Reform and governance in higher education

Review article Reform and governance in higher education Ehrenberg, Ronald G. (ed.). 2004. Governing academia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 315 pp. Pb.: $21.00. ISBN: 10-978-6543-1. Huisman, Jeroen (ed.). 2009. International perspectives on the governance of higher education. Alternative frameworks for coordination. London: Routledge. 269 pp. Hb.: $150.00/£75.00. ISBN: 978-0-41598933-6. Barnett, Ronald. 2003. Beyond all reason. Living with ideology in the university. Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. 218 pp. Pb.: £27.99. ISBN: 0-33520893-2. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1997. Cultivating humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 320 pp. Pb.: $28.50. ISBN: 0-674-17949-8. The last quarter of a century has seen waves of reform in higher education (HE) around the globe. No less striking are the similarities in terms of language, aims and instruments across these reforms. 1 A relatively independent – institutionally ‘pillarized’ – and simple organization with a short list of tasks (teaching and research) and occasionally a good wine cellar was to be turned into a multi-tasking engine of economic growth within the ‘knowledge economy’: relevant, engaged, internationally competitive, excellent, entrepreneurial. In a mood that occasionally approached what Albert Hirschman (1991) has dubbed ‘fracasomania’ (failure complex) – the belief that the existing system has so irredeemably failed that only its wholesale restructuring can bring about improvement – the old structures, designed to reproduce scholarly traditions and train elites, were no longer thought fit for purpose; no longer up to the new challenges and opportunities. Nor were they providing value for taxpayers’ money. The reform impulse of policy makers and politicians was given an intellectual frame and programme by ideas emerging from the universities themselves, and specifically from the social sciences, notably new public management (NPM). Like other public service providers, universities were to be simultaneously exposed to market discipline and subject to stricter and more transparent systems of accountability and audit (Strathern 2000). These new instruments of control were, paradoxically, introduced in the name of ‘autonomy’ (Olsen 2009). Universities were to be freed from the direct control of the state in return for which they were to increase efficiency and demonstrate improvement in audits of teaching 1 See KITE 2009 for a useful comparison and review. C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2010) 18, 1 83–89.  doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00091.x 83 84 ALAN SCOTT quality and research output and impact. To further facilitate this, the office of the VC/Rector/President was to be remodelled in the image of the CEO, competition between universities was to be encouraged and league tables were to become powerful instruments for concentrating the minds of academics and university managers alike (see Sauder and Espeland 2009). Within the universities themselves, these developments were frequently accompanied by a Greek chorus in which any change was denounced as a threat both to genuine autonomy (coded as ‘academic freedom’) and the traditional practices necessary for maintaining, again genuine, standards. In a wise and witty article published in the London Review of Books, Stefan Collini warned against: . . . either falling into the absurdity of suggesting that everything would be all right if we could just go back to universities as they were c.1953, or the equal absurdity of proposing that more ruthless cost-cutting and more aggressive marketing could soon have HiEdbizUK plc showing healthy profits for shareholders. (Collini 2003) The works covered in this literature review by-and-large avoid these extremes. They come from the burgeoning field of higher education studies and seek both to analyse university governance as one would any other socio-political phenomenon and, in some cases, to develop policy alternatives to NPM that acknowledge the weaknesses of the traditional model of the university while remaining sceptical of the claims made for the currently hegemonic alternative; neither the university c.1953, nor the brave new world of HiEdbiz plc. The first of these works is Ronald G. Ehrenberg’s collection Governing Academia (2004). A more accurate title would have been ‘Governing US Academia’ as the focus is exclusively on universities in the USA. There are, for example, two chapters on the role of boards of trustees in university governance which, while highly informative, are likely to be of interest primarily to those concerned with the particularities of the US system (though the recent reform packages of some Continental HE systems have imported this model, or rather local interpretations of it, making this discussion somewhat more relevant to European scholars). Other chapters, while using US cases, make more general arguments. For example, Thomas Hammond develops a very detailed case against the influential view that university governance is largely a matter of ‘organized anarchy’ (Cohen and March 1974). Hammond’s argument is that the formal hierarchical organization of universities – the variable delineation of their basic building blocks (i.e. departments) and the arrangements