The double shuffle of University Reform - The OECD/Denmark ...



The double shuffle of University Reform - The OECD/Denmark policy interface

Susan Wright and Jakob Williams Ørberg

Introduction

At the ministerial meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Education Committee in Athens in 2006, the Danish Minister of Education, Bertel Haarder, a member of Denmark’s Liberal Party, caused a commotion. He went out on a limb as the only one of the assembled ministers who thought total marketisation was not only the most likely but also the most desirable future for university research and education. Among those present was the leader of Denmark’s largest association for university employees (Dansk Magisterforening) who later reported to the Danish media that people around her were whispering about the ‘Danish disease’ during the session (Stage 2006). What they meant was that the Danish government predictably opts for the most extreme versions of current international agendas for university reform. What we would like to show in this chapter is that the commotion created by the Danish Minister was also about something else. The disquiet was caused by his disregarding the style through which the agenda for university reform had been moving forward in Europe. Following Hall (2003) we call this style the double-shuffle: a continuous dance between a vision of the university modelled on the corporate world and one based on the sector’s traditional organisation.

We were studying what went on at this Ministerial Meeting as part of a research project on university reform in Denmark.[i] The project started in 2004 when universities were preparing themselves for the implementation of the 2003 University Law that changed:

1. The legal status of universities – to become ‘self-owning’ institutions

1. Their governance – the establishment of Governing Boards

1. Their management – the appointment of leaders at all levels

1. The way government steers universities – increasingly through contracts and output-based payments.

Since that law was passed, there has been a further torrent of reforms including the merger of government research institutes and single faculty universities with multi-faculty universities. Debates continue about methods to measure and grade research outputs as a basis for allocating research funding. The research project has studied the debates in Denmark and the international context that surrounded these reforms. Our aim is to see whether and how, from the multiple perspectives of a wide range of actors, the reforms have transformed the identity of university leaders, academics, students and even the university itself.

The Danish reform follows a trend to loosen the grip of central government planning on institutions on the one side, while moving away from collegial rule on the other. Still only implemented in a few European countries, international policy communities are nevertheless almost all focusing on the twin projects of making universities autonomous and accountable. By autonomous, the reformers mean turning the university into a coherent organisation with a unified leadership which is capable of orienting the institution strategically and competitively in the global situation. By accountable, they mean that universities should not only show they are spending public money legitimately, but that they are delivering on the performance objectives which central government sets up as a precondition for funding or even builds into output-funding mechanisms.

This new university policy, however, does not function in a vacuum, and it is wrong to imagine old or welfare-state universities simply disappearing as new managerial universities enter the stage. As we shall see, the older images of the universities and their ethics and logics are still present and, in important ways, these underpin the new vision of market-driven and strategically-organised universities. Indeed, the very success of the new vision for universities seems to depend on and deploy widely held images of the ways universities used to work. The appointed leaders who head these changes present themselves through images of the old collegial and elected positions, whose nomenclature they still carry. In exploring the complicated interweaving of new and old in the transformation of universities in Denmark, we traced this strategy to the OECD, the international agency which has made one of the most significant forays into university policy development in the past two decades. In this chapter we will see, first, how through OECD’s development of the policy background for the changes brought forward in Denmark, as well as in other countries, the new and the old went hand in hand and seemed to constantly incorporate each other. We explore the way this works as a political strategy. Second, we show how one of the newly appointed leaders further incorporated this strategy into the projection of his new role. His vision of how he would steer his university into the new era became deeply dependant on images of the previous purposes and forms of leadership of the old institution.

In order to capture this double-vision of reform we deploy the concept of the ‘double shuffle’ used by Stuart Hall (2003) to describe the means by which, in the UK, Blair’s Third Way carried forward an agenda inherited from Thatcher while supporting itself on images of the comprehensive welfare state. We suggest that today’s universities are changing into market-driven organisations while conjuring up images of traditional collegial academia in portraying themselves and where they are going. Whereas Hall emphasised the crucial role of discourse in Blair’s political project, we suggest that the double shuffle of university reform in Denmark and elsewhere also takes place on three other planes, in terms of policy, symbols, and material or technological processes. Inspired by Saskia Sassen’s (2006) notion of old institutional capabilities being deployed for new purposes and to serve new organising logics, we suggest that university reform not only moves with the rhythm of the double shuffle when OECD describes new public management universities as consistent with Humboldtian visions of the universities. We argue that the strategy of the double shuffle is also used when leaders, charged with the task of steering their institutions through the reforms, employ symbols of the collegial university in their self representation, and even when technologies from the old order are put to use in the new, as when peer review is employed by managers in evaluation systems.

When the Danish Minister of Education exposed his unalloyed support for only the most radical vision of the reformed university, we argue that he deserted the dance being played by his colleagues in the OECD. Their double shuffle promoted more radical visions of the university by keeping more traditional versions also in play. University leaders, similarly, are enacting a new kind of university by re-working images of the old university. The Minister disregarded the language, symbolism and mechanisms through which reforms have been moving forward in the university sector.

OECD’s Agendas for University Reform

Denmark’s university reforms have been informed and inspired, above all, by agendas emanating from the OECD over the last decades. Denmark has participated in many of the surveys and reports, meetings and discussions that have shaped the OECD’s thinking on university reform. Indeed, when we asked an official in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation if the OECD had influenced Danish university reform, he replied, no, we shaped OECD policy. In the 1990s the OECD emerged from a very negative period, in which the OECD’s main ‘policy product,’ National Innovation Systems, ceased to grasp governments’ attention. Universities were beleaguered by governments’ loss of confidence in their role and constraints on public expenditure. This negative phase ended in the 1990s when the OECD formulated the notion of a global knowledge economy and assembled statistics to project its growth (Godin n.d.). Now, for the first time, education, as an OECD activity, gained a high profile and strong legitimacy (Henry et al. 2001: 132). In 1991 a reorganisation brought CERI, the Education Committee and the two specialist programmes on university management (IMHE) and education buildings (PEB) together in a ‘Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour and Social Affairs’. In 1994 the development of education indicators became a major activity, in a new Unit for Education Statistics and Indicators (Henry et al. 2001: 10, 12). In the mid 1990s, the OECD put forward a standard definition and a scoreboard of indicators for its new policy concept, the ‘knowledge-based economy’. By the late 1990s, the reform of universities had become a major concern for the OECD, as they were important both as sites of knowledge production and management and as providers of higher education, the human resource base of the knowledge economy.

