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Introduction

Not so long ago, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, a good colleague mischievously claimed that more studies had been made on Bologna than on the Great Napoleon. As a scientific observation, it was neither plausible nor credible. However, it served a more latent purpose and it served it well: it caused many somnolent experts to surface from a deep – but mercifully not terminal – torpor. Happily, our optimist was not a historian, though to offset this lacuna one has to admit the individual concerned was extraordinarily well versed in the arcana of the Bologna process and perhaps for that very reason, had never heard of Herr Friedrich Kircheisen. In the earlier part of the previous century, Herr Kircheisen was one of Germany’s leading spirits in Napoleoniana and a regular contributor to the Bibliographie napoléonienne, a semi-hagiographical ongoing work of reference, which first appeared in the France of 1902. It continued over the subsequent years right up to the start of the Great War. Through this work of incomparable erudition, Herr Kircheisen and his French colleagues set themselves the stupendous task of cataloguing all that had been written on the Corsican Ogre. And indeed, the imperial score was impressive.

Already by 1870 – over 100,000 tomes, volumes, books, brochures, pamphlets, fly leaves and wicked libels, chronicled and analysed the deeds and misdeeds of the Great Man (Geyl 1976). Not as numerous as today’s writings on dieting, child-raising, sex or football, but impressive even so.

The point I want to develop in this chapter does not involve drawing tendentious analogues between Bologna and the Berezina, still less to make parallels between the emerging European Higher Education Area, the European Research Area and the Retreat from Moscow. Rather, I shall pose an ancient and well-exercised question that most historians find themselves having to tackle by the nature of their trade – namely, whether the Bologna Declaration of June 1999 represents continuity or change in the thrust of higher education policy in the European Union? Simplistically stated, is Bologna the start of something new? Or the end of something old? Do the Declaration and the institutionalisation of the exchange, debate and, in less evident form, the negotiations, which have subsequently been grafted on to this political equivalent of a new vine root, in truth, represent a watershed? Are there substantial continuities in content and focus between the priorities of higher education at nation state level and their projection as a shared set of objectives in the Declaration itself? In fine, given what we know about the evolution of higher education policy over the previous two decades, is it correct to see the Bologna process as the Alpha of our present-day ambitions or the Omega to those of yesteryear?

Three Modes of Analysis

The Projective Mode

Grosso modo, the scrutinies and analyses that focus on the Bologna Declaration and on the process of exchange and negotiation that subsequently emerged from it, fall into three broad types. These are probably best qualified as “the projective and speculative”, “impact” and, third, “weighing up”. These three approaches are the natural way systematic and organised understanding is brought to bear on higher education policy or, for that matter, on higher education tout court. And whilst the sceptical will point out that one of the most important functions of the first is to bring scholarly attention to a “problem” worth investigating and to justify why indeed one is in hot pursuit of it, it also serves – at least in theory – to set both the initial intellectual boundaries to, as well as amplifying the significance of, the general problématique by making predictions about its likely evolution and thus the implications such evolution may reasonably have for government, funding, institutional efficiency, reputation and general viability – if not survivability – of higher education in our time!

The “projective” investigation fulfils other purposes, as well. It may be seen as a prior stage to identifying possible route maps for institutional adaptation to the difficulties thus identified. As applied to the Bologna process, it has two fundamental features: it is obviously future oriented on the one hand. On the other, it takes the basic principles contained in the Declaration both at face value and as determinants. Curiously, it is rare for the “projective” mode to be concerned with institutional capacity to move towards the developments thus extrapolated and identified. It is concerned literally with the various ends foreseen and rather less with the detailed means of reaching them.

Impact

The second approach seeks to assess preliminary progress in terms the impact declarations of intent have upon behaviour at systems, sub-system or institutional level. Impact, however, is a term that has suffered much from inflation in its usage and thus an unhappy deflation in its precision. One of the more unfortunate of these imprecisions is the assumption of permanency, namely, that whatever shift in practice, resource or behaviour is observed, will endure. This is not the only assumption behind the study of “impact”. The second assumption the notion of “impact” makes is to confuse and to conflate two very different conceptual and operational processes. These processes are sequential and may be viewed together as the operational dimension to the overall phenomenon of implementation. Implementation without impact is, at the very most, improbable and at the very least a monument to ineptitude and frustration. Interestingly, however, the degree of impact in all likelihood may well be a direct function of the speed at which conformity or outward acceptance is required to be demonstrated to those who have oversight and general responsibility for implementation at national or regional level. Be that as it may, impact itself can just as well be a passing thing, as most living organisms tend to show.

Yet, an impact ascertained and produced does not eo ipso mean that behaviour modified remains such, still less that automatically the modification is fully and thoroughly assimilated into the institutional fabric, though here again one may hypothesise that measures which, by their nature, lie fully within the administrative domain might enjoy a more rapid “embedding” than those that involve redefining knowledge, its content, its presentation, the resources allocated to it and the qualities of those involved in disseminating it.

