The President’s Speech at the Inauguration and Conferment Ceremony 2026

A very warm welcome to Stockholm University’s Inauguration and Conferment Ceremony 2026!

Dear honorary doctors, I warmly welcome you to the annual Inauguration of New Professors and Conferment of Doctoral Degrees ceremony at Stockholm University. You are all outstanding contributors to the understanding, development and well-being of today’s society. Your interests cover a broad field of knowledge, and among you we have experts on the development of legal frameworks for understanding and regulating technological change in society, on how to compose music for silent films, on Swedish medieval history, adult education and lifelong learning, on how venture capital investments can promote long-term societal resilience, and an investigative journalist specializing in corporate harm, toxic industries and scientific disinformation.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to Stockholm University as doctors honoris causa.

Dear new doctors, jubilee doctors, and new professors, a warm welcome to you on this day of celebration when we salute your scientific achievements.

We have gathered here today, in solemn and traditionally academic form, to celebrate science and research by inaugurating the university’s new professors, conferring doctoral degrees upon our new doctors, honorary doctors and jubilee doctors, and celebrating our recipients of pedagogical awards as well as the recipient of the University’s Grand Medal.

We celebrate science at a time of profound geopolitical uncertainty. The war in Ukraine is still ongoing, more than four and a half years after Russia’s aggressive invasion began. Once again, we are witnessing a full-scale war in the Middle East, a conflict that likewise shows no signs of reaching a near-term resolution. The world, which seemed considerably brighter only a few years ago, has undergone a very dark development in recent times. At the same time, society faces major challenges relating to climate and the environment, energy, geopolitics and security, increasing polarization in which scientific findings are pitted against unfounded opinions, and, not least, threats to democracy and freedom of expression.

What, then, can universities contribute in these uncertain times? With their almost thousand-year history, universities stand for the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge, contributing both to the development of society and to the provision of skills and expertise. To quote Professor Sverker Sörlin of KTH, we live in an age of “educational nihilism”, in which universities and higher education institutions have a particularly important role to play in counteracting such a development. The rapid technological development, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, challenges our understanding of what knowledge is, and here academia must play an important role.

Universities therefore have an important responsibility. An academic responsibility that means that those of us involved in academic activities have a duty to ensure that the work carried out at our institutions is scientifically sound and ethically sustainable. That we stand for, and stand up for, knowledge and learning, and convey them to our students. That in our relationship with the wider society, we demonstrate that we can maintain the public’s trust in academic research and higher education. Universities and higher education institutions have an underlying social contract based on mutual exchange and mutual respect.
In order to uphold this responsibility, institutions of higher education and those who work within academia must have a high degree of autonomy over their activities. This is why we so clearly emphasize the importance of academic freedom and institutional autonomy. In both research and higher education, we must be able to remain independent of political as well as economic pressure, remain free from undue interference, and be free to generate and disseminate knowledge, thereby responding to society’s need for knowledge and expertise. It cannot be emphasized enough that academic freedom is a prerequisite for universities to carry out their missions with quality and credibility.

How individual academic freedom can be strengthened has recently been examined in a state commission led by Professor Anna-Sara Lind of Uppsala University. In her final report, she emphasizes, among other things, the need to clarify in the Higher Education Act that academic freedom applies to all university activities, i.e. both education and research, something that is not currently clearly stated in the legislation. The inquiry also proposes that the time has come to consider the possibility of giving academic freedom constitutional protection, encompassing the freedom of both research and education, through an amendment to the Constitution.

Another state commission currently under way is the so-called Autonomy Inquiry. The inquiry is led by Kerstin Jacobsson, who is, in her day-to-day role, University Director at KTH. She has been tasked with reviewing the organizational form of Sweden’s state universities and higher education institutions, including proposing an appropriate alternative to the current model of government agency status, as well as examining what changes can be made within the existing organizational structure to increase institutional autonomy. As government agencies, universities and higher education institutions are currently subject to a duty of obedience towards their principal, and are therefore open to being assigned various tasks arising, for example, from political agreements.

For many years, successive governments have respected the distinctive nature of our universities and our particular mission to independently generate new knowledge and provide an arena for open and critical dialogue. This has changed during the most recent parliamentary term, which demonstrates the need for stronger protection of institutional autonomy as well. The present system is based on the assumption that the state is benevolent, but what happens on the day when it is no longer so? The work of the inquiry is therefore of the utmost importance, and many of us hope for a proposal that will enable universities and higher education institutions to focus on their primary core missions – research, education and engagement with society – without undue political interference.
At present, we do not have a new government in place, but we can hope that, when one has taken office, it will both take into consideration the conclusions reached by these inquiries and propose changes that strengthen Swedish universities and higher education institutions in their ability to contribute to the knowledge nation that Sweden is, and should continue to be. The role of politics is to set the framework; the substance must be a matter for universities, their researchers, teachers and students, in the true spirit of collegiality.

An example of such a framework is the Research and Innovation Bill, which is prepared every four years. The guiding principles of the current bill are excellence, internationalization and innovation. If we consider these guiding principles in relation to the research conducted at Stockholm University, we can conclude that the University performs very strongly. The many awards and research grants received by our researchers, as well as the scientific findings published in prestigious journals during the past academic year, testify to the strength of our research environments.

The call for funding to establish new strategic research areas resulted in the Swedish Research Council recommending that the government give Stockholm University a coordinating role for four new strategic research areas. The University hosts strategic research areas in Health, Life Science and Artificial Intelligence, Polar Research, Climate-related Research, and Quantum Technology. In the latter area, Stockholm University is also one of six higher education institutions participating in the national Swedish Center for Quantum Technology. The strategic research area in climate-related research, known as ClimTrio, is a collaboration within Stockholm Trio, further strengthening the alliance with Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Stockholm University’s strong and distinguished research environments also enable the University to perform very well in the calls issued by the European Research Council, ERC. During the past year, three researchers have received ERC Starting Grants, two researchers have received ERC Synergy Grants, and one researcher has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant.

Two researchers have during the past year been selected as recipients of RJ Pro Futura XX, a programme for outstanding researchers in the humanities and social sciences, funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. We are also delighted that two researchers have been named Wallenberg Academy Fellows, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and that three of the University’s mathematicians have received substantial research grants within the Mathematics Programme, a collaboration between the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Stockholm University has also received substantial research grants in environmental and resilience-related research from the Mistra research foundation. In connection with last year’s Inauguration and Conferment Ceremony, we are pleased to note that the prestigious Göran Gustafsson Prize was awarded to the professor who delivered the 2025 Inauguration Lecture, and that one of last year’s honorary doctors was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

This is only a small selection of all the grants and awards that have been given to the University’s researchers. As President of Stockholm University, I am proud that Stockholm University is an attractive and successful institution that attracts excellent students and staff from all over the world – something that we can all witness here today at this Inauguration and Conferment Ceremony.

New professors, new doctors, honorary doctors, jubilee doctors, our medal recipient and pedagogical prize winners: tonight, it is you whom we celebrate, and through you, the advancement of science, made possible by your successful contributions to the research environments in which you are, or have been, active.

My warmest congratulations and best wishes for the future to each and every one of you, from me personally and on behalf of the entire Stockholm University community!

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the University’s staff and students for your excellent contributions, which have further strengthened Stockholm University’s core activities – research and higher education.
It is all of us, together, who make Stockholm University what it is, and I am extremely proud of everything you have achieved.

Thank you!