The OECD has no access to legal or regulatory mechanisms to enforce its prescriptions. Unlike the European Union, it cannot pass directives; unlike UNESCO its members cannot make Declarations; and unlike GATS it has no legal machinery to enforce compliance once members enter into agreements. The OECD’s system of governance is much ‘softer’. It has to put forward concepts, such as ‘the global knowledge economy’, which gain the attention (and continuing financial support) if its 30 members. It then engages ministers, university leaders, other ‘stakeholders’ and experts in writing reports and in participating in networks and conferences. The resulting reports, trend reports, statements of best practice and guidelines are then made available for governments and institutions to follow voluntarily. Further mechanisms such as country reviews, indicators and rankings are used to assess and report publicly on each member state’s progress in meeting the reform agenda. Some ministers, as in Denmark, generate much local publicity about their country’s standing in OECD league tables, using them to name and shame and urge further reform so as to win the race to meet the OECD’s vision of a success in the global knowledge economy. A combination of moral pressure, shame, and desire to beat the competition impels countries towards policy convergence. The European Union refers to this form of governance as ‘the OECD method’ or the ‘open method of coordination’. It has been adopted more widely, for example it underpins the Bologna Process for reforming higher education and the Copenhagen Process for reforming vocational education and training.

In the case of OECD’s work on higher education, Henry et al. (2001) analyse how the organisation has acted on national policy making through thematic reviews, such as that on ‘the first years of tertiary education’ conducted in ten countries, including Denmark (OECD 1998), and ‘country reviews’ such as that held into Danish universities (OECD 2004a) and into Danish education research (OECD 2004b). Information from these sources and from its statistical sources has been distilled into policy suggestions, best practice, and scenarios for the future, which have been discussed at meetings, such as that held with Education Ministers in Athens. Henry et al. identify a particular ‘report genre’ for the OECD, which they call ‘an admixture of the apparently academic, distanced and disinterested with the normative’ (2001: 139). They show that OECD reports first take critiques, for example Harvey’s (1990) analysis of postmodernity and globalisation, and turn them into a factual description, and then into an inevitable process. They then implore national and institutional policy-makers to gear themselves to this ‘new reality’ (Henry et al. 2001: 152-3). Henry et al. argue that OECD reports are framed within a particular normative stance – a particular ideological view of globalisation that urges acceptance of neo-liberal market reform, managerialist approaches to universities and a theory of human capital which presses the need to prepare students for work in a global economy. The OECD report, Redefining Tertiary Education itself proclaims that it is ‘descriptive, analytic and normative’ (Henry et al. 2001: 18) but, in the main, the OECD remains silent on its role as advocate of a particular ideological stance. In this way, Henry et al. argue, the OECD occupies an ‘ambiguous policy zone’ (Henry et al. 2001: 145). It acts not just as an international forum for the exchange of ideas and information between member countries; it is also managing the process of policy production and, by framing these policies normatively, in ways that conform to a particular ideology, the OECD functions as a policy actor. The OECD sets the way forward for universities by anticipating a policy convergence and by providing a normative stance with policy prescriptions that act as an invitation cum pressure for governments to pursue this agenda, each in its own way (Henry et al. 2001: 129, 139, 107). The process is voluntary: members states decide for themselves to follow the path of reform that the OECD recommends.

The OECD (1998) report Redefining Tertiary Education was a crucial document in setting the agenda for the role of universities in the projected knowledge-based economy. The report drew on two earlier OECD reports and put them in a new context. The first had argued for the expansion of higher education – the shift from elite to mass, and ultimately universal higher education (OECD 1974). The second detailed ten current roles of universities in society, and raised questions about future changes in their functions (Taylor 1987). Now Redefining Tertiary Education made a comprehensive overview of the implications of ‘tertiary education for all’ for curriculum design, quality management, university leadership and public and private funding. The new context for all these issues offered by Redefining Tertiary Education was a shift from the previous supply-led approach which focused on the needs of universities, to using the interests of ‘clients’ to challenge ‘many of the orthodoxies and pre-suppositions of institutional life’ and drive change (OECD 1998: 15-16, 3). Making the ‘client’ the report’s ‘dominant motif’ meant that ‘institutions are approached, not so much from the standpoint of their own self formations, their traditions, culture and inner workings’ but in terms of meeting the needs of students, the society and economy (OECD 1998: 15).

Whilst the report sustains this stance throughout, it also gives cognisance from the start that there are two divergent views of the purposes served by tertiary education, which are found embedded in institutional practice and policy discourses. The report calls these two models of the university, and labels the first ‘utility in the market place’ and the second ‘independent or unconstrained advancement of knowledge’ (OECD 1998: 10). Later it also refers to the second, variously, as the ‘classical liberal’, ‘critical intellectual’ ‘Humboldtian’ or ‘Newman’ model. How the two models relate to each other, and how they can both be reconciled with an over-riding ‘client perspective’ is never explicitly stated: the report claims that universities can make these two visions converge, without explaining how. Henry et al. (2001: 128) criticise the report because it just ‘sutures’ together these competing discourses, which represent competing interests, traditions and value orientations. Our analysis takes this argument a step further. By focusing not just on the substantive content but on the mode of description, we reveal a particular relation and dynamic between the two models which pushes the OECD agenda forward.

