Faculty days – together again!

Dear colleagues,

I’m looking forward to meeting you all. During the pandemic, meeting face-to-face wasn’t an option. Now it is. The faculty days on 16–17 November will allow us to rediscover why meeting face-to-face is so important. Those are the meetings you get if you turn www.slu upside down, to meetings make magic. The faculty days will be a chance for colleagues who haven’t met in a long time –  or never – to do so.

And we’ll meet three-dimensionally. It’s when we meet face-to-face that meetings become magic, when we can read each other and see understanding, or curiosity. Something we remember. All those things that matter when we need to cooperate. So, this is what I’m thinking ahead of our November event. I’ll come with an open mind. I’ll be meeting new colleagues who joined us during the pandemic. Colleagues, both old and new, will be part of my network, building SLU.

Together, we will rediscover the force and strength of being part of a leading university with a presence all over the country, and needed all over the country.  Together, we’ll mingle and reflect on how you and I can contribute to a better, more sustainable world, as part of SLU. Together, we’ll talk about ‘ …. environmental protection, forestry and timber processing, fisheries and aquaculture  … environmental monitoring and assessment’, to quote the SLU ordinance.

Together, we’ll consider how to strengthen our university, where we twist and turn arguments and where we research, teach and monitor the status of the environment. Together, we’ll analyse how to best combine education and cultivation, teaching our students to look at the world critically and constructively. Together, we’ll find new ways of cooperating and new shared points of departure.

Together, we’ll all think about how we can contribute to the faculty’s new effort ‘Let’s talk science’.  I’m looking forward to meeting you all – as it stands, we’re looking at close to 400 participants!

Göran Ericsson, dean, Faculty of Forest Sciences