My dream is that here in Finland we would discuss education, diversity of voices, tradition, creativity, and perception, instead of money, optimisation, and innovation. Today independent research is under serious threat. It may even completely disappear from universities. If so, it will live on in private institutions and as a protest movement, an occupation for village idiots. As such this is nothing new in the history of research. In the Middle Ages research flourished in monasteries, in the totalitarian nations of Eastern Europe it flourished in cafés and in writings disseminated hand to hand.

If I were rich enough, I would buy a house near where I live, in Toukola or Kumpula, and turn it into an institution of free research. Its name would be the Academy of Toukola. There would always be soup and beer, and the latest research literature to read. There would be people to hold lectures every night, whether or not any listeners came. The lectures could be on any subject as long as it was absolutely useless: Baltic Finnic loanwords in Komi, the taxonomy of turtles, translating James Joyce into Swahili, and so on. If anybody tried to present anything involving corporate collaboration or innovation they would be laughed out the door.

My biggest surprise is that everybody else seems to want the same thing. People are fed up with talk of money, careers, economy, growth percentages, the enterprising export of foil hats to the Far East. When we gave a Course on Useless Knowledge at the university, in which we attempted to gather in one place all the absolutely useless themes of various fields, it ended up being the most popular course I ever did. People do get it. Only the useless is necessary. Only there does it pay to stray where consultants don't roam. If something is favoured by policy makers it doesn't need enthusiasm from the people any longer.

• “Slowness and freedom of research and art at the Helsinki Collegium”, the Kone Foundation 2015