Redefining Higher Education – two co-existing discourses

In Redefining Tertiary Education, the instrumental or market approach is always described first. In this model the student is a consumer or customer who wants to acquire with minimal effort, cost and time, marketable competences and qualifications that converge on employment opportunities in the labour market. A variety of providers (universities, private higher education companies, corporate universities and commercial ‘edutainment’ corporations) make bids to the funding agency or government to provide such programmes. For not-for-profit providers, the return is recognition and prestige and opportunities for expansion and growth. Denmark is quoted as ‘a particularly good example’ of a country moving steadily in this entrepreneurial direction. For-profit institutions expect trading returns like any other business enterprise. Education becomes an internationally tradable commodity, in which fee-paying overseas students are a significant export earner, and long programmes are a disadvantage. For the tertiary education market to function effectively, there need to be consumers who can make informed choices about services and switch allegiance if need be, and a range of competing service providers who will tailor services to clients’ wants and market them vigorously. The management of universities and other providers, including the training divisions of large corporations, needs to become flexible and speedy, so as to maximise sales. In sum, this model of ‘utility in the market place’ has the following characteristics:

Primary values include customer satisfaction, a good match between the labour market and courses and qualifications on offer, and efficient and cost-effective delivery of service (OECD 1998: 45).

When the report turns to the second model, the ‘classical liberal position’, the description starts negatively, making contrasts with the ‘instrumental’ approach, which thereby is promoted to the level of a norm. The ‘classical liberal’ model’s ‘starting point is neither economic or social utility, nor the student as consumer, nor the institution as service provider; it is, rather, the academic community’s mission of knowledge creating and disseminating’ (1998: 45). The report continues to make negative contrasts with the normative instrumental approach:

Scholars and students – not suppliers and customers – make up the academic community…The conceptual framework and language are not that of clients, service-providers, contractual obligations, management, efficiency, competence and skills and so forth but the qualities of the educated person, the self-governing or collegiate body of scholars, academic discourse and interchange, and the endless quest for knowledge and understanding (1998: 45).

In this quest for knowledge, the academic community acts with a ‘civic conscience with moral obligations’:

Detachment from, rather than intimate engagement with, the world of commerce, industry, the professions, the schools and the government service is necessary to provide the right conditions for reflective, analytical, objective research, study and learning and, indeed, to provide a deeper level of service than meeting immediate wants and needs (OECD 1998: 45).

Detachment does not, however, mean separation or isolation: active relations are maintained with other social sectors and institutions, but they are on the basis of ‘mutual respect’. Funding, whether from government or private sponsors, contracts and regulations are in forms that respect and protect ‘the rights and freedom of the academics and preserve institutional autonomy’ (OECD 1998: 46). Even though the account ends with positive language, the negative contrast to the instrumental model has by now been so firmly entrenched, that ‘mutual respect’, ‘freedom of academics’ and ‘institutional autonomy’ sound like a far cry.

The report implies a clear hierarchy between the two models but does not attempt to reconcile the two. Even a debate between their respective merits would ‘all too easily give rise to false or misleading dichotomies’ (1998: 46). The section entitled ‘Towards convergence?’ prescribes a list of changes which both reinforce the privileged position of the ‘instrumental, market model’ and tuck in references to the ‘classical liberal position’ without attempting to reconcile the contradictions:

1. tertiary education has to expand and ‘change comprehensively’ to address the expectations of its clients, achieve efficiency and attain high standards

1. in first degree courses, incentives, strategic steering and built-in accountability procedures should be used to make education responsive to student needs and public priorities, without eschewing the values and principles of free inquiry and curiosity-driven intellectual interests

1. definite competences that will assist students’ employment need to be specified in course design, teaching, learning, assessment and accreditation

1. flexible learning opportunities

1. ‘the collegial concept of decision-making’, which includes students, academic and non-academic staff and external representatives, and that ensures decisions are academically and professionally informed, and responsibility for them is shared, is still ‘relevant’ but ‘inefficiencies and opaqueness of decision making’ need to be addressed

1. A wide range of modern management and evaluation practices need to be introduced, including financial management, strategic institutional profiling and quality assurance, because of the scale and complexity of decision making and the damaging consequences of errors and inefficiencies.

The list is rounded off with a final statement which again claims that convergence between the utilitarian market model and the ‘classic liberal’ or ‘critical knowledge’ model, and their two associated managerial and collegial styles of governance (above points 6 and 5 respectively) is possible, but gives the problem to others to resolve:

there need be no fundamental conflict between either so-called general/cultural education and vocational/professional education or between “collegial” and “managerial” styles of governance but considerable effort is required to develop new system-wide and institutional cultures that embody and interrelate these orientations (1998: 48)

Thereafter, the report mainly focuses on the instrumental, market model, but there are periodic reminders that the traditional model is also present. They jog alongside each other with no attempt to make clear how they can co-exist or how they relate to each other. Henry et al. (2001: 140) call this a ‘greedy report’ because it embraces an ‘and/also’ rather than an ‘either/or’ approach, wanting teaching and research to be informed by both the rationalities of market utility and the advancement of knowledge for its own sake, and expecting universities to be run by both managerial and collegial approaches. In a sign of frustration, they call this obtuse refusal to decide between two models and this denial of the reality of their contradictions ‘purblindness’ (Henry et al. 2001: 140). A study by Hall (2003) points to an alternative interpretation of a political strategy at work here.

OECD’s double shuffle

Hall examines how New Labour in Britain adapted to the neo-liberal terrain it inherited from Thatcherism. He argues that New Labour had a double strategy, one strand aiming at the introduction of a neo-liberal market state, the other addressing the concerns of social democracy. The significant aspect of this double strategy was the way the two strands were combined (Hall 2003: 11). Hall identifies a dominant or leading neo-liberal strategy which aligns government with the logic and values of corporate capital and which, with every move, installs marketisation in further spheres of government. A subordinate social democratic programme (the minimum wage, family tax credits, and concern over delivery of public services) appeals to New Labour’s working class and public-sector middle class supporters, who invoke this programme to insist that New Labour is not neo-liberal or to persuade themselves that old Labour values will eventually reassert themselves. This bears comparison with the OECD’s dominant market model for higher education and research, and its subordination of a traditional academic discourse about collegiality and the pursuit of critical understanding, whose acknowledgement appeals to academics and gives them hope that old values can still be asserted.