Hence, impact analysis may be applied to domains each of which has very different degrees, capacities, rates and forms of responsiveness and compliance (Neave 2006a). Even if we discount such things as differences in national practice, policy style (Premfors 1981), it is self-evident that assessing the “impact” of Bologna is in turn determined by the particular process, function or level of analysis to which enquiry is directed. In short, impact can largely be determined beforehand by the choice of what one decides to examine and very especially when what is to be examined corresponds to what the American policy analyst, the late Martin Trow, defined as falling within the “public” rather than to the “private” life of higher education (Trow 1975). The implication being that assessing impact upon dimensions in the public domain is more likely to yield discernable – though not necessarily, unambiguous – results within a relatively short time. Investigating impact in that area, which Trow defined as the “private life” of higher education, by contrast, may yield results. The difficulty lies in interpreting them in view of what has been said especially when applied to impact, implementation and “embeddedness”.

There is one final aspect to “impact” that should not be lightly passed over. For just as “impact studies” are directed at the systems and institutions for which the Declaration is destined, so at the same time ascertaining the degree of impact also involves examining how far a process that began as a Statement of Intent, has effectively acquired further standing and additional purpose. In short, how far the Declaration has evolved towards becoming an Instrument of Reform in its own right (Bologna Follow-up Group 2003: 7).1 In the common jargon of our trade, how far and in which areas of academic activity has Bologna as a declaration mutated into the Bologna process? In this connection, it is not wholly coincidental that the first dimension to be subjected to analysis for impact lay precisely in that very domain which resides wholly in the public and the administrative spheres – to wit, the legal enactment of the six principles contained in the Declaration. Leaving aside the nice argument as to whether a Law passed is exactly the same thing as a Law enacted and applied – and in certain systems, notably France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, the first is very far from leading automatically on to the second – clearly one of the benefits the legal dimension bestowed – as doubtless it was intended that it should – was early evidence of an impact having been achieved if only by dint of legislation promulgated.2

If the truth were out, legislative initiatives are quite the weakest form of evidence on which to base impact, whether on a system or on the individual university (for examples of this see Boffo, Dubois and Moscati 2006). It is not, for instance, the promulgation of the Law that is important so much as the awareness and grasp that institutional leadership – no less than that led in the Academic Estate – displays over the general purpose and specific goals laid down and thus the implications the Declaration implies for the institutional fabric.

Weighing Up

“Weighing up”, follow up or evaluation represent the third modus operandi in measuring the consequences of policy. It occupies a rather different niche from impact assessment, though it is not unknown for one deliberately to be tangled up with the other and presented as “evaluation” to endow the findings with more substance, weight and consequence. Just as we argued that impact confuses immediate response with long-term consequence, so evaluation focuses on implementation – that is presumed to be a protracted process. The evaluatory mode of policy verification focuses on practices embedded. It also focuses on the process by which they become embedded in the institution. In short, weighing up as the third and final stage in policy verification, works its way from the institutional level with the evidence rooted in what were once termed the “basic units” – that is, the smallest unit in the university capable of taking operational decisions on its own (see Premfors 1986). It is clear, even so, that the evaluative mode is firmly grounded within the “private life” of the individual institution – which involves such aspects as course content, curricular design, assessment, presentation, etc. Its explicit purpose is to give insight into how far recent legislative intention has in effect become part of institutional “embedded practice” and, though it is more rare, to ascertain what conditions – work, employment, administrative structure and models of managerial oversight – are the most conducive to encouraging and ensuring the rapid “embedding” of stipulated practices whether administrative, pedagogical or pedagogically driven.

Just as with impact studies so with those given over to “weighing up” – both are engaged in what amounts to a dual function. Whereas the former examines the impact of Bologna upon higher education systems the better to gauge the change in its status from Declaration to Process, so the latter focuses on the institutional level the better to estimate a similar transition from Process to an instrument of effect and consequence. In short, the latent role of evaluation is to ascertain the effectiveness of Bologna as a policy conduit. And that is a large step beyond merely registering its acceptability or noting the absence of hearty resistance to the ideas and to the spiralling agenda now rapidly accreting around it.

Disciplines, Context and Interpretive Perspectives

As other chapters in this volume show, examining the unfolding saga of the Bologna process provides a fertile ground for bringing to bear a wide range of disciplines which form an integral part of that intellectual dynamic so characteristic of the field of higher education in its present state, amongst which the sociology of organisations, political science, government, public administration, contemporary history stand well to the fore. These disciplines together with economics are the basic building blocks of analysis within the three general perspectives we have just set out. As one has a right to expect, Bologna is the centre of focus rather than the long-term context in which Bologna itself is seated. Yet, it is precisely the changes in this long-term context that open further sensitivities and interpretations to the Bologna process. For in reality, whilst it is both right and necessary to examine Bologna within the framework of European Union policy and, at another level within the cut and thrust of policy developing with the individual Nation State, it is also no less a central event in the history of the universities in Europe and, no less important in the rapidly developing changes in the relationship of that institution with society and with the economy perceived over time.

