Bridging the Gap

Danish and Swedish universities join forces to create an integrated learning region

By COLIN WOODARD

With the completion of a massive bridge-and-tunnel project, Denmark and Sweden are now linked for the first time since the last ice age. And universities on both sides of the newly bridged strait, known as Øresund, are leading the effort to forge a single economically competitive metropolitan region across a vanishing national border.

Eleven higher-education institutions in the area have come together to create Øresund University, a coordinating body to foster the creation of a cross-border learning region. The institutions -- dominated by Lund

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University, the University of Copenhagen, and the Technical University of Denmark -- hope to create joint programs, share classes, libraries, and technical resources, and foster closer connections with private companies and public-sector institutions on either side of the Øresund.

Last July Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden opened the new $2-billion Øresund Bridge, a 10-mile-long link that is actually a tunnel-and-bridge combination connecting the Swedish city of Malmö with the southeastern suburbs of Copenhagen. The bridge, which carries cars, trucks, and trains, is supposed to be the foundation for an integrated transportation system stretching from the Swedish university city of Lund to the farming hinterlands of Zealand, the large island on which Copenhagen is situated.

"By building the bridge we've made it possible to create a regional economy that can compete with the large metropolitan areas of Europe," says Christian W. Matthiessen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen's Institute of Geography. "The universities will be the pioneers of all this."

Previously, the Danish capital and the southwestern Swedish region of Scania had little to do with each other. Of the 1.2 million people who commute in this area, only about 2,000 crossed the Øresund in 1999, according to the Institute of Geography. Zealand's trade flows with Scania were one-fourteenth that of its trade with the similarly sized Danish region of Jutland, which is 100 miles from Copenhagen across another enormous bridge connecting Zealand with the rest of Denmark.

Contact among the region's universities was limited, with few student exchanges or cross-border research collaborations. Even today, few students in Copenhagen are even aware that the old university town of Lund, home to one of Scandinavia's leading universities, is only 20 miles away.

But now Sweden has joined the European Union, and from Brussels to Berlin, from Cadiz to Copenhagen, the new European buzzword is "regionalization." As globalization erodes the power and relevance of nation-states, or so the theory goes, cities are replacing nations as the basic unit of economic competition. Large urban clusters like San Francisco Bay, greater London, or the Amsterdam-to-Rotterdam corridor duke it out in a battle for skilled workers, investment capital, and a share of global trade.

Smaller, more peripheral cities like Copenhagen or Malmö will fall behind, according to the proponents of the idea of regionalization, an idea that has become somewhat self-fulfilling because it's become part of the thinking of many European companies, banks, and international organizations. If the 500,000 people of the Malmö-Lund area can be added to the 1.7 million in greater Copenhagen, the Øresund region might play with the big boys.

It was with this in mind that Sweden and Denmark decided to build the Øresund Bridge. Now they're confronting the more difficult task of building an integrated metropolis across the shared frontier. And it's the higher-education sector that's leading the way, although universities are facing some of the same barriers everyone else is, including the high cost to commuters of crossing the bridge.

"The idea is to have autonomous universities cooperating inside a regional umbrella organization," says Morgens Berg, chief adviser at the National Education Authority of the Danish Ministry of Education. "We don't want to set up another University of London," he says, referring to that institution's infamous sprawl.

"The Øresund University has really put a lot of wind in the sails of regional integration," says Bengt Streijffert, the chief of staff of the Øresund University and until recently a top administrator at Lund University.

By sharing teaching and research resources, universities hope to strengthen their smaller departments and disciplines, particularly languages. One example is Hebrew, which was on the verge of being eliminated at Lund University two years ago. But under the auspices of Øresund University, the Hebrew program has been salvaged. Swedish students start their studies in Lund, then later travel to the University of Copenhagen two days a week for more advanced classes. This semester five Swedes are commuting for this purpose, while three Danish students travel to Lund for first-year courses.

Danes and Swedes can understand each others' languages, and, although they could use English, they prefer to work in their own languages.

"By cooperating we've been able to have more diverse course offerings at both places," says Ole K. Jensen, head of the education planning office of the University of Copenhagen's Humanities Faculty, the equivalent of a conglomeration of departments in the United States. "It's allowed us to build a model for cooperating in other small languages," including Tibetan, Japanese, Lithuanian, and Korean.

The two universities have also created a joint master's degree program in theology from their two tiny departments, and a fully integrated economics program is in the works. Together with the Danish Technical University, they've created Europe's largest mycology department, a home for fans of fungi. Meanwhile, the region's first landscape architecture program has been launched by combining the resources of the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, in Copenhagen's outskirts, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Science's branch campus across the sound in Alnarp.

Having heavily invested in the three Baltic republics -- Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- Sweden and Denmark have encouraged Øresund University institutions to create Scandinavia's first Baltic Studies program. This international master's degree program will be hosted jointly by the universities of Copenhagen and Lund, the Copenhagen Business School, and Roskilde University, just west of the Danish capital.

In the Baltic Studies program, as in others, the regional cooperation offers flexibility. "Students will always have their own home university, but they can add courses, labs, or libraries from others," says Asa Melander, program manager at Øresund University's Lund-based office.

But education is only the beginning. The members of Øresund University want to connect not just with one another, but with the region's high-tech industries to create new research and development networks. The biomedical research sector is first and foremost in their minds.

Together, the region's universities have created Medicon Valley Academy, a regional association to foster the development of an Øresund-wide biomedical research industry. Its name is a pun on California's Silicon Valley, and people in the Øresund area are hoping they can dominate biomedicine the way the San Francisco Bay area dominates software.