It is how New Labour’s two strands move together that is important in Hall’s analysis. They do not converge and are not reconciled. In what Hall calls New Labour’s two step or double shuffle, moves to ‘modernise’ or ‘reform’ public services by opening the door for private investment or blurring the public/private distinction are accompanied by a matching step to make the public think the aim is better service delivery. The two are held in formation by a process Gramsci called ‘transformism’: the social-democratic strand always remains subordinate to and dependent on the dominant, neo-liberal programme, and is constantly being ‘transformed’ into the dominant one (Hall 2003: 19)

The essence of this ‘transformism’ game depends on pulling selectively, and in an ordered hierarchy, from opposing political repertoires, maintaining a double-address to their different ‘publics’, so that you can advance a ‘radical’ (sic) overall strategy of governance, on the one hand, while maintaining electoral support…on the other (Hall 2003: 22 italics in the original).

The double mode of address has the crucial function of re-presenting a broadly neo-liberal project, favourable to the interests of corporate capital, in such a way that it can mobilise the popular consent of Labour voters. This linguistic strategy depends on using words with a wide range of associations so that a concept’s positive charge can be mobilised and transferred to a very different, usually contrary, idea (Hall 2003: 23). This is seen, for example, when the shift from universal public services to selectivity and private provision is described as ‘choice’ and represented as part of a strategy to combat inequality. Similarly, in the field of university reform, the subordinate discourse is replete with words (e.g. autonomy, freedom) which contain multiple meanings, and can be shifted in step with the dominant neo-liberal discourse about marketisation.

Through this double shuffle, according to Hall, New Labour is delivering the market state via social democracy. Mrs Thatcher’s full blown neo-liberal drive to the market state was too obvious and brutal. Its original supporters abandoned Mrs Thatcher for reasons of electoral calculation. Hall points out that moving to a market state via subordinated social democracy is a hegemonic strategy, winning enough consent as it goes and building subordinate demands into its dominant logic. This double headed strategy sows confusion in its own ranks, obscures the long-term objective and prevents a coherent and organised opposition from emerging (Hall 2003: 20). It seems that the OECD is engaged in a similar double shuffle. There is no attempt to reconcile the two discourses about university futures. The discourses of the market and of traditional academia derive from different political repertoires and ‘weasel words’[ii] like ‘autonomy’ and ‘freedom’ make a double address to these different publics. Yet the discourses are in an ordered hierarchy and the subordinated ‘traditional’ discourse keeps in step with the dominant market discourse. It is the subordinated discourse that is essential to appeal to and mobilise the engagement of academics and students, without whose consent the reform of the sector could not take place. The OECD invites governments and especially university leaders to take up the challenge of learning how to use this double discourse and dance the double shuffle. Bertel Haarder, the Danish education minister, caused shock and mutterings about the Danish disease because he would not join the dance. He alone among the ministers strides openly towards a marketised future without any reliance on Humboldt as a partner or any need for spin.

OECD’s scenarios for university futures

Central to Hall’s double shuffle is the idea of continual movement: the subordinate discourse is continually appealed to, and modified, in order to support the projection of an ever-more radical version of the dominant discourse. The successive moves of the OECD’s double shuffle can be shown by following how the simultaneous appeal to two unreconciled university models in Redefining Tertiary Education was developed further in the OECD’s subsequent scenario-building project, to lead towards increasingly radical visions of future universities. At first, six scenarios were developed (Vincent-Lancrin 2004) and presented to a series of OECD meetings (e.g. World Bank, Washington, January 2005). In the light of feedback from these meetings, they were revised and presented to a meeting of stakeholders at Istanbul in June 2006. For the 2006 meeting of Education Ministers in Athens (described in the introduction) the scenarios were reduced to four and based on substantially revised premises. In each manifestation, the supporting ‘traditional’ image of a university is changed, in step with an ever-more extreme version of the market model.

In the initial six scenarios for the future of universities, Scenario 1 is no longer called the ‘classic liberal’ model, but is labelled ‘Tradition’ and gives a brief caricature of universities ‘like they are today’ (Vincent-Lancrin 2004: 259). That is, governments continue to play a prominent role in funding, regulating and managing universities, with a focus on public accountability and equity, and consequently ‘little scope for profit generating activities’ (ibid). Universities teach a small share of the youth population ‘for the purposes of job selection credentials’ and they pursue research ‘without excessive dependence or involvement with the private sector’. Scenario 1 noticeably lacks several features that are more usually associated with a ‘traditional’ discourse about universities. There is no mention of the pursuit of knowledge, either for its own sake or to provide a critique of the present and envisage alternative futures. There is no articulation or synergy between teaching and research, and no mention of university autonomy.

The instrumental market-based discourse pervades four of the other scenarios. Scenario 3 is called ‘free market’ but in fact describes two separate markets for teaching and research. Tertiary education is privatised, driven by market forces, and funded through market mechanisms in which ‘tuition revenue comes to represent a more important share of overall income’, along with the proceeds from patenting curricula and teaching methods. The global tertiary education market is regulated by private companies for quality assurance and accreditation. The market is highly differentiated: a range of providers, including corporations which train their own staff, will form a steep hierarchy dominated by a global super-elite, staff status will be polarised, and institutions will specialise in terms of the subjects they teach and the audiences they address. Teaching and research are entirely disarticulated: ‘And, since the majority of students and their parents are not interested in research, refusing to bear the costs, research moves out to public research centres and corporate research and development divisions’ (Vincent-Lancrin 2004: 260). Research too becomes demand driven and secures important returns through ‘intellectual property rights’.

Scenario 6 takes the market model to such an extreme that it is entitled ‘the disappearance of universities’. This scenario has a very positive – brave new world – tone in which the activities of the university have dissipated into different commercial markets for teaching and for research and there is no mention of the state. Two other scenarios focus mainly on future markets in higher education. In Scenario 4 universities still provide tertiary education but it is demand-oriented and consists predominantly of recurrent skill-upgrading for those of employment age and recreation for the retired. In Scenario 5, universities network with IT, media and entertainment corporations to provide market-driven, life-long ‘edutainment’. In this market, learners define their own degrees for themselves from a global network of provision and teaching materials and methods give ‘high returns to their owners’.

