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Reflections on the University of the Arctic at Twenty

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By Oran R. Young, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara

Like other institutions of higher learning, UArctic is dedicated to the production, preservation and transmission of knowledge. But whereas other universities are organized as collections of departments reflecting the concerns of established disciplines, UArctic’s structure features Thematic Networks addressing cross-cutting topics like health and wellbeing, local and regional development, and food security.

The product of necessity as much as design, this structure has proven beneficial in practical terms. It bypasses the problem of dealing with organizational silos, which has hampered the efforts of mainstream universities to make their work relevant to the pursuit of sustainability in the Anthropocene.

Those of us who led the effort to create UArctic in the 1990s focused on the challenge of delivering education and conducting research for the North and in the North, and for good reasons. The small, widely dispersed human communities located in the Arctic often made it necessary for students to go south in search of education, and encouraged the development of research programs dominated by southerners. Understandable as it may have been, this situation had severe drawbacks. UArctic set out to address this concern by creating a university without walls and developing programmatic initiatives featuring alliances between Arctic institutions of higher learning, student mobility opportunities, and collaborative research networks. While there is still more to be done, UArctic certainly has made a difference in these terms.

More recently, UArctic has responded to the rapid growth of interest in the Arctic on the part of individuals and organizations located outside the Circumpolar North. Today, the membership of UArctic includes organizations based in France, Germany and the UK as well as in China, Japan and Korea. This represents a natural adaptation to changing times. If the 1990s was a period of identifying and responding to the particular needs of the Arctic, the current decade is a time of developing constructive relationships between the Arctic as a distinctive region and the outside world.

Without a doubt, UArctic is flourishing; it has identified a niche in the world of higher learning and demonstrated adaptability in developing programmatic initiatives to fill this niche. The challenge going forward will be to maintain a proper balance between the continuing need to engage in education and research in the North and for the North, and the growing importance of navigating relations between the Arctic and the rest of the world. Meeting this challenge will not be easy, but it offers an unparalleled opportunity to contribute to the future of the Arctic as a zone of peace and prosperity.

Table of Contents

  1. Editorial

    By Outi Snellman

  2. Letter from the President

    By Lars Kullerud

  3. Education as a Priority in Arctic Cooperation

    By Aleksi Härkönen

  4. Nordic Higher Education Collaboration: Arctic Teachers as Creators of a Sustainable Future

    By Tuija Turunen

  5. Arctic Children: Preschool Education and Smooth Transition to School

    By Anna Polezhaeva

  6. Circumpolar Universities Association: Communication and Collaboration Between the Peripheral Areas of the North

    By Esko Riepula

  7. The Arctic Heritage – A Contribution from IASC to Developing a Broad Arctic Cooperation

    By Odd R. Rogne

  8. Maintaining Dialogue and Building Capacity – IASC in the Future

    By Susan Barr and Larry Hinzman

  9. IASSA – Giving Voice to Arctic Social Sciences

    By Peter Sköld and Florian Stammler

  10. The Establishment of UArctic and the Arctic Council Process Behind It

    By David Stone, Lars-Otto Reiersen and Jan-Idar Solbakken

  11. UArctic Annual Report for 2016

  12. The Beginnings of Circumpolar Studies

    By Jón Haukur Ingimundarson

  13. The Scandinavian Seminar Group and UArctic: From Vision to Reality

    By Daphne L. Davidson, William J. Kaufmann and Rune Rydén

  14. Circumpolar Collegiality from 1998 to 2006: Reflections on the Early Days of the Council of UArctic

    By Asgeir Brekke and Sally Webber

  15. Growth of Russian Institutions’ Engagement in UArctic

    By Claudia Fedorova

  16. Learning Through Practice: The CASS PhD Network as a Precursor of UArctic Key Teaching Practices

    By Rasmus Ole Rasmussen and Gérard Duhaime

  17. Strengthening Indigenous Engagement in UArctic

    By Jan Henry Keskitalo and Johan Daniel Hætta

  18. Together We Stand Stronger: Interview with Liisa Holmberg

    By Marie Søndergaard

  19. 100 Years of Sámi Cooperation: Interview with Gunn-Britt Retter

  20. UArctic in the Context of Circumpolar Cooperation

    By Heather Exner-Pirot

  21. UArctic and Indigenous Peoples: Onwards with Shared Voices

    By Gerald Anderson

  22. Student Profiles and Follow-up Stories

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