DEBATE: Use the right to vote, influence UiO's language policy

Dear Colleague,

Once again, the Electoral Board's emails have ticked into your inbox. Once again, there are elections for us temporary academic staff. Once again, you must make up your mind about who you want to represent your interests in the university board.

This is your opportunity to influence how the university is run and what your working life looks like. Unfortunately, I fear that, once again, we will have a voter turnout of less than 20%. And that is the university’s fault.

Year after year, large sections of the staff are excluded from being able to make informed choices, simply because there are no minutes, summaries or any information in English about what happens on a daily basis in the university board. I believe that this is laziness by university and a major democratic problem.

A good example of this was when non-Norwegian-speaking Elisabet Garcia Gonzalez was appointed as our representative on the board. As her substitute, I saw first hand that the university wrote English summaries for her. Despite the fact that summaries in English were produced, the university refused to publish these openly available. I do not know what UiO's reasoning was for this, but if they themselves believed that the summaries were of such low quality that they could not be published online, then they are not good enough for representatives either. Such summaries must be put in place as soon as possible so that the work can be followed and everyone can get involved. It is about transparency and democracy.

The university's own local newspaper, Uniforum, where you are reading this right now, is another example. This is currently only available in Norwegian, but should also be published in English so that all employees have the opportunity to keep up to date with what is happening on campus, while at the same time are given the opportunity to get actively involved. This is why I am writing this piece in parallel in Norwegian and English.

In the coming board period, a new language policy will be made by the university board. This is a golden opportunity to put such, and many other matters concerning the use of Norwegian and parallel use of Norwegian and English on the agenda. As a UiO-employee, it must become easier to learn Norwegian and it must become easier to get involved even if you do not understand Norwegian.

Ironically, with this article, I would like to ask for your vote in this year's election. Vote for me so that, next year, you will be given the opportunity to make an informed choice when new representatives are to be elected.

If you are wondering what else I think and do, you can check out my election platform.

Go to evalg.uio.no and cast your vote.

Norwegian version