In between the caricature of ‘universities as they are now’ and the different market models lies Scenario 2, entitled ‘entrepreneurial universities’. This scenario is clearly trying to combine the ‘traditional’ with the ‘free market’. This is the only scenario to mention three missions for universities – teaching, research and community service. Universities are given greater autonomy to respond to a variety of mixed public and private funding sources. Research is not only highly lucrative but also prestigious. In teaching, because of commercial approaches to international markets and e-learning, the prestige and wages of staff improve, but the sector is differentiated between elitist teaching in research universities and lifelong learning in lower status, teaching-only institutions. Whereas the other scenarios list external systems of control over public accountability, quality and accreditation, it is not clear what combination of drivers and controls is envisaged for ‘entrepreneurial universities’. Nor is it clear how, within these controls, universities can exercise the autonomy that will enable them to balance their three missions and achieve a market-oriented approach that is still in keeping with their critical traditions. By saying that ‘universities take a market-oriented approach to operations without losing basic academic values’ (Vincent-Lancrin 2004: 259), the scenario deploys a strategy of ‘pragmatic presupposition’ to state a vision as if it is already enacted, and is silent on the means for its achievement.[iii]

In sum, only in Scenario 2, the entrepreneurial university, do the market and traditional discourses dance alongside each other, with the market discourse clearly in the lead position and the traditional discourse shuffling along in support. A very brief and bowdlerised version of ‘tradition’ is sketched in the first scenario and, by emphasising shortcomings and omitting to mention strengths, invites dismissal. The four versions of the market discourse have been elaborated into such a strong normative position that they only need to make very occasional negative contrasts to the traditional discourse to reinforce their superiority.

By the time the scenarios about the future of universities were presented to Education Ministers at Athens, they had been reduced to four: the traditional model no longer existed in its own right; one scenario, called ‘new public management’, represented the double shuffle between the traditional and the market models; and for the first time a model based entirely on the free market appeared, unsupported by any reference to tradition. These four scenarios, more clearly than the previous six, are based on different ideas about the knowledge economy. The first scenario, ‘Open networking’ is based on free and open access to knowledge. On the grounds that research is largely funded by taxpayers, the latest results are freely available for students, academics and civil society world-wide. Relations between higher education institutions in the first and third worlds are marked by cooperation and trust rather than competition, so their education systems can be harmonised and students have the autonomy to choose their courses from a global network. Many people at the Ministerial Meeting thought this was the most desirable future, but not the most likely. The second scenario is based on the premise that all but a small elite of universities engage in a backlash against globalisation and focus on servicing their local community. Participants felt that all universities should ‘serve local communities’ regardless of whether or not countries turned isolationalist.

The third scenario, ‘New Public Management’ is based on a mixed economy. Universities still depend on public funding, but most of their income is from student fees, supplemented by commercial activities in foreign education markets and arising from research patents, competitive research grants and other sources like businesses and private foundations. Universities are autonomous or private institutions, stratified and specialising in different research and teaching missions. They are steered by market forces and financial incentives and the ‘golden standards of good public governance’ - accountability, transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness and forward vision. This scenario resembles the one called ‘free market’ in the previous version, but now a fourth scenario called ‘Higher Education Inc.’ is based on the establishment of free trade in higher education under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). While the most prestigious institutions continue to be supply-driven and managed through peer assessment, the majority are demand-driven, specialising in a segment of the research or teaching markets, and engaging in a fierce and world-wide competition for students and for research funding. Run with business-like methods, their fortunes depend heavily on international rankings. In other words, the market discourse has split in two, between the fourth scenario which depends on free trade and commercial imperatives to both fund and steer universities, and the third scenario where markets are important for funding universities, but governments still steer them, and institutions are given the autonomy (off-loaded responsibility) to reconcile those two imperatives with their traditional academic values of the free pursuit of knowledge.

Hall and other analysts of recent political transformations have argued that new managerialism, with its apparently neutral technologies of simulated markets, contracting out services, performance indicators and performance payments, is the vehicle through which neo-liberal ideology informs institutional and professional practices. OECD’s four scenarios signal a step change. The ‘Higher Education Inc’ model (Scenario 4) that the Danish Minister supported would be governed and managed through actual markets and commitments to free trade, shedding the pretence of traditional academic values, and removing government funding, social agendas (such as widening opportunities, equity or the public good) and any brakes on market steering. ‘New Public Management’ (Scenario 3) becomes a model in its own right and appears to be a much more moderate alternative, based on a mixed economy and combining responsiveness to markets with government steering and university autonomy – it even assumes the garb of tradition to which it was previously opposed.

The double shuffle continues. An ordered hierarchy of partner discourses is still drawn from opposing political discourses and used to maintain a double appeal to different publics, but the partners have changed. Initially a market discourse was in the lead position, supported by a ‘traditional’ model of the university. Now an entirely free market discourse is taking the radical position, and new public management steps into the reassuring support position, leaving the traditional model of the university ridiculed on the side-lines. What we have witnessed is the shift of subordinate discourses as they are constantly transformed to support the growing ideological dominance of the free market discourse.

A challenge for university leaders

The evolving descriptions of new futures for the university, as we have followed them through policy documents from the OECD, persistently claim that the two sides of the double shuffle, the ever-more market orientated vision, and the collegial governance and critical values, can be reconciled. But rarely do the documents say who has this responsibility and how it can be done. Mostly the documents deploy the linguistic strategy of turning a future scenario into a present claim, as if their reconciliation is already the case. The report, Redefining Tertiary Education, clearly passes the ball out of OECD’s court:

The challenge to countries, not just governments, is to formulate and implement policies that at best produce a resolution of these complex issues, including a new forward-looking synthesis, drawing constructively on the diverse interests (OECD 1998: 46).

More precisely, the report hands the responsibility down to university leaders, claiming that if they are sufficiently ‘insightful, knowledgeable and imaginative’ the difficulties of reconciling the two models ‘can be overcome’ (OECD 1998: 83).

