Until 1960, the only way to obtain a university degree in science was to complete an MA (skoleembedseksamen), which primarily aimed at employment at upper secondary school. People who wanted a university career had to complete an MSc (magisterkonferens).
The Executive Order on the Master of Science degree (cand.scient.) was introduced in 1960 and formed the basis of a much needed modernisation of the science degree programmes at Danish universities.
The appointment of three new professors from 1961 onwards – Hakon Lund had been appointed professor of chemistry at Aarhus University as early as 1932 – finally provided the necessary academic basis for establishing an actual Department of Chemistry in the new buildings in Langelandsgade.
While Hakon Lund was the grand old man within classical organic chemistry, the three new professors signalled a decisive step towards the interface with physics: Laurits Tage Muus was appointed professor of physical chemistry, which included areas such as thermodynamics and electron spin resonance spectroscopy, Svend Erik Rasmussen became professor of inorganic chemistry, specialising in X-ray crystallography examinations of the crystalline structure of substances, while Svend Brodersen was appointed professor of chemical physics, with molecular spectroscopy using infrared techniques and Raman spectroscopy as his special areas of interest.
Right from the start, the four professors decided to divide the Department of Chemistry into four independent sections, which were to remain almost unchanged for the next thirty years: Section for Organic Chemistry, Section for Inorganic Chemistry, Section for Physical Chemistry and Section for Chemical Physics. The department's administration grant for research and education was divided equally between the four sections regardless of the number of staff and students. In 1968, the Section for Theoretical Chemistry was established with Jan Linderberg as a new professor of theoretical chemistry. Jan had been a visiting professor at the department since 1966, but was permanently employed a few years later with the establishment of the new department. Jan and his research were of great importance to the department for more than 35 years, and he was rightfully made professor emeritus in 2003.
Pros and cons have been discussed for whether this rigid division of the department and its resources created optimum conditions for academic development. On the one hand, it cemented the controlling influence of the professors on the employment policy, research and education of their respective sections. This was in accordance with the statute governing the universities at the time, but there is no doubt that, in some cases, it was a barrier to initiatives that were not in line with the research profiles of the individual sections or across several sections. On the other hand, the professors were very interested in increasing the academic prestige of their sections and in creating the best possible conditions for their staff, for example by exercising their influence on foundations and research councils when their staff members applied for grants.
It was not a propitious time for democracy. There were no official requirements for the group of professors as regards transparency in the management and administration of the department. The professors made agreements with each other at closed meetings about the management of the department's finances and the announcement of available positions. However, they did take an initiative to openness by inviting representatives of the department's teaching assistants group (later known as the the associate professors group) to attend the meetings. Decisions were communicated by means of 'internal messages', which were distributed to staff at the department and Master's degree students. The professors took turns to assume the role of head of department. Approximately once a year, the professors called an information meeting in a so-called 'departmental council', which included all staff at the department as well as senior students. The departmental council had no official powers, however.
The Department of Chemistry taught its own students of Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, of course. However, during the first many years, the annual intakes were limited (during those years, enrolments averaged fewer than thirty students per year). The department also organised lectures and theoretical exercises at a basic level for the biology and geology students at the faculty.
The largest individual teaching task consisted of the service teaching that the department provided for first-year students at the Faculty of Medicine in the form of lectures, laboratory exercises and theoretical exercises in organic and general chemistry, including propaedeutic courses. The 'teaching of medicine', which required considerable manpower, ended around 1980 when it was taken over by the Department of Medical Biochemistry. This spelled the end to the formal tie with the teaching of medicine at Aarhus University, which had played a role by supporting the Department of Chemistry during the university’s infancy.
For the above-mentioned reasons, external teaching was more important during the first years of the department's life than the teaching of its own students. This has since changed.
'The reign of the professors', as it was generally called, came to an end when the youth rebellion in 1968 led to the University Act of 1970. Under the new act, Aarhus University changed from being a self-governing institution (as had been the case since the university was established in 1928) to a public institution under the Ministry of Education, like the remaining Danish universities. The new act introduced a number of collegiate bodies that were responsible for managing the universities on a day-to-day basis, as well as a set of complicated democratic (and bureaucratic) rules for the composition and election of these bodies.
It was almost inevitable that the changed power balance would result in friction between the professors and the group of associate professors throughout the Danish university landscape, and the predictable confrontations between the two groups did not leave the Department of Chemistry untouched. However, after a few years, the parties arrived at a form of peaceful coexistence.