None can doubt that Bologna and the Bologna process are reshaping higher education in Europe though whether the means and the ends are desirable, prudent or whether the outcomes are likely to be conducive to meeting the original purpose within the agreed schedule, are very different matters indeed. Yet, it has often been argued that for the first time in more than three and a half centuries, Bologna revives an earlier concept of higher education and the social order.3 The groundwork of the reconstruction of a European Identity is expressed through the notion of the “European universities” rather than the “universities in Europe” – the latter phrase being the Nation State construction of the same. Certainly, as the abortive proposal for a European Constitution showed, whatever the commonalities Europe may choose to associate itself with, they no longer revolve around a world of shared beliefs and convictions shaped by the canons of religion. Rather, the commonalities that rally the different historic cultures of the European Nations together revolve around that lowest common denominator of economic exchange. Indeed, the subordination of the social and the political as handmaidens to the advance of the economic stands as one of the seminal developments if not its prime historic feature in European society of the past quarter of a century (Neave 2004). Though the overriding weight placed upon the revival of what the 19th century Scottish historian, Thomas Carlyle, once called the “Cash Nexus”, has often been condemned by the representatives of the universities in the Union,4 it is perhaps the lesser of two evils. By concentrating on economic harmonisation, the detestable prospect of its cultural dimension may perhaps be avoided although attempts to rewrite “European” history and other elements of school and university curricula show the temptation is always present for the more unrepentant of Europe’s intégristes.

Nevertheless, a very substantial part of research on Bologna is often chary in the extreme towards the historical context. Many analyses sit in an historical vacuum, all too often unrelated to developments that went before. Yet, it is a truism of the most elementary sort to say that, important though Bologna and its aftermath are, the initiatives that began before Bologna was signed did not shrivel up on its proclamation. If we are to make a convincing case either pro or contra the claim that Bologna marks a watershed, a little attention should be paid to the developments which set a particular stamp on the period prior to Bologna. We need to do this if only to map the continuities that the Bologna Declaration took on board and to identify those major developments in higher education policy which themselves continued but remained outside its purlieu. Suffice it to say that higher education policy did not come to a shuddering halt and all energies focused on carrying Bologna forward. Earlier initiatives within the Nation State pace the elaboration of quality assurance procedures, and their accompanying agency infrastructure did not grind to a stop, even though attention often focused elsewhere (Neave 2006b).

Policy, History and Periodicity

Deciding whether Bologna represents continuity or an historical turning point poses in its turn a rather vital question: when did the period in which either development took place, begin? In what way was that period different from what went before? Though it is by no means generally accepted, a particularly weighty argument can be made for setting the start of the New Age in 1981. Naturally, the sceptical will ask whether at the time contemporaries were aware of the significance of this particular moment as a break point or whether this choice is simply an example of hindsight and anachronism, and therefore largely arbitrary, being made in the light of what we know took place subsequently. 1981 marked the end of what has been termed the Neo-Keynesian consensus in higher education (Neave 1982; Torres and Schugurensky 2002), essentially the notion that higher education served such collective goals as social justice and economic progress by public investment in higher education as an act of collective solidarity and as an extension of that rationale which drove forward the development of the welfare state. Two events in Western Europe brought the long decades of Neo-Keynesian consensus to an end: the drastic budgetary restrictions imposed on United Kingdom universities and, in the Netherlands, measures to rationalise and redistribute the national provision of higher education, contained in the White Paper Taakverdeeling en Concentratie Wetenschappelijk Onderwijs the year following (Maassen 1987). Interestingly, the problem both countries faced was similar – the issue of resources allocated to higher education, where to make savings and how to optimise output in terms of cost; how to secure higher levels of “through-put” efficiency in terms of students graduating (Bijleveldt 1994). Yet, recourse to “the market” as an ideological and political construct took place far earlier in the Netherlands than in Britain, being presented as a political justification almost from the first. In the UK, the pragmatic measures of financial husbandry acquired an ideological purpose only in the latter half of the decade when the Conservative government reinterpreted cost-cutting as one element in a wider strategy of “rolling back the frontiers of the state” (Williams 2004).