Other OECD documents provide guidance to leaders about how to introduce the new forms of management and achieve the changes associated with the market vision of universities. An example is On the Edge: Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (OECD 2004c) which shares best practice on financial management and governance of higher education institutions. The publication calls on leaders to manage their universities in a way that takes account of the changing context of university activities drawn up in the OECD policy work referred to above. The report does not sustain the double shuffle: indeed it starts with a quotation that bluntly negates the validity of the supporting discourse about the traditional university:

The University is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe as in centuries past. It is a big, complex, demanding, competitive business requiring large-scale ongoing investment (OECD 2004c: Foreword p. 3).

The foreword further states that:

The challenge for governments is to ensure that increasingly autonomous and market-driven institutions respond to public interest agendas, at national and regional levels, while also taking a greater responsibility for their own financial sustainability. The challenge for institutions is to manage a more complex portfolio of aims and funding; to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive environment; and to protect and maintain academic quality and their ability to deliver over the long term (ibid.).

The new broader agenda of demands put on universities in the knowledge economy is summarised in the report as: 1. Up-skilling the population and Life-long learning, 2. Social inclusion, widening participation, citizenship skills, 3. Economic development, 4. Regional policy, 4. Cultural development and regeneration, 5. Knowledge-based developments and 6. Research and development, especially in science, technology and medicine (OECD 2004c: 13). It is the role of university leaders to ensure their institutions deliver on all these expectations, as well as securing their institutions’ sustainability in new systems for funding and accountability. The report suggests university managers ask themselves:

• Have we developed an integrated management team in which the academic and non-academic managers respect each others’ contribution and share a common set of values and objectives?

• Are our academic strategies informed and supported by the most professional management skills in the financial, estates, personnel and systems areas?

• Do our strategies enable us to develop and grow our position in the market, playing to our strengths rather than maintaining under-performing or historic activities?

• Are we taking greater responsibility for our own future, or are we still too dependent on decisions made outside the institution?

• Are we strong enough to deal with risks and contingencies which may threaten our sustainability?

• Are we developing our staff to become the strategic institutional managers of the future?” (OECD 2004c: 67).

The most important aspect of this checklist is the 'we', the repeated subject of the sentences. Saarinen (2008: 185-6) points out that the use of ‘we’ in such documents suggest complex relationships of inclusion and exclusion, authority and commonality. Here the OECD is ventriloquising a ‘we’ of the university speaking as its management, which, as it is stated in the report, is no longer ‘administering’, but now ‘managing’. The enactment of this ‘we’ is the challenge, accompanied by guidelines and examples of best practice, which is handed down by the OECD report to the national level and to individual universities.

This challenge, as Henry et al. (2001: 153) also point out, for managers to enact OECD’s vision of a future university responsive to market conditions and managerial demands, with attendant changes to curricula, new learning practices, and new skills and attitudes among students and academics, cannot be achieved either by edict or by following checklists at the national or the institution levels. Rather, it can only be achieved ‘through the creative utilisation of the imagination of all those who make up a university’ (Henry et al. 2001: 153) so that managers, academics and students own the process. But when the OECD or managers make such appeals to a common sense of ownership and commitment to their project, they invoke another ‘we’ of the university as a community of students and scholars with a will and a capacity to act.

As will be shown below, the inclusive ‘we’ and the exclusive ‘we’ can be in play simultaneously when the university as ‘we’ - the academic community - is urged to act passively within parameters set by the ‘we’ of those with new authority to speak for the university. This switching between ‘we’s’ softens the message. Similarly, rather than bluntly presenting the vision of the university as a ‘competitive business’ which has no truck with a ridiculed image of the university as a ‘quiet place’, this is where the double shuffle comes back in to play: a mobilisation of what sounds like traditional academic values and university missions in support of moves towards the market model. As we shall see in the example below, what university leaders require in their attempts to meet this new challenge for management is not always a brand new management, but, in Sassen’s terms, a repurposing of the capabilities of the ‘old’ management to the ‘new’ context.

The double-shuffle of the new university “we”

If the OECD, and national governments, continually push responsibility for dancing the double shuffle down to the universities themselves, this in practice means the university leadership has to find a way of articulating the vision of the free market university with its ‘traditional’ values. As mentioned in the introduction, the Danish university reform of 2003 ended a system of collegially or democratically elected leaders and brought in a system of appointed leaders who are accountable to a new governing board, which has a majority of members from outside of the institution. But not all was new. The new appointed leaders used the same titles (Rector, Dean, Department Head) as before, and the units (university, faculty, department) in the organisational structure remained unchanged. It is also typical that at most Danish universities the newly appointed rectors were native to the institution.

At the University of Copenhagen the newly appointed Rector, who had been Dean of the medical faculty under the previous governing structure, gave his version of the jump from administration to management in a speech to the 2006 Annual University Celebration. This is an important event in the annual calendar, when leaders, academics and students gather in the great hall and become visible as a university both to themselves, and to the Queen, government ministers and other dignitaries who are present. The event is the occasion for the Rector to assess the situation of his institution and present it both to members of the university and to the wider society. On this occasion, the Rector presented his vision for the university under the new governance regime that he was heading. The Rector’s speech exemplifies very well the challenge to the new leadership to maintain a double appeal to both the government’s (and OECD’s) new vision for the university, whilst also drawing on the many traditions of the University of Copenhagen, which are especially associated with that day.[iv] Saskia Sassen has shown how when old orders are breaking up and transforming into new organising logics, the working elements of the old orders - symbolic, organisational or technological – are re-appropriated to serve a new logic and create new meanings. The Annual University Celebration and the Rector’s speech illustrate how this leader drew all these three elements into his version of the double shuffle and demonstrate well how the push for reform is dependant on support from invoking the traditional meaning of symbolic, organisational and technological elements of the old order.

In the front row at this event traditionally sit the academic leaders of the university, deans, pro-rector and rector, wearing their ceremonial gowns. The front row in the 2006 Ceremony looked just the same as in previous years, under the old University Law. Only, under the old law, the university leaders sat there as the elected representatives of a community. They sat in front of those who, arrayed in rows behind them, had chosen them to lead. Now, even while wearing the same symbols and sitting in the same place, they sat as appointed leaders, not representing or responsible to the university community but accountable to the university’s governing board, which is now the institution’s highest authority.

