Newsmail #20, 2022-03-18

Dear all,

Yesterday, the ITM management group met with the rector (the KTH President), the vice president and the University director. The six heads of our departments had prepared thoroughly some issues that we wanted to discuss and to get feedback on. We met for three hours, quite informal, and had time to raise many issues. We selected three issues beforehand: our facilities, buildings and labs, and our struggles with expensive rent and short-sighted planning; life-long learning and university administration.

I was given plenty of room to explain our situation with our struggles to fund our activities, our under-staffing, challenges to sustain hands-on teaching and laboratory work in our MSc-programs. We also discussed solutions, getting more funds to pay for experimental work or finding methods of collaborating with other departments. It is clear to me now that the management of KTH shares our frustration and understand that sustaining our experimental focus, or need for teaching resources for, for example design teaching activities, is crucial for the long-term development of KTH. I am also glad to understand that the university leadership openly states that there are problems with the current setup and that changes are necessary.

As you know, we left parts of our building back to KTH in January. Now, the other two departments in our part of campus are doing the same thing, and, as a consequence of this, KTH will initiate a larger re-shuffling to make sure our buildings are full and that we can release some entire buildings. We have learnt yesterday that the buildings in our area will be kept, and filled, so other departments will move into the parts we now leave. In our case, it means that we have more stability now, we can trust that we can keep our MMK building for the near and not-so-near future, and also that we will get new exciting neighbors soon.

Best,

Martin