of these into faculties, etc. – has a material effect upon the governance of academic institutions. Organizational charts matter because they affect the ‘information set’ transmitted upwards to senior managers, which in turn influences management decisions. Thus, universities organized differently in terms of their formal structures will not respond in a like fashion to similar or identical issues, for example of resource allocation. The main reason for including this collection in this review is, however, a single, and in my view remarkable, chapter by the political economist/political scientist Susanne Lohmann: ‘Darwinian medicine for the university’. Lohmann’s analysis is influenced by evolutionary psychology, but those wary of that perspective should note that in order to follow the argument one only really needs to accept the distinction between ‘defences’ and ‘defects’, and the view that defences can easily become defects. What Lohmann  C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. R E F O R M A N D G OV E R N A N C E I N H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N 85 does with this simple premise is quite striking. Her argument, much simplified, is that disciplines have been the source of the great success of the university since the Middle Ages because they build walls around, and thus protect, ‘deep specialization’, and it is to the latter that we all owe much of our success. However, the very same walls also protect defunct disciplinary areas and thus contribute to the ossification of university structures: ‘what makes the university strong makes it weak’ (78). This has two broad implications: one conservative, one reforming. The conservative principle is that since inflexibility is a necessary effect of that which makes the university work at all, it cannot simply be abolished through acts of reformist will. Holistic reform will either fail because the self-reproduction of disciplines is stronger, or it will succeed but at the cost of damaging the mechanisms that protect deep specialists from each other and from the outside world. The reformist principle is that in order to stave off the worst effects of ossification the mechanism of disciplinary self-reproduction cannot be left to run on autopilot. The problems of university governance also stem from the nature of scholarly work itself which, most of the time, fails, leaving a large pool of frustrated (but usually tenured) staff within the institution and creating a problem that Lohmann, rather brutally, identifies as ‘what should we do with the empties?’ (83). Furthermore, departments are prone to Balkanization which can produce a stand off between sub-groups; a cast-iron guarantee of quick ossification. Lohmann’s antipathy towards holistic reform leads her to make a series of pragmatic suggestions as to how these problems can be addressed. Thus, with respect to frustrated faculty, she emphasises the need to remove them from positions in which they have a de facto veto on decisions, and ideally find them alternative tasks (in teaching or in administration) from which they can draw satisfaction and in which they can take pride. With respect to Balkanization, Lohmann recommends ‘logrolling’ (in this case, a mutual arrangement in which each interest group gets a turn in appointing without interference from the others) as a solution to deep-seated departmental conflicts of interest. But, given that the problems of university governance have their roots in the nature of the university itself, they are wicked and can, at best, be ameliorated. Much of the time, Lohmann argues, individual institutions will ossify and the next wave of innovation will come from elsewhere. Her analysis is a useful counterweight to overblown claims made for reform and ‘good governance’ while avoiding hand wringing. The lack of a comparative element in the Ehrenberg collection is partly made good by the volume edited by Jeroen Huisman, International Perspectives on the Governance of Higher Education (2009). 2 Huisman’s aim was to bring together those researching university governance and change from across Europe (plus contributions from the US and Australia) to provide the basis of comparative analysis. If, as asserted above, there is a striking similarity in the aims and instruments of reform, then there is also considerable diversity of starting points and outcomes. Huisman’s volume emphasises these differences of context and nuance. In addition, the volume seeks to locate HE governance in a wider context in which political steering is increasingly ‘shared’ between state and non-state actors. Giving universities greater ‘autonomy’, encouraging them to be more entrepreneurial and competitive, to collaborate more with external ‘stakeholders’ and cover more of their own costs is part of this larger shift in the nature of political steering, or, if you prefer, a further stage of neo-liberalization. These 2 As one of the contributors, I should declare an interest here.  