On 16 April I wrote about an evaluation of archaeology programs offered at Swedish universities and colleges. Now Aard regular Ãsa reports at the Ting & Tankar blog on the results of in-depth evaluations of certain programs that were judged to be of iffy quality (source1, source2).
Three programs have been issued warnings by the National Agency for Higher Education:
- The Mediterranean archaeology PhD program in Gothenburg
- The osteology PhD program in Lund
- The osteology MA program in Visby
All the warnings are due to inadequate quantity and quality of teaching staff per student. Two PhD programs, egyptology in Uppsala and osteology in Stockholm, escaped warnings because they have been voluntarily closed for application "until the situation improves".
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Oh dear. So where do you go to prod old Swedish bones then?
And how can/will the programmes react? Could Lund and Göteberg join forces, for example, to form an Eastern Ear Sound archaeology programme?
At the moment you can't do a decent PhD in osteology in Sweden. Maybe Helsinki or Copenhagen or Oslo?
The universities and colleges in question will have to either invest more money into the programs or close them down. They have a year to fix things. Not sure if mergers are a workable solution from the point of view of the university administrations. They get funded separately and compete for students (who come with money bags).
As I mentioned on my blog, the people already in the system will in all probablity be able to produce excellent dissertations mostly. Problem is there is no room for any additional PhD students and those that have gotten their doctorate have mostly either stepped out into unemployment, temporary assignments, or are working with excavation archaeology. A waste of some very fine researchers considering we really need more teachers and researchers if the subject is to survive at all.
Either the Universities dissolve osteology and gives it back to anatomy and zoology (a pity), or someone somewhere have to put their money where their mouth is.
The problem with studying in Copenhagen is that in the Danish system you must come from a zoology/medicine background to do bones. And most of the Swedish osteology students come from a archaeology background and probably can't afford the time or money to do a science undergraduate degree prior to apply for a Ph.D.
Arrr, those cunning Danes!
Maybe we could get the critics to come to the US and oversee bad television programs on archaeology. The crap that shows up even on science channels is getting so sensationalist that I have to warn students off all the time.
Maybe the producers studied osteology in Sweden.