Knowledge Cultures 3(6), 2015, pp. ISSN (printed): 2327-5731 • e-ISSN 2375-6527

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES: ANOTHER SOMEWHAT LAMENTING – YET BASICALLY HOPEFUL – ACCOUNT1 THORSTEN NYBOM [email protected] Örebro University

Abstract In this essay the author tries to come to grips and analyze what he considers to be a deep-going institutional and intellectual crisis in practically all higher education systems in Continental Europe, and ventures possible remedies for overcoming present structural and political dysfunctions. He is also discussing a number of confluent – internal and external – forces of change that, in his view, will deeply and fundamentally affect higher education in general, and the future of the European universities in particular. Keywords: Disintegration, politicization, forces of change, public and private goods, Europe.

Introduction Even if my deliberations will be personal and my "conclusions" will be contestable – to put it mildly –, they are nevertheless founded in my fairly extensive experience, reading, writing, discussion, and a wee bit of thinking with respect to the specific field of study and social practice we usually call higher education and research policy. As far as I am concerned, the starting point for any discussion today of the position, organisation, and tasks of the European universities must be that the university no longer has the same, self-evident and undisputed legitimacy that it still had just 30 years ago. 7

First, because today practically all European research and higher education systems are in flux, regardless of their organisation, structure, historic roots and funding principles. Second, and perhaps even more seminal, because the traditional European universities are plagued by deep social, economic and intellectual uncertainty and this goes to the very core of the institutions. In short, the university has, so to speak, to renegotiate its "social contract" with regard, not only to its funders and students, but also to society at large. Paradoxically, the crisis the universities are presently facing can at least partly be seen as a consequence of the emergence of what is called the knowledge society, because this has meant not only a rise in the demand for higher education, professional skills and sophisticated knowledge, but also to an enormous growth in the supply of such services. 50 years ago, the university still had a virtual monopoly on the production and distribution of qualified knowledge and research. Today, one can find producers and transmitters of knowledge just about everywhere and in a number of alternative, institutional arrangements – in industry, in public and private bureaucracies, in the arts and the entertainment sector, and even in the media. As a result, in the eyes of funders, students, and prospective employers, the university, is only one of several possible alternatives or options. This competitive situation, in turn, has resulted in growing demands for accountability and external scrutiny. Clearly, it has become gradually more or less impossible and irresponsible to go on trying to defend the – both economically and intellectually speaking – somewhat "uncommunicative" higher education systems that existed in Europe until the 1980s. It is thus high time that we at the European universities start admitting that the present-day universities are nothing like what they still were in the 1970s. We are doing more – and different – things than we did then, and under totally different conditions. To begin with, there is a different student body. The student-faculty ratio has changed dramatically. The principles, level and sources of funding have changed radically. The distance between high-quality research and undergraduate education has become almost insurmountable; in many cases, cutting-edge research has left the university altogether. Yet another paradox is that accompanying a deep and widespread uncertainty about the future tasks and institutional organisation of the higher education and research system, there remains an implicit belief in the salutary effects of research and higher education – most notably, among the chattering political classes. This belief presupposes an immediate connection between the volume of research and higher education, on the one hand, and economic development, on the other. 8

This is a fairly dubious assumption; at very least, it must be supplemented by considerable reservations. The only thing we historians can really say regarding the interrelation between the educational level of a nation and its economic performance is that a connection of this kind does exist. But to proceed from this reasonable supposition to categorical statements as to what this connection actually looks like and how it should be institutionalised, organised, and funded is hazardous, irresponsible, and really just plain silly. 1. Historical Mistakes: The Disintegration of the European Higher Education System(s) In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a consequence of genuine demographic, democratic and economic pressures, institutions of higher learning in Continental Europe were transformed from rather exclusive institutions to institutions of mass instruction. In contrast to the US 20 years earlier, this reaction to very real pressures was implemented without a simultaneous restructuring of the existing higher education system. This blatant sin of omission on the part of both ignorant politicians and arrogant academics had a number of more or less critical and long-term effects and consequences: 1. The universities in some parts of Europe have sometimes virtually ceased to function as proper institutions of higher learning (Southern Europe). 2. In other parts of Europe, institutions of higher education were “reconstructed” through heavy-handed bureaucratic means, which eventually lead to even greater uniformity instead of a necessary differentiation (Sweden). 3. As a consequence of 2.), wherever it has been possible, a substantial part of qualified research has tried to decouple itself from the comprehensive university, either through different forms of “inner emigration” (Sweden) or by simply leaving the university in favour of independent extramural research institutes (Germany). 4. Politicians no longer honour the 200-year-old contract between the state and the university system. Instead, there has emerged a fundamental lack of trust between the two parties.

