ABSTRACT
Helsinki Craft School was founded in 1871 to teach the elementary skills in shaping objects not designed by the students but by the style-defining elite of artists and architects. The school went through several curricular and administrational transformations and had a monopoly on upper-level craft education until the 1980s. In 1973, it was given full university status, the first in the Nordic realm to reach that echelon amidst the academic establishment. It was expected that the school would now supply skilled designers for the at that time successful, design-intensive industries serving not only the domestic consumption but also a growing export market. But instead, the new design university landed into a political minefield, triggered first by international leftist radicalism and then by conformist, Soviet-led Marxism-Leninism steered from the Kremlin. It was the bigger picture which mattered: Moscow attempted to evoke an internal revolutionary mood in Finland and when the moment would be ripe they would come as ‘friends’ to support the political transition from capitalism to socialism. And to shift the border of the Communist block towards the western shore of Finland. In this global, geopolitical game university education, the academic youth, was in many ways important. And especially the cohorts of cultural influence, to which also design education belonged. This chapter focuses on the microcosm of University of Art and Design where the parameters of the greater political tactics were strongly felt but less understood. One must say that Lenin’s view of the ‘useful idiots’ was pertinent considering the inner dynamics of the university in the 1970s.