C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 86 ALAN SCOTT issues are usefully sketched by António Magalhães and Alberto Amaral (‘Mapping out discourses in higher education governance’) and well illustrated in David Smith’s and Jonathan Adams’s comparison of UK and Australian higher education and in Michael McLendon’s and James Hearn’s account of the role of the state in US higher education. The issues addressed by the contributors are closely related, giving the volume its thematic coherence, but the theoretical positions upon which the individual chapters draw are quite diverse. Several use the work of Guy Peters on governance (e.g. the Magalhães and Amaral paper), others turn to neo-institutionalism (e.g. the Smith and Adams paper), while yet others (e.g. Sue Wright’s and Jakob Ørberg’s insightful paper on reform in Denmark) draw on anthropology. But it would be a surprise if a volume of fifteen chapters (many of which are multi-authored) were to offer a single coherent framework. What it does offer are very useful case studies that provide by themselves a guide to central developments within (‘Western’) national HE systems, and cumulatively a comparative picture of similarities and, more especially, differences across these systems. The challenge of providing a unified and coherent general framework for understanding the nature of the contemporary university has been taken up by Ronald Barnett in a series of works examining various facets of higher education. One of the latest – Beyond All Reason (2003) – examines the role of ideology. Barnett argues that the university is, and always was, ideologically saturated. Now, however, with the multiplication of its tasks and growing expectations, it contains a veritable menagerie of ideological positions. It should be noted that Barnett strips the concept of ideology of connotations of false consciousness and understands it as a form of ‘voluntary servitude’ (borrowing from Rosen 1996). He further argues that the idea of the university as a single coherent entity – as universitas – in unsustainable in the light of the diversity of its activities. There is little in common, in terms of interest, practice or type of subject, between, say, those studying for professional qualifications, those undertaking basic research in the natural sciences, or those beavering away in the archives. The university is a complex, or ‘super complex’, organization. The strength of Barnett’s approach is that he is fully aware that one cannot tell a simple story about complexity. Thus, for example, after noting the role of tightening surveillance of academic work and the potential threat this poses to academic freedom, he notes: ‘but we should open ourselves to the possibility that academic freedom may be expanding’ (46) and goes on to list examples: the recruitment of non-traditional students, contact via the internet with a worldwide academic community, etc. This ‘sociological ambivalence’ is reminiscent of Georg Simmel’s view that any modernization entails both a levelling out of differences and greater individualization. But Barnett has a normative agenda of his own. If we cannot distinguish ideology from non-ideology, can we at least distinguish ‘virtuous’ from ‘pernicious’ ideologies? He proposes a schema illustrated in figure one. Even if one accepts the virtuous/pernicious distinction, the obvious objection here is the location of these terms along these axes is not stable. ‘Disciplinarity’, for example, is conservative and virtuous when it defends academic standards, but conservative and pernicious when it protects defunct areas of activity (Lohmann’s point) or, worse still, when it degenerates into games of identity politics. But Barnett anticipates such a criticism by considering the virtuous and pernicious usages of the same terms, thus relativising the distinction. The price of this move is that the categories  C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. R E F O R M A N D G OV E R N A N C E I N H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N 87 Figure 1 Barnett’s ‘two axes of ideology’ Source: Barnett 2003: 61 become slippery, but it does at least enable him to identify ‘engagement’ as the notion around which an alternative discourse could emerge. Here he, in a self-consciously utopian move, envisages the possibility of a new conversation that shifts the terms of the debate away from ‘quality’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ and towards engagement with a fuller range of stakeholders (including the one key stakeholder often left out of the debate: the students). This conversation is not to be a cosy one; indeed he presents it in a way that both managers and academics will find uncomfortable in places. The difficulty with even such a tough-minded utopia is that it creates a similar paradox to that identified by Rousseau in the case of constitutions: the reform that the conversation should bring about would already need to be in place in order for that conversation to happen. But some political crises do indeed produce a constitutional moment, and I suspect that Barnett’s view is that if we carry on as we are now a genuine ‘reform moment’ may emerge from just such a crisis of institutional legitimation. Even if one doubts or is sceptical of Barnett’s positive proposals (though those so inclined should at least acknowledge the importance of going beyond ‘critique’), there is much here that is of interest. Barnett has thought long and hard about university governance and his analysis of the current situation – e.g. of the state’s role as sponsor of quasi markets – is well argued and insightful. One of Barnett’s aims is to defend some of the virtues and values of the traditional university (not least ‘reason’) without slipping into, to borrow another phrase from Hirschman, the ‘rhetoric of reaction’. This is an aim he shares with Martha Nussbaum in her Cultivating Humanity (1997). The reason for including such a relatively old, and very established, text in this literature review is that, like Barnett’s text, it offers some pointers to those who want to move the conversation on beyond the parameters in  C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 88 ALAN SCOTT which it currently conducted. In some respects, Nussbaum’s book is indeed dated. It is an intervention into the so-called ‘culture wars’ in US academia in the 1990s, but remains of interest beyond this local, and somewhat parochial, context. Nussbaum’s strategy is determinedly paradoxical: a defence of new (‘minority’) areas of teaching and research such as women’s studies and African-American studies on the grounds, but also on the condition, that they foster classical virtues: the self-examined and autonomous life of the world citizen. Nussbaum, one of America’s foremost classicists, appeals to the standards of Socratic dialogue and to the stoics to argue that the aim ‘to confront the passivity of the pupil, challenging the mind to take charge of its own thoughts’ (28) can be realized through the kind of detailed and serious confrontations with other forms of life that is undertaken in these new areas of study. She also makes the patriotic move of praising the US tradition in which students are exposed to a liberal and general education at university level. By defending these areas of study via an appeal to classical principles Nussbaum risked pleasing no one or antagonizing everyone. The cultural Right was bound to be hostile to any defence of the new areas of the humanities, while her potential allies could just as easily be alienated by an approach which refused to question the universality of those standards. Her argument was both too relativist for some, and not relativist enough for others. But these are not the aspects of the book that I wish to highlight here. Rather, it is the strategy that Nussbaum adopted that remains useful. Firstly, she tries to refocus attention on a core function of the university: teaching. What kind of human subject should we be trying to shape? Secondly, she seeks to shift the debate away from the material benefits that universities produce as side effects of their core activities back onto those activities themselves; onto their intrinsic (including ethical) worth rather than their extrinsic benefit. Finally, aware of the limitations of her own experience (largely confined to elite US universities), she undertook research in a variety of institutions. What she reports back is sometimes rather partial: she was clearly looking for good news (even heroic) stories from the field to bring back home. Nevertheless, it has taken a philosopher to point out the need to examine closely the everyday practices within a plurality of institutions that have the name ‘university’ in common. This review provides just a flavour of a considerable body of work on higher education. The best of that work seeks to go beyond the mere critique of the NPM paradigm that has been dominant during this period. The authors discussed here are trying initiate a conversation about university governance in which due weight is given to the university’s wider obligations without losing sight of its specific core tasks. What is at stake is not merely efficiency – value for money – but the legitimation of the university as a place of learning and research in a context in which neither cultural deference nor Humboldt’s ‘Kulturstaat’ are there to sustain it. Alan Scott Department of Sociology University of Innsbruck Universitaetsstrasse 15 A-6020 Innsbruck Austria alan.scott@uibk.ac.at  C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. R E F O R M A N D G OV E R N A N C E I N H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N 89 References Cohen, Michael, D. and James, G. March. 1974. Leadership and ambiguity: the American college president. New York: McGraw-Hill. Collini, Stefan. 2003. ‘HiEdBiz’, London Review of Books, 25 (21). Online: http://www.lrb.co.uk/ v25/n21/coll01_.html (accessed 12 September 2009). Hirschman, Albert, O. 1991. The rhetoric of reaction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. KITE 2009. Characterising modes of university engagement with wider society. A literature review and survey of best practice. Final report, 10th June 2009. Newcastle: Office of the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Engagement), University of Newcastle, UK. Online: http://www.tufts.edu/talloiresnetwork/ downloads/Characterisingmodesofuniversityengagementwithwidersociety.pdf (accessed 12 September 2009). Olsen, Johan, P. 2009. ‘Democratic government, institutional autonomy and the dynamics of change’, West European Politics 32: 439–65. Rosen, Michael. 1996. On voluntary servitude. False consciousness and the theory of ideology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sauder, Michael and Wendy N. Espeland. 2009. ‘The discipline of rankings: tight coupling and organizational change’, American Sociological Review 74: 63–82. Strathern, Marilyn. (ed.) 2000. Audit cultures. Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. London: Routledge.  C 2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists.