Two decades ago, the Porthania reading room was still used as a smoking room, where it was possible to meet an eclectic ‘academic community.’ The geographer Mauno Kosonen was always ready to exchange a friendly word with a young assistant from among his small cigars and piles of paper. I greatly envied my teacher Ossi Ihalainen, who had played the tenor saxophone in Olavi Virta’s band in the 1960s. And if I was lucky I was able to hear Pertti ‘Lande’ Lindfors’s vociferous telephone calls from the lobby about university politics.

As a more senior teacher and researcher, I have noticed how important it is to get to know different researchers and teachers at the University. In all the stages of my now 40 years of study, I remember those teaching personalities whose effect on my studies, career choices and identity as a scholar were by no means small. Only in hindsight have I noticed interesting similarities between my role models. Many of them had not forged their academic career in the discipline that they had enrolled at the University to study.

When I came to the University to study Finnish language, I changed my major after a year or two to comparative literature, and I eventually ended up as a scholar of Finnish literature and later a professor of the subject, although I had never actually taken any courses on the topic as a student. In this convoluted path is concealed, in my view, the whole idea of a university: its task, in addition to academic and artistic studies, is to create the preconditions for personal and intellectual development and maturation. But are similar places to the smoking room to be found anywhere today? Yes indeed.

In the canteen of the National Archives I have come to know numerous teachers, researchers of various disciplines and administrative workers with whom one can practise the best sides of academic conversational culture: making self-assured statements about everything under the sun without a shred of evidence to back them up.