The first two points (and indirectly, the third, as a consequence of the second) are directly tied up with a sharp and continuous rise in student enrolment during the last 30 years. Several of the European higher education systems have evolved from mass university systems to become more or less universal higher education systems. In most cases on the European continent, this has happened without any fundamental structural and institutional changes in the existing, often unitary and inflexible, state9

controlled higher education systems. Accordingly, this growth has caused substantial structural, institutional, and intellectual dysfunctions and deficits. To make matters worse, the rapid growth of the student body has been accompanied by unchanged or, in many cases, reduced levels of per-capita state funding. Regarding the fourth point, the lack of trust between the university and the state may be seen as a clear indication of the massive retreat on the part of the European states and central governments from their traditional “Humboldtian” obligation of being the ultimate guardian angel of their national institutions of higher education. Further, they abandoned the block grant funding system in which resources were allocated directly to the universities and research in favor of a system where so-called “competitive funding” became the standard operating procedure. This meant that the material conditions for long-range planning at the university level were eviscerated, leading to a radically diminished capacity to function as autonomous institutions. Thus, I maintain, during the last 15 years, European central governments have become just another – albeit more powerful – “stakeholder“ in the university, which treats the universities not as a public good as such, but rather as just another political means for achieving all sorts of political ends the present government has on its agenda. Paradoxically, although to an historian certainly unsurprisingly, this “New Public Management”-inspired “withdrawal by the state” and deregulation were almost everywhere accompanied by a general trend of increased politicisation of higher education and research, which in some cases has led to a redefinition of the ultimate role and mission of higher education institutions. The most obvious example of this dual development is England, but the trends are visible almost all over Europe – not least in my own country. Universities are no longer considered to be invaluable national academic institutions and cultural centres. They are primarily seen as instrumental means; they function as “development or innovation centres” in national or even regional economic policy. Moreover, this process has been accompanied by an almost explosive expansion of evaluations and accountability schemes, which have turned the traditional European system of exclusive and strict “input control” (Abitur and peer-review) into different schemes of “output control” in which practically “everything that moves is measured”. Finally, in a European “etatist” university context and tradition, precious few of the present European central governments (with the possible exception of Switzerland, Denmark, and the Netherlands) can be said to articulate, much less pursue, any form of conscious or even consistent national science and higher education policy. Instead, practically every European politician is standing on the ruins of his/her crumbling university 10

systems, delivering one statement after the other – in Brussels and elsewhere – regarding the strategic importance of knowledge, research, innovation, education, etc. Against this background, one could very well start wondering if the euphoria over the alleged unlimited possibilities opened up by the implementation of the Bologna process in European higher education, especially among European politicians and higher education bureaucrats, has anything to do with a serious will on part of its academic and political protagonists to promote the pursuit of qualified knowledge. A more cynical observer would perhaps rather detect a hidden political agenda behind the massive enthusiasm among national and European politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists, which might indicate that the main advantage of the Bologna scheme is that it gives these politicians an opportunity to avoid the risk of having to take responsibility for a number of necessary but presumably very controversial reforms on the national level concerning a) funding (fees); b) differentiation; c) access (master’s level); and d) marketization. Instead, unpopular undertakings can be presented as “unavoidable and logical consequences” of Bologna. This type of argumentation is sometimes called the TINA syndrome (There Is No Alternative) and is frequently used by politicians, bureaucrats, and economists – not only concering hgher education. In the worst of all possible scenarios, the politicians – together with their allies in academia – in particular, the European Association of Universities (EAU) – will succumb to the illusion, or at best maintain the unfounded belief, that Bologna will, in itself, both raise the quality of higher education and research and at the same time take care of the constantly growing needs for qualified vocational training and lifelong learning structures. 2. The Confluence of Internal and External Forces of Change But it is certainly not only politics and political decisions that have had farreaching consequences for the university and institutionalised research. It is possible to distinguish a number of fundamental and partly concurring structural processes that to high degree will define the decisive parameters for European higher education and research systems at present and in the future. What is extraordinary about today’s situation is not the fact that the systems are changing. On the contrary, more or less dramatic change has characterised the universities ever since they emerged 1000 years ago. The exceptional in the present development – just as 200 years ago – is that we are facing something close to a Cultural Revolution. By this I mean that the ongoing and coming changes will have significant consequences at almost 11

