University of Helsinki
Together with the Doctoral School and Doctoral Education steering group representatives, HYVÄT has made a statement on the university’s policy of allocating work spaces to doctoral students.
Our main concern is that the university should provide doctoral candidates with equal possibilities to pursue their doctoral studies and complete their dissertation. Offering doctoral candidates office space is one crucial component of these possibilities, and one that many doctoral students lack at the moment.
We propose that:
1. Practices for distributing office space should be standardized and openly available throughout the university.
2. Working spaces should be free of charge. Doctoral candidates are often working on limited and short-term funding, and asking them to pay for coming to work cannot be justified.
3. Source of funding as a strict criterion for working space should be abandoned because it creates several hierarchies of doctoral candidates.
4. Doctoral candidates are a significant part of their disciplinary research communities/groups and this should be acknowledged in practice by integrating them into the office spaces of their research disciplines or groups.
5. Doctoral candidates significantly contribute to the research that is carried out at the university. Hence, it should be in the university’s interest to provide an attractive working environment for doctoral candidates.
The key is to allocate work space to the doctoral candidates in connection to the relevant discipline or research group, so that they have a possibility to connect with colleagues in their own field (supervisors, staff, and fellow doctoral candidates). Office spaces where they are cut off from their closest colleagues do not offer the support of the community.
The entire statement as well as a list of the recipients can be found here.
EDIT [10 May]: The Faculty of Arts replied to our statement 9 May, the reply can be found here.
On 26 April HUART and HYVÄT made a joint statement on the university’s planning and decision-making concerning work spaces. That statement can be read here (only in Finnish). The Faculty of Arts reply to it can be read here.