Sustainability in Teaching & Research

As a place of education and an employer, KUG sees itself as part of an open society and believes that art, culture and scholarship harbour special potential for change that takes account of the diversity of society in terms of gender, age, religion and belief, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability. The teaching staff at KUG leverages this potential to reinforce an attitude of artistic citizenship among students, empowering them to open up new spaces for art in society and to practise their profession within them. In this way, the arts are seen as a social practice that can help intercultural differences bear fruit and encourage students to harness their potential for innovation and change.

All teachers, general university staff and graduates of KUG are aware of their social responsibilities. Their research activities are also guided by internationally recognised ethical standards and principles of good scientific practice (‘responsible science’).
A vibrant, sustainable scientific culture essentially depends on the form, content and goal of research and teaching being primarily determined by the intrinsic epistemological interest of the scientific community. Guaranteeing the intellectual independence that this requires means securing dependable, long-term basic funding for academic staff, the necessary infrastructure and other support services. For this reason, although KUG has a good track record of third-party funding, it is committed to financing scientific research from its global budget over the long term. Due to the university’s strong profile in humanities research, this primarily means funding a well-balanced mix of different positions for academic staff, i.e. positions for all career stages, from student employees to professors, temporary and permanent positions, as well as tenure track positions. To ensure a dynamic intellectual climate across the various disciplines, the university administration endeavours to allocate research funding in a balanced way, in line with the requirements of all the research areas in question.

After the University of Graz, the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz is the most important research institution for the humanities in the Austrian province of Styria. A key element of academic sustainability, therefore, is cultivating research in the humanities and arts, regardless of any immediate objective, especially of an economic nature. The primary goal of such research is to deepen and refine our understanding of human culture in all its past and present forms of expression. The University of Music and Performing Arts Graz believes that a well-founded understanding of culture is essential for peaceful coexistence in a global society and is conducive to the sustainable growth of cultural wellbeing.

In applied research areas, collaboration with business partners is perceived as an enriching endeavour that can stimulate innovative achievements in research. Nevertheless, top-level academic research at universities must never be primarily determined by the interests of external parties. Researchers must also be free to conduct research without immediate or obvious opportunities for exploitation, to reject research contracts and to cooperate solely with business partners whose interests are in harmony with those of the researchers. 

The highly competitive nature of the research system for some years now has meant that researchers are increasingly tempted to gain a competitive edge through dubious means. In terms of policy, the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz and other like-minded institutions are striving to eliminate the causes of such behaviour over the long term, and to aid in the sustainable recovery of the academic ecosystem. To address the top priorities for action, it has set up a number of entities under its remit, such as an ethics committee and a representative tasked with ensuring good scientific practice. These entities are supported by the research community and help to curb academic misconduct by exercising a supervisory and preventive role.