every level and for every actor and activity within the higher education and research system: 1) The shift from mass higher to universal tertiary education and to lifelong learning As a consequence of the European systems’ adaptation to an ever increasing array of tasks and a more heterogeneous student body, they are moving towards a more or less unplanned vertical stratification (with the exception of Germany, which has intentionally taken steps in this direction), rather than toward functional horizontal differentiation that characterizes the higher education system in the US. Admittedly, the US higher education system is characterized by an overt and forceful vertical dimension (regarding mission and excellence), but an equally important dimension of that system is horizontal institutional differentiation, which promotes not only institutional competition but also cooperation, i.e.: without the confessional, liberal arts, and technical colleges, no Harvard or UC Berkeley! 2) The uncontrolled growth of qualified knowledge When discussing the massive and rapid growth in higher learning, we tend to concentrate almost exclusively on student numbers and rising over-all costs. Almost as significant and potentially as transformative is the enormous growth in knowledge production. This perpetual expansion has at least two fundamental consequences for traditional institutions of higher education and research: a) the universities can no longer maintain the illusion of being the sole provider of qualified knowledge in society; b) this process of knowledge-flooding, which per definition includes a growing heterogeneity of the institution’s knowledge production and knowledge transfer, puts an additional strain on the internal coherence and the common value system of the universities. 3) The continuous advance of institutional heterogeneity The higher education sector is neither capable of nor interested in acting as a combined political force in higher education and research policy. The most obvious example here is, once again, England, where a number of different so-called “mission groups” among the universities are certainly not engaged in any “common course”, but rather actively combat each other. This dissolution process is also visible in other European countries. 4) ICT and the (probable) coming of a cognitive, pedagogical and logistic revolution The long-term impact of this process in the life and organization of the university remains as yet to be seen. There will be some major con12

sequences, including, but not limited to, questions of curricula and pedagogy, but the consequences will probably not be the ones described in the proselytizing campaigns of today’s “MOOC-zealots”. 5) The simultaneous processes of globalisation, individualisation and “marketisation” These are, of course, general developments with extensive ramifications and important implications for all spheres of modern society. Nonetheless, I believe that their impact on the European higher education systems will be relatively more profound for the simple reason that those systems were considered until the 1980s, to some extent to “live in a world of their own”.. 6) The dissolution of the historical nexus between the nation-state and the higher education and research system In addition to the more direct and obvious consequences discussed earlier, this process has also created something of an ideological crisis, that is, a feeling of deep uncertainty among European universities regarding who their actual owners and principals really are. 7) Chronic public underfunding and the retreat from political responsibility: “The New Public Management” revolution As noted above, NPM-advocates almost nowhere seem to have recognized-or cared --that uncontrolled deregulation of a bureaucratic rule-governed system invariably leads either to anarchic marketization or to increased political interventionism. In Sweden, the former has been the case in the elderly care sector, whereas the latter has characterized the higher education and research system, in Sweden as elsewhere in Europe. 8) New relations between knowledge, industry and society: “Triple-Helix”, “Mode 2”, “Entrepreneurial Universities” etc. Potentially, this process of integration between the activities of the university and the demands and expectations of external “stakeholders” could have considerable consequences, not only on curricula, training, funding and research output, but also on university management, governance and steering. As the university is increasingly subsumed under the “innovation system”, albeit as its perceived motor, the rationale for academic selflegislation, for instance, loses its relevance. 9) Growing tensions between education as a public and a private good This is perhaps the most fundamental and momentous ideological shift during the last 30 years. First of all, this shift strikes at the very heart of the ethos and self-understanding of the classical university. Secondly, this shift 13