The Rector also wore the same chain of office as always, but if its appearance remained the same, the ceremony at which it was bestowed on him, and by implication, its meaning, had changed. Under the former regime, the new Rector went from sitting among her peers, and, witnessed by the university deans, the previous Rector put the chain on the new Rector, and the new Rector took up her new position at the Rector’s desk. Meanwhile the previous Rector went to sit among his peers as a normal member of the academic community. In contrast, pictures of the 2006 annual university celebration show the Rector’s public relations assistant helping him arrange the chain and in a blog entry afterwards, the Rector described how the act of adorning himself with the chain of office prior to the celebration felt like putting on a costume which belonged to a former era. However, as we point out below, the continued use of the traditional symbols of the university community serves a crucial role in the promotion of the Rector’s new vision for the university. As was the case in the above analysis of policy documents, the image and symbols of the traditional university serve as key steps in the double shuffle of old and new models for the university, which the Rector engages in to push the reform of the University of Copenhagen forward.

In the speech, the Rector announced that the University of Copenhagen was going to deliver on the high expectations put forward by government in a recent new plan for allocating extra funds to the university sector. Copenhagen University would deliver top-end graduates, original research, compete for state funding on quality, compete world wide on quality, transfer knowledge back into secondary and primary education, deliver life long learning, and be an innovation hub. As he said, the university would, although their funding lagged behind Japanese and US competitors, aim to be among the world’s elite. ‘We’ he said - invoking not just the strategic capacity of his newly installed management, but also the broader ‘we’ of the academic community, which his garb signified - are going to achieve this. To conjure up an image of the inordinate effort and innovation required to find the new ways of doing things that this challenge required, he equated it to the revolutionary invention of the ‘back flop’ which changed forever the way to do competitive high jumping. The Rector was announcing a transformative moment in the management of the university, as well as a transformative moment for the meaning of the university community.

The Rector emphasised that, first and foremost, he wanted to succeed by making fundamental research the brand of the university. In order to achieve this he introduced in his speech a bottom-up strategy process to identify the future potential of the university and a plan to use international quality indicators to steer funds to high-performing academic employees in both research and education. Further, to stop its top students and graduates from running off to Ivy League schools, he would raise educational standards and introduce elite programs. The University of Copenhagen had to attract and keep more star professors and recruit more students and teachers on the global market, he said, and he joked that a sign saying ‘trespassers will be recruited’ should be hung up in Copenhagen - perhaps even in Hindi.

These promises from the Rector have since been rolled out as a “Programme of Excellence”, which reallocates funding from the university budget to support management-prioritised star-research projects. These are selected by the management on the basis of recommendations from a panel of international top researchers which reviews the projects. Further, a strategy unifying the whole of the university's activities in a ‘Roadmap to 2012’ has been set up, as well as elite education programs accredited by the Danish Accreditation Agency and awarded a special higher level of funding from the Government. Meanwhile the overall objectives for the university's performance have been organised in indicators agreed with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and passed down the university organisation in a hierarchy of performance contracts between rector and deans, and between deans and heads of departments. These management initiatives have been paralleled by a great communication effort to establish the University of Copenhagen as a perceived organisational whole and as an elite university with global impact. Researchers are now instructed to present themselves as coming from the University of Copenhagen and not the local unit with which they have usually been identified. The university also takes out advertisements in newspapers and has posters in the city which equate it with global elite institutions and academic lighthouses such as Yale, Oxford and Cambridge.

In this way, the Rector, dressed in the traditional way and invoking traditional academic values of fundamental research, set out to enact a strategic leadership for his university that would fulfil the government’s policy priorities through introducing new managing technologies that would make the University of Copenhagen succeed in the global knowledge economy. Indeed the managing technologies themselves were reinterpretations of traditional university technologies. Most significantly peer review, which through the excellence programme has been removed from its roots in academics’ own self-guarding of research quality and has been engaged as a tool for management prioritisation. Whilst presenting these visions of the new university, the traditional dress of the Rector lent its power to the unifying ‘we’ of the university that he invoked in his speech – as if his gown and chain still signified his representativeness of the voice of the academic community.

The Rector’s enactment of the double-shuffle that we found in the OECD documents, the strategy for mobilising and transmogrifying a subordinate, traditional discourse, in support of a dominant one, moving in an ever-more radical direction, was underlined when the Rector quoted Kant at the end of his speech. Aiming to summon up all the resources and energy of the university community in a concerted creation of the University of Copenhagen as a strategically acting organisation, the Rector ended his speech by stating that the university’s success in achieving its aims, and thereby living up to the government’s ambitions for it, was dependant on its ability to shape powerful visions for its future and actively define its own purpose in the light of outside forces. He went on to quote Kant so as to suggest the basis for the university’s jump into its own future:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man’s inability to use one’s own understanding without guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapera Aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!

The use of Kant’s words may seem a little misplaced as an attempt to rally the university community behind the Rector’s project. But in the light of the discussion in this chapter, they make their own kind of sense. Instead of it being the single citizen, academic or student of the enlightenment who is rising to autonomy and attaining self rule, the Rector is using Kant’s words to refer to the collective effort of the university in jumping into the global knowledge economy. The rebirth of the university at the time of the enlightenment is invoked by the Rector, but it is no longer for the individual to go to the university in the pursuit of freedom and knowledge. Here the subject rising from immaturity is the “we” of the university, meaning the collective effort orchestrated by management through planning and steering mechanisms that are to result in Copenhagen University’s leap into the global elite. So in this reference back to Kant’s project of enlightenment, the Copenhagen Rector manages not only to evoke the ideals of an imagined classic university and equate that with the present efforts of Copenhagen University. He also equates the present effort of the university management to construct a coherent organisation of Copenhagen University, and align the work of its employees with its strategic effort, with the enlightenment project of attaining self governance and autonomy (Ørberg 2007, Wright and Ørberg 2009). The transformation the Rector was announcing was one of organising and directing the capabilities of the university towards a new purpose, not one of leaving those capabilities behind. He was directing the university towards its competitive role in the global knowledge economy, as described by the OECD, but was also thereby inscribing its capabilities in a new competitive logic dominated by the OECD’s new public management checklist.