In 1974, the department took the innovative step to create the Section for Biostructural Chemistry with Brian Clark as newly appointed professor. It was no coincidence that the Department of Chemistry ended up housing this section, as several of the department's scientists were working with X-ray crystallography examinations of the structure of proteins. The Section for Biostructural Chemistry was nevertheless treated in many respects as a 'stepchild' at the department. Apart from the studies of crystallography structures, there were no research-related aspects that overlapped the 'old' part of the department, and no actual collaboration ever developed between the scientific staff at the Section for Biostructural Chemistry and the rest of the department.
The section remained associated with the Department of Chemistry until 1996, when it was transferred to the newly established Department of Molecular and Structural Biology located in the Science Park. In hindsight, the Section for Biostructural Chemistry's association with the Department of Chemistry was only a temporary solution.
Today, the situation is very different. When the degree programmes in Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Biology were created, they became an integral part of research at many of the department's centres, and the Section for Biostructural Chemistry's association with the Department of Chemistry would no doubt have had a very different outcome if it had taken place today.
The department's old structure with sections remained in place for another twenty years, i.e. until around 1990, although in a much looser form than before. The new statute for the department made it possible for staff to choose to be affiliated with a different department, and some academic staff members made the most of this opportunity. This resulted in a number of interdisciplinary groups, of which the Section for Analytical Chemistry (established in 1976) survived the longest.
In 1983, the Department of Chemistry established the Section for NMR Spectroscopy. It was separated from the Section for Organic Chemistry, which it had been part of since the early 1960s for historical reasons. The cause was the creation of the Center for NMR Spectroscopy, which was subsidised by the first major grant of external funding to the department from the research councils.
In the 1980s (the so-called 'poor eighties' on account of the difficult financial conditions for Danish universities during this decade) and during the 1990s, the department's research was dominated by two trends:
The University Act of 1970 was gradually becoming subject to much criticism. It was alleged, for example, that there were no valid professional reasons for the influence of technical and administrative staff and students on academic decisions and that their influence was therefore open to criticism. In practice, however, the technical and administrative staff never interfered in decisions that did not affect them, and- the students at didn't abuse their influence either. The act was not amended until 1992 and was therefore in force for a long period of time.
The amendment of the act mainly resulted in a strengthening of university management at all levels: the rector, deans, heads of departments and directors of studies. In connection with the amendment of the act, the Faculty of Science had been granted special permission from the ministry to work as a free faculty for the period 1991–1995. The purpose was to free the faculty from the detailed control exercised by the Ministry of Education for many years. One of the arguments put forward was that a faculty council elected by the faculty's own staff was in a much better position to make decisions about the conditions in their workplace than an office in a (remote) ministry. In return for its freedom, the faculty had to meet some agreed production targets in terms of the numbers of graduates and PhD students.
The power was formally placed with the Faculty Council, but in practice it was the dean and the Faculty Council's executive committee that had the greatest influence on the distribution of resources at the individual departments. It happened, for example, via the so-called snatch principle: Vacancies were not necessarily re-filled within the same subject area but could be included by the faculty - they were snatched. The faculty could also move them to other subject areas, other departments or simply refrain from re-occupying them, and this also happened in several cases.
The free faculty mandate was - against the faculty's own wish - not extended, but it still managed to leave many traces in the faculty's and thus also in the department's self-perception: The faculty and its departments still considered themselves detached and thus not subject to the same rigid rules as the rest of the university, and the faculty actually succeeded in establishing several favorable special schemes in the following years compared with the other faculties. It is conceivable that the foundation for the Department of Chemistry's (and the other natural sciences departments') later research success was laid during this period.
During the free faculty period, the departmental structure at the Department of Chemistry was softened as the department board took responsibility for the professional development of the department as a whole - a process that received wholehearted support from the faculty.
From the mid-1990s onwards, a new infrastructure gradually developed at the department (the same thing happened at other departments at the faculty) with the establishment of a number of centres at the Department of Chemistry. Apart from the grants from the Danish National Science Research Council (SNF), the Danish Technical Research Council (STVF) and the National Agency of Technology (TS), it was mainly brought about by the creation of the Danish National Research Foundation (DG) and the Strategic Research Council (DSF), which had provided fairly large grants to a number of research centres based at the Department of Chemistry since 1991:
Many of the above-mentioned centres are/were also an integral part of the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO) at Aarhus University.