affects the role and behaviour of the students, gradually turning them into customers. And, where there are customers seeking private goods, there will certainly also be a number of prospective profit-seeking private providers of such “goods” –in many cases, of dubious quality. 10) The conflation between information and knowledge Commentators and self-appointed experts routinely use “the information society” and “the knowledge society” as synonymous and interchangeable concepts. This tendency to conflate information and knowledge is not merely sloppy or thoughtless. In point of fact, it reveals a fatal misunderstanding. The information society is and will remain at odds with anything that might be rightly called the knowledge society. Knowledge is achieved through laborious effort and ingenuity; information is merely dispersed, collected and disseminated. If we fail to make this distinction, we may very well face a future in which mediatized information may come to pose the greatest threat to institutionalized science and knowledge production. 11) The dissolution of traditional academic values and a subsequent crisis of legitimacy and rationality in research and research funding During the period discussed here, research funding has undergone a period of massive bureaucratization and instrumentalization, as is made manifest by the ever-increasing importance – direct and indirect – of the so-called EU “Framework Programmes”. It has also largely become a dominant trend in science policy and research funding on the national level. The “Policy for Science” that characterized the first three decades after the Second World War, the Vannevar Bush formula, has been abandoned for something that rightfully could be labelled “Politicized Science”. One consequence is the growing tendency in research funding to replace the traditional criterion of genuine academic excellence with more nebulous criteria with an array of labels: “strategic significance”, “social and economic relevance”, “mode 2”, “the production of socially robust knowledge”. The list of terms in this Orwellian science policy newspeak would seem endless. The terminology is intimately bound up with politically controlled earmarking, in which pork-barreling and “strategic” allocation of resources have become the rule rather than the exception. (Significantly enough, the laudable establishment of the European Research Council (ERC) – a small step back towards the Vannevar Bush-principle of research funding – was by no means an initiative taken by the Bruxelles research bureaucrats or even by European university leadership; it was initiated and carried through by a handful of independent European research foundations and Academies of Science, despite fairly heavy resistence). 14

The ramifications of the development sketched above are enormous, and have yet to be fully grasped. They have to do with the internal life of science and the university, including the self-understanding and professional ethos among scientists and scholars and their relationship to their disciplines. Thus it is no exaggeration to predict a gradual demise of the university as an institution. But what even those who acknowledge and perhaps even accept the disappearance of the classical university fail to notice is this: as goes the university, so go the disciplines and the research and teaching which define them. Even if the traditional disciplinary structure is still well anchored in academic life and its prestige structure, it has nevertheless by degrees lost its special position in the research policy hierarchy. There is no reason to assume that this trend will be reversed any time soon, if no explicit effort is made to turn the tide. It is commonly assumed that what I have described is merely a matter or evolution, that is, a more or less natural consequence of the alleged widening gap between academic basic research and the acute problems the world is facing and will be facing in years to come. But this is only true in part. The insistence on interdisciplinary approaches, for instance, is not always clearly motivated by the alleged lack of relevance of contemporary science; rather, it has turned into an ideological or political tool to undermine academic autonomy and its traditional value system. The repercussions for the health and welfare of the European university, by which I mean its teaching and research, can hardly be overestimated. 12) The breakthrough of gobal one-dimensional excellence criteria and rankings and the introduction of “opportunistic instrumentalism” at universities Before concluding these perhaps not too original deliberations, let me at least touch upon three of the most frequently used buzz-words in the present higher education debate: internationalisation, excellence, and ranking, since these dimensions are usually discussed in either fairly simplistic terms, be they enthusiastic or dismissive. Internationalisation is almost always presented as one of the key features of higher education and research that should have top priority. In principle, this is all well and good, but one must also realise that internationalisation, like everything else in human life, carries with it certain risks and drawbacks. Hence, the internationalisation of research and graduate education can lead to growing unease and even disintegration at the local level. When a person joins – or is admitted into – ”the international tribe of top ’gypsyscholars’, her first loyalty will be towards that particular tribe. The home university/department and local colleagues will quite naturally tend to become less interesting – or even unimportant. So, in these days of 15

