mobility issue precludes a lot of individuals. We've had some cases where, you know, you've invited a fellow, but they can't, they can't make it, they can't travel, or they can't be given a visa.

Helga Nowotny 17:35
And especially now that we see all forms of international cooperation going down. It's cutting funds, it's, you know, the suspicion you come from some countries that are off limits. And it gets worse and worse every day. And I think here it is all the more important to keep channels open and to say we need this international cooperation going even if it is at, you know, a modest level, but we can do it.

Edward Kirumira 18:08
Going forward. One of the things that it would really be nice to see is to have collaborative programs across Institutes for Advanced Study. For example, somebody taking a fellowship, and half of it is in one Institute, and another half in another, so that the networks that each of the Institute for Advanced Study create can actually be broadened. It would also go towards the issue of the small percentage representation, if we could use that also.

Helga Nowotny 18:43
I would also plead for unification, in a sense, a stronger alliance, because then you can speak with one voice to the outside world. And given the fact that institutes are so tiny compared to universities, you know, being able to speak with one voice and say, you know, we are a body that has the same spirit, the same value, we work in more or less the similar ways, and then you have much more visibility and weight.

Natalie von der Lehr 20:13
You just listen to "The Imaginary Garden" performed by the choir "La Capella" during dinner in the orangery. Astrid Söderbergh Widding is a professor of cinema studies and has been the president of Stockholm University for 12 years. Now she is an executive director for the Wallenberg foundations and also the chair of the Nobel Foundation. But in between positions, she has been a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.

Astrid Söderbergh Widding 20:39
Yes, that was wonderful. The day after I stepped down as rector, I took the flight to South Africa and landed in Stellenbosch, so where I spent a couple of months at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. And that was a fantastic intellectual experience. But also it was great just to be on the other the other side of the globe and to reverse your perspectives, which you take for granted normally in your everyday life.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:08
So the topic of this symposium is trajectories forwards and the role of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the academic landscape. Would you like to share some thoughts on that?

Astrid Söderbergh Widding 21:18
I think Institutes are extremely important in academic life today, because it is so often demanded of universities that they should produce useful knowledge and useful outcomes from the research. And of course, you should offer results, but often you don't know which results will be useful, and also the possibility to think creatively and to think across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, that has become rare luxury. So I think here Institutes, when functioning in a sound and good way, they can really become drivers of change in academia and inspire the scholarly system.

Natalie von der Lehr 22:01
Nowadays, we live through turbulent times, and there are some worrying events. Recently, the Swedish government asked Stockholm University and Gothenburg University to sort of develop a test for citizenship. You had some thoughts on that? Can you share that?

Astrid Söderbergh Widding 22:19
Yes, the two rectors of these two universities, they protested, and I believe absolutely rightfully so, because, of course, a university with such experience can produce a test whatsoever, but we shouldn't be used in that way as instruments for political purposes, for solely political purposes. We also, we construct other tests, but these are for academic life, and then then it's okay, because it is for academic purposes, but here it is something completely different. This is a sole political purpose and and if you use universities as instruments in that way, then I think that academic freedom is really at stake.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:00
What can the universities do in that context?

Astrid Söderbergh Widding 23:03
Well, I guess they can protest and they can debate. I think it's very important that academic freedom has been put high on the agenda. So that's, one could say that's the good part of it, that it makes people aware of the problem.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:17
Can the institutes play a different role here? Or what can the Institutes for Advanced Study do in this sort of problematic situations?

Astrid Söderbergh Widding 23:26
Yes, I think that they could be a strong voice together with the free academies. They share the mission with universities, of being academic institutions in a way, but they are not state authorities under the government. So they can speak freely. They can speak truth to power. Here, in this case.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:52
We truly live through turbulent times at the moment, and a fair part of the discussions circled around what Institutes of Advanced Studies can do when democratic values and academic freedom are increasingly under attack. Wilhelm Krull, former Secretary General of the Volkswagen foundation and founding director of the New Institute, shares his thoughts.

Wilhelm Krull 24:14
Well, I would say turbulent times is still a very polite way of describing what is going on, because there are so many interconnected crises right now ranging all the way from wars to internal conflicts to civil rights violations. And therefore, I think it's such a complex array of intertwined kind of things that it's not that easy to deal with turbulent times as such. So I think we have to be selective if we really want to achieve an impact in whatever we are doing, and that's why I think it's so important to first of all, focus on issues that are directly related to academia. And that is, in my view, on the one hand, the whole topic of the future of democracy, but more specifically, the future of academic freedom. The freedom of expression as well is, of course, violated in many countries. And the Human Rights index shows you in how many countries the human rights are violated. But if we try to cover all of that at once, we lose the credibility of our own expertise. And that's why it's so important that we first of all analyze what is going on and why certain parties, certain politicians are so objectionable to academic freedom, and how we can actually convince them that this is a counterproductive kind of thing for their respective country. So when they see that without these kind of opportunities for free inquiry, there will be, in a very short period, no things left to apply. They, of course, all want applied research. They want innovations. They want startups. But thinking about the foundations, or nowadays, I'd like to call it foundational research, as, let's say, the important ingredients, or maybe even the thing that provides the basis for all the other things that is something where we must try to have as many opportunities as possible. And particularly IAS can create a platform, or they can be using their convening power in order to also meet without a large public confrontation. Because you see, in most cases, at least that's my experience, politicians do not learn in big events. They like to just stick to their position in order to convince their constituency. But if you talk quietly to them, or if you talk in smaller groups to them, and if you can also build alliances, then all of a sudden, they may change their attitude. Maybe we should still be optimistic in some respects, or at least keep our confidence that change is feasible. And as far as I can say, if you start early on, then of course, that is an opportunity to actually also see to it that change is happening in the right direction. And that requires, of course, a very cautious and strategic approach to all of these kind of issues. Otherwise, you lose out in simply confronting people of other opinions, and that's usually the end of a story, and not the beginning of a wonderful friendship.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:59
You have listened to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. This was an episode within our Series SCAS Talks Spotlight, highlighting the SCAS Jubilee in September 2025. You have heard some of the thoughts and reflections about the future trajectories for Institutes for Advanced Studies in academia. This was the first episode of the special Jubilee edition. In the next episode, you will hear more about academic hospitality and diplomacy, meet early and mid career researchers and learn more about the famous SCAS lunches. Don't miss out on that. The material for this podcast was recorded and edited by me, Natalie von der Lehr. I would like to thank Björn Wittrock, Christina Garsten, Edward Kirumira, Helga Nowotny, Bruce Carruthers, Astrid Söderbergh Widding and Wilhelm Krull for talking to me. The musical interlude "The Imaginary Garden" was brought to you by the choir La Capella, and is part of their current performance, which explores themes of curiosity, resilience, freedom and women's rights. You can find out more on the website lacappella.se. In our regular podcast series, you can hear more about the research of present and former SCAS fellows. Tune in and listen if you're not a regular listener already. Thank you for listening, and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai