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Dewatripoint, Mathias; Thys-Clément, François
& Wilkin, Luc. (Eds.). (2002). European Universities:
Change and Convergence? Brussels, Belgium: Editions de
l’Université de Bruxelles.
Pp. 248
€28.50 (Paper) ISBN 2-8004-1281-X
Reviewed by Marc Cutright
Ohio University
August 23, 2003
European Universities: Change and Convergence? is an
anthology with an ambitious agenda, to address the challenges
that universities face in the emergence of a more unified Europe
and the attendant emergence of multinational priorities and roles
for those universities. The collection includes contributions
from a conference on the future of universities, convened at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles in early 2001. This is the
second book to emerge from that conference; it regrettably seems
that the conference was overmined for publication. Despite an
international roster of authors from a variety of disciplines,
and the efforts of editors Mathias Dewatripont, Françoise
Thys-Clément and Luc Wilkin to gather dispersed and
irregular contributions into five themes—the functioning of
university systems, assessment of academic performances, response
to societal needs, governance systems, and teaching and research
networking strategies—the result is largely unsatisfying.
Too many pieces are of essentially local interest and focus, too
few demands have been placed on authors for completion of
promising article starts—one such piece is little more than
an outline of bullet points without elaboration—and too few
pieces are gathered within each theme to give us a sense of
thematic distinction, import or trend. Nonetheless, a few
chapters are worthy of note in their more expansive perspectives,
or because of their insight into national circumstances with
international implications.
Josep M. Bricall is a political economist at the University of
Barcelona. His is a reasonable summary of the text’s
overall ambitions, and he does a fair job of summarizing the
context of change in European—and
other—universities. He holds that the responses of the
university community to change have been ad hoc rather than
strategic. Among those challenges he cites are technological
changes, broadly encompassing everything from post-Industrial
Revolution means of production to information and communication
technologies; the diversification of the student body to include
several categories of nontraditional students; the emergence of
the service economy; “new managerialism”; tighter
public budgets coupled with new demands of accountability for
these lessened funds; and the enlargement of the framework of
higher education, a “spilling over” of traditional
administrative, structural, and national boundaries. What might
lend particular challenge to universities in Europe is the
declared intention of greater continental integration and even
specialization by governments and their universities, as
exemplified by several continental Declarations of recent years
(e.g., Sorbonne, Bologna, and Lisbon). If the diagnosis seems
somewhat obvious to those who have followed the developments of
higher education in recent decades, the prescriptions might seem
a bit unoriginal as well. Universities, we are told, should more
openly and courageously engage their stakeholders, strike a
balance between vocationalism and science, reinvigorate humanism
for better integration of knowledge, and embrace life-long
education delivery for students. The chapter’s superficial
treatment of these many elements suggests that the reader would
have been better served if Bricall had bitten off less and chewed
it more thoroughly, but that appears not to have been his
charge.
Michael Reed of Britain’s Lancaster University begins
his chapter on the new managerialism with a review of the
concept’s recent development and actualization in UK and US
contexts, enunciating an engaging critical theory of its roots
and intentions, and its transmutation into university
governance. At base, Reed holds that this trend is a transfer of
direction and evaluation to external forces, and that it is
resulting in a transformation of the institution as a place of
work rather than a community of scholars.
From here, Reed goes to his research and that of his
colleagues at Lancaster, who have explored how “manager
academics” in Great Britain view themselves, and are viewed
by others, in this context. From the interviews—in which
scholars frequently air the suspicion or charge that manager
academics seek out managerial positions due to a lack of academic
competence—Reed draws several conclusions. He foresees
that “delicately negotiated trade-offs between professional
power and bureaucratic control” are likely to give way to
“a much more virulent strain of managerialism that
doesn’t have much time or respect for the niceties of
academic traditionalism and all its incumbent limitations on the
unfettered exercise of managerial prerogative” (p. 79).
Among the implications Reed sees presently and fears for the
future is “the reconstruction of higher education as a
commodity-providing service in which educational needs and
priorities are reduced to codified and measurable performance
indicators and outcomes” (p. 80). A limitation of
Reed’s chapter is the brisk and somewhat cursory
description of the research upon which his case is based; we
could have used more, including more direct quotes from
institutional actors.
Stéphanie Mignot-Gérard and Christine Musselin
present a well-executed and intriguing study of French
universities and their transition from weak administrations to
significant presidential authority. Until recent decades,
faculties enjoyed high autonomy, to the point of dealing directly
with the government on funding and other issues. The 1990s
particularly saw the emergence of a stronger presidential role in
French universities, expanded to the “president’s
team” of vice presidents and other nonacademic, central
administrators. Originally empowered by such matters as the
coordination of technology and budgetary efficiency, these
offices and teams increasingly exert influence and power in such
matters as curriculum and academic personnel evaluation. Between
these classic approaches and camps have fallen the deans of
faculties. Are these individuals, the researchers sought to
know, regarded as members of the president’s administrative
team? Or are they, reflecting their term appointments by election
of the faculties, figures of primus inter pares, and
allied first and foremost with their disciplinary colleagues?
The authors surveyed thousands of faculty members, and their
deans and presidents, on a variety of questions about authority
and appropriate role. Contradictions abound, but some patterns
emerge. Deans, faculties, central administration, and presidents
alike see the dean’s role as “representatives of the
interests of their faculty.” It appears to be a
“motherhood” issue in the abstract. But on the more
concrete circumstance of whether deans should defend the
interests of their faculties in university strategies, support
remained high among deans and academics, but falls to under
majority among presidents and presidential team members. Some
86% of deans said that “deans should belong to the
president’s team”—while only 61% of presidents
agreed. The authors conclusions include: “Presidents
rarely consider their deans as partners in the university
government: they see them more as actors to enroll or to avoid
and…much more of a constraint than a help in the implement
of university strategies” (p. 137). The implications for
more managerialism in France and elsewhere are several, not the
least among them is that individuals thinking of accepting
deanships or other positions bridging the academic-managerial gap
might be well advised to look carefully at the role,
expectations, and future of the position—and even its
career survivability—as managerialism grows stronger.
The virtually international practice of rankings of
universities is Michael Shattock’s topic, with focus on
universities in the United Kingdom. Shattock, of the University
of London, compares a variety of newspaper and other rankings
generated in the UK, with a focus on the comparison of teaching
quality and research productivity. With few deviations, the
standings of the top ten or so universities hold intact,
regardless of the ranking topic. Shattock attributes this in
part to the fact that most of these universities have roots going
back to the Middle Ages, or at least some centuries, and the
“halo” effect that ensues in the attraction of
quality to quality. But he also sees affirmation in these
rankings of the compatibility of research and teaching, so often
and spuriously put at odds, and affirmation of the academic
cultures from which these institutions sprang. “They have
all adapted to the changing environment but they have not changed
their core institutional values and are recognizably the same
institutions as they were 15 years ago…,” when
research success began to be more transparently defined and
publicized (p. 172).
The contribution by Americans Sheila Slaughter and Larry
Leslie is a disappointment, made more acute by the fact that they
intended it to “expand” (p. 57) on the ideas
developed in their landmark work, Academic Capitalism
(1997). The basic argument is that academic capitalism surfaces
in varied and irregular ways within a university; so far, so
good. The authors attempt to illustrate this through two sector
examples, the recruitment of undergraduate students, and the
treatment of intellectual property rights and patents by
universities and the courts. The latter domain is illustrated by
a very few, virtually anecdotal examples of court cases, from
which the authors draw the conclusions that universities are
increasingly concerned with and aggressive about establishing and
defending such property rights, and that students are variously
considered in these arguments and cases by the university, to the
university’s immediate property advantage. What we are to
conclude from this sampling of cases is unclear. Even more
unclear is the state of law in the US, based as it is largely on
legal decision precedent; we have references to “the
Court,” but only sporadic clarification of the
court’s jurisdiction, and no connection or lineage among
the cases.
The argument on the capitalistic bents and implications of
student recruitment in the US is even muddier. Slaughter and
Leslie note correctly the investment in student recruitment
strategies in the US—although this is hardly news—and
the direct use of marketing language and reference such as
“brand name” and “selling” the
institution. But the authors suggest that this packaging is a bit
of a lie, a bait-and-switch proposition, holding that marketing
budgets have expanded, “while service budgets (counseling,
remediation, recreation) diminished” (p. 60). This
assertion, made without evidence, will likely come as a bit of a
surprise to colleges and universities that have sunk billions of
dollars into state-of-the-art fitness centers, anywhere-anytime
Internet access for students, special efforts to increase the
retention and success of first-year students, supplementary
instruction in high-risk courses, learning communities, retention
and support programs for minority and at-risk students, and so
on. (Slaughter and Leslie’s own University of Arizona in
2002 dedicated a 120,000-square-foot Integrated Learning Center,
dedicated to first-year and other undergraduate student success,
conducted in an advanced technological environment
[http://www.ilc.arizona.edu/].)
Perhaps the most over-the-top assertion—again made
without evidence, a deficiency that repeatedly weakens the
article—is that if affirmative action is dismantled,
education “will have almost no constraints” (p. 61)
on admission based on the ability to pay, using subsidies from
the “dumb rich” (p. 60) to offer
scholarships—tuition discounts—to talented
middle-class students, in order to get the “good mix”
of students who will one day become donating alumni, hike up US News
& World Report standings, or at least reflect
professional credit and prestige back on the institution. This
redistribution of funds has been thoughtfully discussed, with
nuance and qualification, by Brewer, Gates, and Goldman (2001).
But the idea that universities have a property interest in the
weakening of affirmative action, an interest that trumps all
other concerns, is an odd case for Slaughter and Leslie to make
in light of the fact that recent, landmark decisions on
affirmative action from the US Supreme Court cast the University
of Michigan as the frontline defender of affirmative action in
the US. Moreover, this position was publicly supported by amicus
briefs and other means by hundreds of other US colleges,
universities, and higher education system, making clear that
higher education is among the strongest proponents of affirmative
action, often in defiance of the political cultures in which
institutions operate.
If the authors seek villains for the
increasing difficulty
that the poor and minorities face in attaining a college
education, they might find better suspects in state and federal
governments, who have, as Slaughter and Leslie note, decreased
funding to institutions of higher education, but who have not, as
Slaughter and Leslie suggest has occurred, transferred this
support in any substantial or systematic way to students as
virtual vouchers, unless one wishes to characterize the
endorsement of five- and six-figure loan indebtedness as
support.
References
Brewer, D. J., Gates, S. M., and Goldman, C.A. (2001). In
pursuit of prestige: Strategy and competition in U.S. higher
education. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism:
Politics, policies and the entrepreneurial university.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
About the Reviewer
Marc Cutright is an assistant professor of higher education
at Ohio University, and a research fellow of the Policy Center on
the First Year of College.
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