What Bill Gates Taught Me About My University

Dr. Bill Gates, best known as the wealthiest person on the planet, founder of the world’s largest software company, is also known as one of the world’s most generous philanthropists, pledging to donate 99.5% of his massive $77 billion fortune.

In 2007, both Bill and Melinda Gates were awarded honorary doctorates from Karolinska Institutet for their work with their foundation. In March this year, Dr. Bill Gates returned to Karolinska Institutet to participate in a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Hans Rosling, a long-time collaborator of Gates.

Dr. Gates is no stranger to university visits. He has embarked on numerous college tours to talk to young people, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, UT Austin, and, this time, Karolinska Institutet.

“I love visiting universities because students always ask the toughest questions.” Gates writes on his Facebook page earlier last year.

But at KI, he didn’t get any questions from students. In fact, there were barely any students there.

Despite there being over 8000 students at Karolinska Institutet, including doctoral students in contrast to less than 4000 staff members, only 15% of the 1000 tickets to the event were granted to students. Having inspected the first ten YouTube videos from Dr. Gates visit to other universities, where the majority of the audiences seem to be students, this was indeed something rather unique.

I was personally in touch with the organisers of the Gates visit months prior, and tried to get a student representative, such as the president of Medicinska Föreningen or Odontologiska Föreningen, on the panel.

This wasn’t even discussed, and we were instead offered to ask a question as an audience member.

After talking to numerous students from different programs through the KI Students Facebook-group, we finally phrased a question that would be relevant for all students at the university.

Unfortunately, time ran out before we had the chance to ask our question as other audience members had been prioritized. Gates would proceed to leave Karolinska Institutet without having interacted with a single student.

Karolinska Institutet wanted very little to do with their students at this event.

Not to giving up on the issue, I tried to email Dr. Gates. After several attempts I eventually got through and was ecstatic to receive a response shortly thereafter. This email response would be his only interaction with students at Karolinska Institutet.

A visit from someone like Dr. Bill Gates is indeed a special event for our university, and that the KI organisers may have deemed other participants more important than the students, is understandable, even if this is a deviation from Dr. Gates’ other university visits.

But my worry is what happens if our university starts to apply this mentality to other events, or to the university as a whole. Karolinska Institutet recently fundraised one billion SEK where not a single cent was directly invested into education or the students. KI’s latest addition, Aula Medica, was also built without any space for students. Despite huge protests from students, it was also recently decided that KI’s new flagship research building Biomedicum would now be built without student labs, physically separating research and education on campus.

Perhaps the most alarming of all, Karolinska Institutet has very recently reformed its management group (“ledningsgruppen”) and removed all student-representatives. Even more, Vice-chancellor Hamsten took this mid-term decision unilaterally, without any involvement of the students.

Vice-chancellor Hamsten replied to Medicor: “”Studentberedningen” was created [at the same time] with the ambition to better satisfy the students’ need for contact with the university leadership and to improve student influence by creating a forum dedicated to in-depth discussion of issues of particular importance from a student perspective”.

He did not, however, comment on why this decision was decided without the students, despite repeated enquiries.

In their annual report, the Doctoral Students’ Association welcomes the Vice-chancellors initiative to create this new collaboration platform. The exclusion from the ‘ledningsgruppen’ is, however, not seen as a positive development as it is believed that this action reduces student influence on other matters and damages the transparency of the KI management considerably.

“The nature of these two constellations is principally different, and presence in one does not justify the absence in the other”, says Arash Hellysaz, the chairman of the Doctoral Students’ Association. “We are, however, currently discussing how we should improve student representation with the management, and I’m hopeful that we will find a solution.”

While others will argue in favor of many of these decisions, do they outweigh the costs in the long-term? Would the decisions have been different if the students had a more significant part of the decision-making process?

I’m not the first one to comment on this. A recent article comparing two American and Swedish universities in Läkartidningen, co-written by one of our own KI professors, Anders Ekbom, offers some insight into more systematic problems. Top Swedish universities spend about 70% or more of their budget on research, whereas their American counterparts spent more than 70% on education.

The report also reveals that while achievements in pedagogy and teaching are required for faculty employment in the US, the focus in Sweden is predominately on research. We also don’t offer regular pedagogical feedback for teachers, nor external teaching evaluations, which is commonplace across the pond.

Furthermore, it also credits high student satisfaction as part of the reason why American universities receive large donations from its alumni, which is a major contributing factor to the success of the universities. This is rarely heard of in Sweden.

How do we expect to make progress in teaching and education when we don’t value teaching experience for promotions? Is it then so strange that those researchers then make decisions that benefit research, at the cost of education?

It is not that there is a desperate need for change. It is that change has happened, and the students haven’t been a part of it. I think it is time once again for the students to take a more active and more united stance, for the sake of our education. More than ever, we need to work together, regardless of whether you are MF or OF, student or faculty. Karolinska Institutet is our university, and we are, all together, Karolinska Institutet. More than ever, Karolinska Institutet needs to be known for its education and not just its research. In the end, this will benefit everyone at the university, and we need to remind ourselves of that.

My hope is that next time someone like Dr. Gates visits, they will get to visit more than just Karolinska Institutet — the research institute, but instead Karolinska Institutet — the medical university with, you know, students.

To achieve that, we need to all work together. Will you join me?

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Question to Bill Gates: Considering that a career in global health is less established and therefore also less available than say a traditional medical career, and that many global health professionals such as you and Prof. Rosling don’t originally have backgrounds in global health, how should Swedish students in medical professions acquire the skills and experiences to best prepare them for a career in global health?

Dear Jingcheng,

I had a great time during my recent visit to Karolinska. I always have fun with Hans Rosling, who has an amazing ability to get you excited about the topic while also teaching you something. Working with really smart people like Hans is one of the reasons I’ve become so involved with global health over the years.

You are right that I have never had any formal background in global health. I was so busy during my early years at Microsoft that I didn’t have a lot of time to think about much else. My interest in global health started about 15 years ago when Melinda and I saw a terrible newspaper article. It said that millions of children were dying every year from diarrhea. The leading cause of diarrhea, it turns out, is something called rotavirus, which is responsible for 500,000 deaths every year even though we have simple treatments available for it. Melinda and I had never even heard of rotavirus.

This was the start of a journey into philanthropy for us. We had plans to give back later in life, but once we learned what was going on, it seemed like there was no time to waste. We started reading and learning as much as we could. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to learn an incredible amount — primarily from reading a lot, going to visit the areas of the world where issues like rotavirus are still a big problem, and by having the good fortune to work with many of the smartest global health minds in the world. I have continued over the years to devote more and more of my time to our work at the foundation. It is hard not to when you learn more about the great progress the world has made in global health and all of the opportunity we have to do even more.

If you have an interest in giving back, my advice would be this: follow your interests, learn as much as you can, surround yourself with smart people, and get to work. When you find a cause that inspires you, and the way to get involved that engages your heart and mind, you will make a big difference in the world. — Bill Gates