"We want to become the number one bio region in Europe in five years," says Per Belfrage, a professor and former dean of the Lund University medical faculty who chairs the Medicon Valley Academy. "If you want a hallmark of the Øresund region, it's definitely the biomedical sector." Lund University has, for example, played a prominent role in research on transplanting brain tissue.

The academy has already formed an active collaboration among the region's big three universities, the universities of Roskilde and Malmö, the Royal Danish School of Pharmacy, 26 hospitals, and 150 companies.

"At first people in Stockholm would sort of pat me on the head and say 'It's good this is happening for you down there,'" Mr. Belfrage recalls. But now, he says, they are getting a little worried that Øresund may out-compete the Swedish capital, which has been the economically dominant metropolitan region in Scandinavia.

There are plenty of obstacles to be overcome, not least of which is transportation.

While the sleek Øresund Bridge was completed months ahead of schedule, there have been technical problems with the special trains that cross it. The trains -- which have to cope with differing voltages on each side of the bridge -- only run between the central stations in Malmö and Copenhagen, with a stop at Copenhagen's main airport. Commuters going to and from any other location end up making a lot of connections.

Ola Bunte, a 29-year-old graduate student in molecular biology at Lund University, decided to commute across the sound to the Danish Technical University during the fall term. Mr. Bunte's student research project deals with the computer analysis of a specific kind of genetic sequencing, and while nobody at Lund was working in this area, D.T.U.'s bio-informatics department was packed with experts. His apartment and his wife's job were in Lund, so moving to Copenhagen was out of the question.

He figured the commute wouldn't be a problem. The bridge promoters say the Malmö-Copenhagen trip takes only 35 minutes. But each day Mr. Bunte had to catch a commuter train from Lund to Malmö, board an Øresund train to Copenhagen-Central, take a Danish commuter train from there to the western suburbs, then catch a bus that would take him the last mile-and-a-half to D.T.U. To make matters worse, the Øresund trains have been plagued with technical problems and delays.

"The very first morning I commuted it took me three and a half hours because of troubles with the trains," he recalls. "I remember thinking: Am I going to sit on trains for seven hours every day?" Mr. Bunte's typical commute has been closer to two hours each way, but he and other commuters find it frustrating all the same.

"Suddenly people think that Copenhagen is a lot closer than it used to be, but that hasn't been my experience," he says. "It was a good opportunity and I would definitely do it over again, but definitely not for more than one semester."

The bridge's other problem is cost: The passenger-car one-way toll of nearly $30 is prohibitive even by Scandinavian standards. Most motorists and trucks opt for the cheaper ferry service. Mr. Bunte owns a car, but, like many other students, couldn't afford to take the ferry or the bridge five days a week. Even train travel is pricey -- $20 round-trip from Copenhagen to Malmö -- and many students commute by passenger boat.

There are other obstacles as well. Departments wishing to hold joint programs have to reconcile differences between the Swedish and Danish institutions. So departments need to figure out when to schedule a course at a mutually convenient time, how to transfer credits, and answer the potentially divisive question of who will -- and won't -- teach a course.

"The problem is, if you have redundant departments you wish to merge, who keeps their job?" says Mr. Streijffert, who says there are eight or nine organic chemistry departments in the Øresund area. "Some people are worried about staying employed, and they're right to be so." Mr. Streijffert believes the two governments will have to agree to set up regionwide academic committees to make the difficult decisions.

Another worry is that most students will be moving in one direction: from Sweden to Denmark. This is not a marriage of equals. Copenhagen is a vibrant, affluent metropolis of 1.2 million. Malmö is a provincial rust-belt town, hard-hit by the collapse of its shipbuilding, automobile, and machine industries. Everybody in Scania is familiar with Copenhagen, but the reverse is not true.

Even before the bridge was completed, large numbers of Swedish students were enrolling in the University of Copenhagen's medical faculty. Today nearly 30 percent of all students there are from Sweden, and they number more than the entire enrollment at Lund's medical faculty. This creates a financial problem because under an international agreement, Scandinavian citizens can enroll at one another's universities free of charge.

"At some point the Danish taxpayers will wonder what they're paying for," says Mr. Streijffert, who notes that Swedish applicants also have an unfair advantage over their Danish counterparts because their grades get an artificial boost when they are converted into the Danish system.

Some Danish students are heading to Sweden. Daniel Lehrer, a 21-year-old psychology student at the University of Copenhagen, is studying for a year at Lund University and says he loves it. Lund is a picturesque university town with a campus environment, a far cry from the scattered, urban settings of most Danish universities. Here he's found a rich student scene unattainable back in his native Copenhagen.

"The biggest surprise for me was that Lund was there," he says. "None of my friends have ever been to Lund, not ever. You go to Malmö maybe three times in your life, maybe go skiing once or twice, but nobody knows that 10 minutes further on a train you have a huge university and a big student life. Most people think Lund is up by Stockholm," which is five hours north of here by train.

Nor are University of Copenhagen students aware they have the option to study there for a semester or a year through the Øresund University collaboration, Mr. Lehrer says. There's little advertising as yet, and he only learned of the possibility when he ran across "a little, unsightly Øresund brochure" by chance. "I'm very glad I did," he says. "When my friends visit they're amazed and say, 'Whoa -- does this place really exist?'"

Getting the word out -- and decreasing the cost and inconvenience of bridge travel -- will be essential to future progress, according to Jannik S. Linnemann, head of the higher-education department at the Danish Ministry of Education. "The Øresund University hasn't been visible enough," he says. "It will only work if we get more people traveling back and forth across the sound."

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