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:
1The legal status of universities – to become ‘self-owning’ institutions
2Their governance – the establishment of Governing Boards
3Their management – the appointment of leaders at all levels
4The 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 visionfor 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 influencedDanish 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).