Festreden over the infinite blessings of internationalisation, one should still remember the sobering words of Jürgen Mittelstrass regarding a dilemma that existed at least until quite recently:”there is nothing more international than modern elite research, and probably nothing more national then the European university systems”. One should also be aware of the fact that the internationalisation euphoria, and the media exposure that frequently accompanies it, is not exclusively connected to elite- or cutting-edge research. The intensified international exchange has also opened the door to ”unconventional” academic careers and research-related entrepreneurship, where”visibility” and ”performance” have largely superseded documented and solid research achievements as viable”intellectual capital”. There are numerous examples, in Sweden and elsewhere, of individuals and entire institutes who have chosen this alternate route to fame and fortune. If the international academic community is not prepared to combat this torrent of Geschäft, it runs the risk of irrevocably compromising the scholarly endeavour and lowering the scientific spirit. Concerning the issue of excellence, or Centres of excellence, the small European nations – and in research and science we are all small compared to US – must realise that if we are going to create real centres of excellence in research and research education, we can very seldom do so on a local or even national level. We have to think, behave, and act like MIT or UC Berkeley. To create genuine centres of excellence one has to look for competence, literally, everywhere. So, if my fomer university, Uppsala, decides to become a Centre of Excellence in almost any field of study, nine times out of ten, only a minority of the researchers would – or should – come from Uppsala. This, together with the fact that the establishment of Centres of Excellence would require substantial resources, and put severe organizational, financial and cultural pressure on the internal and national funding systems. Finally, I would like to say something about rankings. In the course of the last two decades, various sorts of rankings, preferably in the form of league tables, have become a more or less regular, although still controversial, element in higher education and research policy. Regardless of the actual motives behind this worldwide deluge of rankings, there is hardly any reason for higher education representatives to moralize over the present state of affairs. Instead, it is high time that universities contemplate how their own negligence and irresponsibility have actually promoted or at least contributed to a situation where externally initiated rankings today are not merely viewed as news and information commodities, but are perceived as entirely legitimate and relevant evaluations of academic quality by an increasing 16

number of societal actors, who –with or without justification-- consider themselves to be legitimate stakeholders when it comes to deciding upon the size, quality, efficiency, resources and missions of the higher education system. What is the actual impact of rankings on higher education institutions so far? According to recent studies, the impact of rankings for the individual student’s actual institutional and educational choice, for very good reasons, seems thus far to be extremely limited. The best guess put forward is that students from more privileged social strata (and their parents) probably have a more pronounced tendency to study the rankings than fellow students coming from more deprived socio-academic conditions. The same differences might possibly be observed between those students who have an international perspective, and those who have a local perspective in their educational choices. But with the gradual introduction of almost NorthAmerican Ivy League levels of tuition fees in some European countries, the impact of rankings might in time become quite palpable, and eventually play an increasingly important role when students, especially the ones coming from overseas, choose their institutional affiliation and academic career. There are, however, at least three levels or areas of higher education and research policy planning where rankings have had an obvious and distinct impact: politics, university boards and university leadership/management. When it comes to politics, I will only state as my firm conviction that the German Exzellenz-Initiative (or any other comparable European excellence scheme, for that matter) would probably never have come about without the impact of the Shanghai Jaio Tong- and Times Higher Education-rankings. Not surprisingly, it seems to be university boards that are most likely to ascribe immediate policy relevance to ranking results. To a sometimes laydominated university board, often recruited from the quarterly-reportobsessed business sector or from the vote-seeking political sphere, and with often rather rudimentary knowledge of university life, changes in the ranking can be perceived as almost the only unambiguous and ‘objective’ evidence of institutional success or decline. League tables then tend to become the bottom line in the ‘balance sheet’ of the ‘company’. Whenever a university board starts showing signs of disease, an insecure and academically weak university leadership is prone to feel pressed to take urgent steps. Eventually, management-inclined university executives may be tempted to carry out relatively extensive and expensive ‘quick fixes’, primarily in order to affect some simple but important rankings indicator, although such actions will have precious little if anything at all to do with the actual quality of teaching and research of the institutions. The effects with regard to the balance of power within the institution, on the other hand, may be pervasive and permanent. 17

