Top university - Downhill for humanities? Policing the future of higher education in the Finnish mainstream media

Abstract

The ongoing structural changes of the university are under heated debate worldwide, including the Nordic countries. In scholarly discussion, however, there has been surprisingly little analysis and critical assessments of the ways the mainstream media especially represent the state and future of university for the general public. By focusing on the ways Finland's largest daily newspaper covered a specific plan to reform the Finnish university system during Spring 2007, this article explores who were given the right to define the university's contemporary state of affairs, name its problems and suggest solutions to them in the national print media's public arena. More specifically, the article is concerned with the kind of actor positions afforded to human sciences and humanist scholars in the media coverage.