The centres work closely with universities, research centres and industrial companies in Denmark and abroad. In addition, the department's staff participate in centres based at other universities in Denmark and abroad, and the department's centres involve several of the department's own employees cutting across the borders of former sections. The old departmental structure has therefore largely disappeared and been replaced by scientific communities with shared interests, shared instruments and collaboration about graduate schools.
The activities at the centres have, of course, rubbed off on the Department of Chemistry, which has experienced a major boost in recent years, both financially and academically. As an additional benefit, many researchers from Denmark, as well as other countries, have applied for work at the department, which has obviously strengthened the international environment. While the number of members of the permanent academic staff have been more or less constant at the department, the technical and administrative staff was considerably reduced in this period. Conversely, there has been a considerable increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars and PhD students. The result has been a lack of laboratories, and the research groups have had to go on forays in adjacent buildings to find room for their activities.
In many ways, the new centre structure is similar to the original structure with sections. The centre director (in practice always a professor) is currently responsible for research at the centre – in the old days it was the professor who was responsible for the section. In that sense, there is not much difference between a centre and a section. However, there is one major difference: The grants to the centres always come from foundations using external assessors. The assessments and the subsequent control ensure that only the very best applications are awarded grants. This guarantees the quality of the research carried out at the centres. In addition, there is a de facto requirement regarding collaboration – partnership – with groups of scientists outside the department's own sphere. This ensures a high international level of research, but the price for this success is high: The centre management uses a considerable amount of energy writing applications and documenting progress along the way.
In 2003, the University Act was again amended. The university once more became a self-governing institution with a board in charge of appointing the rector. The rector appointed the deans, who in turn appointed the heads of departments and directors of studies. The department boards were abolished and the responsibility for running the departments now rested with the heads of departments. This remains the case today.
Work of the Department of Chemistry during the years from 1961 until the beginning of the 1990s was characterised by the appointment of very few professors (there were never more than six tenured professors during the entire period). As a result, the department's general academic structure became an extension of the one that had been cemented in the early 1960s. However, a strong growth layer was established for the next generation of chemists, as reflected by the number of strong research centres established in recent years.
For the period 1999-2014, NordForsk conducted a bibliometric study of citation rates for publications in a number of comparable subject areas, including agricultural research, biology, biomedicine, chemistry, materials science, geoscience, physics and mathematics for all Nordic universities and university hospitals. The report, which was published in 2017, places the Department of Chemistry at Aarhus University for several periods as the strongest chemistry institution in the Nordic region and shows that the department has a very high citation rate (on average twice higher than the average for publications in the field), as well as a large proportion of the most cited publications (> 20% of the articles are among the 10% most cited).
In October 2011, the department turned 50 years old. Today, together with the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO), the department is the most research-successful major unit at the Faculty of Natural Sciences. The department houses several of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centers of Excellence and handles teaching assignments for many of the programmes at the faculty. The department will continue with the current academic composition and is expected to continue to be a very strong partner in iNANO and other interdisciplinary initiatives. The department has also undergone a reorganisation into a new structure that has especially rethought research support across disciplines. The new organisation has proven to have very great advantages, whereby the support is both professionally deep and cross-cutting - and contributes to a positive common work culture.
In 2019, all departments at the new Faculty of Natural Sciences were evaluated with the help of international experts. The conclusion for the Department of Chemistry was extremely positive and painted a picture of a well-functioning and successful department. A primary focus point was that the department had too few permanent scientists compared to its activity and potential. Therefore, it was emphasised that the department should recruit significantly in the coming years. It was also stated that recruitment should have extra focus, as a number of employees were facing retirement. Since 2019, five tenure track assistant professors/scientists as well as two externally recruited professors have joined the department, and more job postings are on the way. This generational change will be important and interesting to follow in the future.
In 2021, the department celebrated its 60th birthday with a wonderful event attended by emeriti, who contributed memories from the department's beginnings. The future of the department also paints a positive picture with large already secured grants, including four Villum Investigators. At the same time, a new large center for CO2 research (CORC) has been launched with funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, where the Department of Chemistry will contribute with research activities. The department maintains its current geographical location, but will in the short term expand its activities, including at iNANO and CORC, to include parts of the new laboratory complex.