3. Concluding Remarks and a Few Very Modest Proposals2 In my view, during the last three or four decades, the European higher education systems have undergone a process of disorientation, brought about by the confluence of several simultaneous cultural and intellectual, as well as economic and political, forces. The development in science policy, research organization and higher education has also had a lack of focus and has actually led to a crumbling of the value system and self-confidence of the traditional European University. I would go so far as to compare the current period to that of the era of turbulence and decline that preceded the foundation and development of a university that gradually transformed virtually all universities, i.e. the creation of the so-called Humboldtian University. Having stated this, I would nevertheless urge us all at long last, to take a definite if certainly affectionate and grateful farewell to Wilhelm von Humboldt, and instead turn for guidance to other, more recent authorities. We certainly do not need any more pompous declarations by European prime ministers or ministers of education, or even by representatives of the EAU, about the glorious future of the European universities in 20XX. Instead, we need to devote all our intellectual efforts, and a substantial portion of our economic and human resources, to rebuild our education systems in general, and our damaged higher education systems in particular. In my humble opinion, the position and future development of the European university systems calls for rethinking on a systematic level comparable to what occurred in California in the 1950s and early 1960s, even if, as the Californians appear to feel, no fundamental change can ever be permanent. The California model, it is clear, is in trouble, but that does not mean that the issues it confronted are not issues that Europeans should be confronting today One crucial message we should take away from the California Master Plan and its instigator Clark Kerr’s vision is the urgent need to make a serious effort to figure out how quality universities, educating and training talented young people at the highest level, with support from the public purse and with rigorous critical standards, can be combined with a system of mass access to higher education. The crucial issues remain those of system differentiation. This means that we need to address the following questions: a) how do we construe a workable higher education system, that is, one that can adequately execute the steadily growing number of diversified tasks and obligations placed upon it?; b) how do we define the characters and number of institutions actually needed in each category or segment of that system?; c) how do we secure the continued existence and flourishing within this system of the delicate species called the research university with its 18

particular qualities?, and d) how can we best fund and finance such a diversified system? Without such reflection and planning, I fear that a research and educational system will eventually emerge that bears no resemblance to that particular and peculiar Lebenswelt that was the European research university for the last150 years; the latter will sooner or later suffer from a gradual loss of creativity, competence and, in the end, legitimacy. In short, I would like to see a discussion of how the European university of the past may be reconstituted to serve the present by regaining its historical strengths – not by nurturing its obvious weaknesses. The European governments and responsible ministers initiating such a long overdue discussion would certainly be worthy of our unreserved respect and praise. They would also have started the long and cumbersome road “back to business.” The days of quick fixes and flashy one-liners in European higher education and research policy should definitely be over. Accordingly, it would perhaps be not only proper but even wise if concerned European actors in all sectors of academia and research policy planning reminded themselves of the academic sincerity, administrative ingenuity, political wisdom and, most especially, the intellectual and moral integrity that characterized the way and works of the late Clark Kerr. It would of course be both improper and even pointless to compare Professor Clark Kerr with Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt, but he is at the end of the day the closest we have come in the last century. NOTES 1. This paper is a slightly extended version of an invited “Abendvortrag” closing the international conference “Wissenschaftliche Tagung zum Kölner Universitätsjubileum” 2013-10-23/26. 2. Since I have seen no obvious reason to change my mind radically in the last year or so, this concluding passage is an almost verbatim quotation from Thorsten Nybom, “The Disintegration of Higher Education in Europe, 1970-2010: A PostHumboldtian Essay” in Sheldon Rothblatt (Ed.) Clark Kerr’s World of Higher Education Reaches the 21st Century: Chapters in a Special History. Springer, Dordrecht 2012, pp. 179-180.

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