The University of Tromsø is a young institution, but safely rooted in an old European university tradition. The decision to build a university at 70ºN was reached by the Norwegian Parliament in 1968, and the ambition was to build an institution that could help modernise and develop the northern part of Norway - a region which had fallen behind the rest of the country in fields such as health care and business development, and where the paradigm of the cold war dominated the political debate.
In the past decades - and in particular since the beginning of the 1990’s - new opportunities and challenges have emerged, and consequently the perspective has to be broadened. The northern region has come into view as the prime area of focus in Norwegian foreign and domestic policy. Keywords in this context are renewable marine resources, oil & gas, and the meeting of cultures and nations. Furthermore, following the disappearance of the iron curtain, the region has gradually returned to its “standard state” of cooperation and peaceful coexistence. The Barents region has truly become a region of opportunities!
With the increased pace of development, both regionally and internationally, comes new and diverse challenges, ranging from local radioactive hot-spots, to pollutants carried with the wind and the ocean currents to the Arctic, to the increase in the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in certain areas. Overshadowing them all is of course the issue of climate change. It is something of a paradox that the region which probably has the smallest “environmental footprint” is also the region where the consequences of the total anthropogenic CO2-emission are likely to be felt first, and perhaps have the most dramatic effect.
Against this backdrop, it is no exaggeration to say that the University of Tromsø - being the northernmost university in the world - is in a unique position to explore the opportunities, and to provide the civil society with the tools necessary to meet the challenges. Among these tools is an overall, broad competence necessary to understand processes such as regional development and globalization, and to discuss in a meaningful way the concept of “homeland vs. frontier”.
The University of Tromsø also has an obligation to provide the civil society with specialised knowledge in fields where our geographical localization gives us a comparative edge. Examples of the latter are:
- Political and social development in the high North
- Northern lights research
- Fisheries science
- Social medicine
- Multicultural and multilingual research
- Indigenous issues
- Bio-marine and bio-medical sciences
- Tele-medicine
In building both the broad competence and the specialized knowledge, the University benefits immensely from the fact that Tromsø is a national and international centre for polar research. The city is host to a number of research institutes and organisations with a northern focus - the most prominent of them being the Norwegian Polar Institute.
Another crucial element to the University’s success is its ability to attract world class scientists from both Norway and the rest of the world. For instance, 10 out of 13 top positions at the new school of odontology are non-Norwegians, and foreign nationals play key roles in many of the centres of excellence, and research schools at the University of Tromsø. The scientific environment that this blend of national and international competence produces, will be instrumental in ensuring the University’s successful participation in the research and development programme Barents 2020 - a programme which has been presented by the Norwegian government as one of the key tools in promoting development in the North.
Through regional, national, and international cooperation, the University of Tromsø has as its overall ambition to tap into and to expand the knowledge base of the Circumpolar North in order to help facilitate a sustainable harvesting of the natural resources in the region. The ultimate goal is to enable the peoples of the north to “live a good life” in the North, and off the North.