The dean candidate of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities

I feel obliged by the proposal of my colleagues in the faculty to stand for re-election as dean. It is also very much a recognition from the faculty of the work we have done together over the past four years. This period has included the Covid crisis and Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine. Time and again, the university has had to respond to events that no one could predict. All in all, I think we have managed well, but this has often meant the need to rush in unknown directions. Certainly, not everything has gone flawlessly or smoothly.  

I very much hope that the coming years will offer opportunities for more stable development. The university and the faculty will continue to face new challenges, and the key to success will undoubtedly lie in working together. The common concerns of the institutes and the faculties will, either directly or indirectly, largely boil down to the issue of funding for research and higher education. Similarly, we no longer compete with only Estonian higher education institutions for good student candidates, but with foreign universities, which are in a completely different economic situation. The shortage of Estonian students leads us to the topic of the next generation of academic staff, which is also a language issue. If we do not have enough young Estonians willing to continue our work, we will have to tackle two tasks at once: bringing talents from abroad to study and work here, and integrating them to our Estonian-speaking university community and country. It is a pleasure to see many good examples of that in our faculty.  

There is room for improvement in making better use of the international research potential in the faculty. In particular, researchers studying the land and people of Estonia still face the demanding task of serving the Estonian readership and developing research in our mother tongue, while at the same time disseminating knowledge through high-quality research about Estonia around the world. The diversity of disciplines and the flexible opportunity to concentrate on teaching and studies can also only be ensured through cooperation between researchers, students, departments, institutes and faculties.