Conclusion

We have analysed the movement of the OECD’s agenda for reforming universities, both through time, as we followed the sequence of documents it produced, and through levels, as the OECD passed its agenda down to national governments, and on to university leaders. We have found parallel discourses, which are not sutured together or even reconciled: the one envisages a radical, strategically managed, economic utility or market model of the university; the other appeals to collegial management and the pursuit of critical analysis and knowledge for its own sake. In the OECD documents we have seen a double shuffle being danced, where at each step that the lead discourse takes in the direction of the market-driven university, it mobilises support through an appeal to traditional aspects of the university. As the lead discourse advances, the supporting discourse is gradually transformed in the same direction, but always looks more traditional than its lead partner. Thus the description of a ‘classic liberal’ university becomes a caricature of ‘universities as they are now’, and eventually disappears from the scenarios, so that the new public management university assumes the robe of tradition in relation to Higher Education Inc. This transformism generates the dynamic for ever more radical reform.

If the OECD conducts this double shuffle in terms of discourse, when the challenge of simultaneously enacting the two versions of the university is passed down to university leaders, they use an additional range of resources - symbols, organisational forms, and technologies. But in the example explored here, there is a similar strategy in terms of all these resources to the OECD’s double shuffle. While the lead step is always taking the direction of the strategically managed, market-driven university, the image which is conjured up though its supporting symbols and technologies is a modified version of the very traditional institutions that the step is meant as a departure from. The new management at the University of Copenhagen not only uses the language of the traditional university to deliver the new, it also lets the new present itself through the symbols of the old, and redeploys the steering technologies of the traditional university to serve the purpose and logic of the new managerial university.

Returning to the situation which introduced this chapter, perhaps the narration above makes it more understandable that the Danish Minister of Education’s embrace of the free market future as the most beneficial for universities could cause such furore. What the Minister did was bluntly accept a radical departure from the contemporary western university – thereby refusing the game of the slow adjustment of the existing institutions- the double-shuffle dance through which reform moves. The politically self-assured Minister in a sense stepped outside the rules of the game; but perhaps his minority vote set in motion a whole new series of steps in the double shuffle aimed at advancing in the direction of his radical vision by finding new accommodations with the mainstream reform agenda.

References

GODIN, B. (n.d.) The Knowledge-Based Economy: Conceptual Framework or Buzzword? Canadian Science and Innovation Indicators Consortium.

HALL, S. (2003) New Labour's double-shuffle. Soundings: a journal of politics and culture, 24, 10-24.

HARVEY, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell.

HENRY, M., LINGARD, B., RIZVI, F. & TAYLOR, S. (2001) The OECD, Globalisation, and Education Policy, Oxford, Pergamon.

MINISTRY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION (2003) Danish Universities in Transition. Background Report to the OECD Examiners' Panel. Copenhagen, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

MINISTRY OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION (2004) OECD-evaluering af det danske universitetssystem – Resumé af anbefaling – Igangværende og planlagte initiativer fra Ministeriet for Videnskab, Teknologi og Udvikling. Copenhagen, Ministeriet for Videnskab, Teknologi og Udvikling.

OECD (1974) Towards Mass Higher Education, Paris: OECD.

OECD (1998) Redefining Tertiary Education, Paris, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

OECD (2004a) Reviews of National Policies for Education: University Education in Denmark - Examiners' Report. Paris, OECD.

OECD (2004b) National Review of Educational R&D: Examiners' Report on Denmark, Paris: OECD.

OECD (2004c) On the Edge: Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education, Paris: OECD.

OECD (2005) Six scenarios for universities. OECD/CERI Experts Meeting on 'University Futures and New Technologies'. Washington: World Bank.

OECD (2006) Four futures scenarios for higher education. Higher Education: Quality, Equity and Efficiency. Meeting of OECD Ministers of Education. Athens, Greece.

SAARINEN; Taina 2008 'Whose quality? Social actors in the interface of transnational and national higher education policy' Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29 (2): 179-193.

SASSEN, S. (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

STAGE, I. (2006) Den danske syge - kommentar. Magisterbladet, 12.

TAYLOR, W. (1987) Universities Under Scrutiny, Paris: OECD.

VINCENT-LANCRIN, S. (2004) Building futures scenarios for universities and higher education: an international approach. Policy Futures in Education, 2 (2), 245-263.

WRIGHT, S. and ØRBERG, J. W. 2009 'Paradoxes of the self: self-owning universities in a society of control' in E. Sørensen and P. Triantafillou (eds) The Politics of Self-Governance, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

ØRBERG, J. W. (2007) Who Speaks for the University? Legislative frameworks for Danish university leadership 1990-2003 Working Papers on University Reform, no. 5, Copenhagen: Danish School of Education, May.

Notes

-----------------------

[i] The project ‘New Management, New Identities? Danish University Reform in an International Perspective’ ran from 2004 to 2008, funded by the Danish Research Council. Other team members were Gritt B. Nielsen and John B. Krejsler of the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University and Stephen Carney of Roskilde University.

[ii] ‘"Why, weasel words are words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell." Thus, weasel words suck the meaning out of a statement while seeming to keep the idea intact, and are particularly associated with political pronouncements. Weasel words are used euphemistically. The term invokes the image of a weasel being sneaky and well able to wiggle out of a tight spot.’

[iii] I am very grateful to Signe Pildal Hansen and Taina Saarinen for clarification of the concept of presupposition and to Taina Saarinen for very helpful comments and suggestions on the whole text.

[iv] This event is associated, not least, with challenges to systems of university governance. It was at the Annual University Celebration in 1968 that a student managed to grab control of the rostrum during the Rector’s speech, and famously declared the students’ rebellion against professorial rule. This set in motion events that led to the 1970 University Law, which brought in an elected or collegial governance structure. It was this elected system that was finally replaced by the 2003 University Law.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download