A Remarkable Quarter Century

A remarkable quality in reform during the past quarter century of higher education policy making in Europe has been its sustained and comprehensive nature, though it does not follow that such was the intention of governments from the very start. There is, however, much advantage to be had in claiming strategic purpose retrospectively not least those gifts of omniscience and ostensible coherence (Neave 2004: 144–147). For some systems – largely in Western Europe – reform was the product of deliberation and calculated purpose. For others, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe, reform was the result of political and moral bankruptcy, economic collapse and an unswervable determination to have done with the practices and procedures of a regime grown paralytic and unbearable (File and Goedegebuure 2003). What was no less remarkable in Western Europe was the high degree of convergence across individual systems of higher education about the agenda to be addressed and the measures to be taken. The ostensible reduction in detailed oversight exercised by central national administration (Kogan 2006) was variously justified: as removing bureaucratic obstacles to an efficient interplay between university and market. The introduction of student fees – not always at full cost – stood as a significant departure from the practice, widely shared, that the cost of higher education, hitherto regarded as an act of national solidarity, should now be borne by individuals and parents. Some consolation was to be had by the Student Estate as a result. Now re-designated as “customers” and as such deemed to have certain rights and to enjoy “consumer” protection, which as students and apprentices was scant, the new status attributed to the Student Estate very certainly justified some indirect say over the provision and evaluation of the “services” supplied. In its turn “consumer protection” justified the scrutiny ostensibly exercised on behalf of “consumers” by specialist agencies of funding, quality and accreditation – a radical step indeed (Teixeira et al. 2004).

Every bit as radical was the policy to diversify higher education’s sources of funding away from public expenditure and towards private income – a priority sometimes held to justify another construct imposed on the University from without – to wit the so-called “Stakeholder Society” (Neave 2002b). Taken together, these initiatives represented a profound shift in the ethical basis that tied institutions of learning to society. This process has been variously presented – as inserting a “market ideology” as the operational lodestar into higher education policy; as a form of ideological coherence – an alternative to that which drew upon State oversight, regulation and resources to hold together establishments of vastly different purpose and mission; and as the “commodification” of higher education, which is an elegant way of registering the return of the cash nexus to learning.5 Whatever the particular metaphor employed – and by the end of the Eighties there were many – the growing weight attached by Ministries and governments to the latter day version of Neo-Liberalism’s Holy Trinity – Quality, Efficiency and Entrepreneurdom – was clear for all to see (Neave 1988a; Van Vught 1989).

Speed Not Haste

Leaving aside the sheer scope and range of the different priorities which reform urged on, a second feature – equally remarkable – characterises the past quarter century. It is the unprecedented speed by which governments pressed reform forward. Speed was a prime factor in re-engineering the Universities of Europe. There are many reasons for such unremitting haste. We will look at them in greater detail later. Student demand for higher education was not least among the “forces of acceleration” and stood as a substantial element in the equation of system “re-engineering”. It is also an excellent example of continuity in policy. Two decades earlier, pressure from student numbers, then termed “social demand”, played a major part in driving higher education in Western Europe firmly beyond the limited numbers that historically tied higher education to elites. It levered higher learning onto a mass basis (Trow 1974), though the command economies of the East and Central parts of the Continent remained deliberately grounded in an elite setting (Kallen 1991). The numbers involved in the rush into higher education during the Eighties and Nineties were, if anything, more spectacular still. For most Western European States, participation rates rose to 30% and beyond with certain amongst them, notably Britain (DfES 2003) and the Netherlands (Kwikkers et al. 2005), setting their sights to raising participation to 50% of the appropriate age group by the year 2010. France had already attained this level towards the end of the previous century (Neave 2005).

In Central and Eastern Europe, the liquidation of Totalitarianism released a pent-up demand for higher education all the more spectacular for the generation-long delay in satisfying it compared with Western Europe. For the first time, massive growth in student numbers was a phenomenon that spread across the whole of the European Continent.

Initiatives to re-seat the relationship between higher education, government and society, hitherto conducted within the context of the individual Nation State and with the priorities of the individual Nation State in mind – whether France (Guin 1990), the United Kingdom, the Netherlands or Spain (Diez Hochleitner 1988; Coombes and Perkins 1989) – from 1990 onwards, moved with varying degrees of hesitation and reticence onto a broader and infinitely more complex field on which to play themselves out. From an operational perspective, the mobilising of higher education in Europe received a dramatic and very substantial boost from the developments in East and Central Europe from 1990 onwards. Spiralling enrolments, the establishment of literally hundreds of new private establishments, all claiming university status, above all in Poland, Romania and Russia (Amaral and Teixeira 2001; Slancheva and Levy 2007), conferred a new visibility to issues which, in Western Europe, were for the most part largely a matter of delicate discussion – the privatisation of higher education, institutional self-management, models of governance, the place and function of competition, quality assurance (Schwarz and Westerheijden 2004; De Boer, Goedegebuure and Meek 1998).

These concerns formed the pillars on which reform rested. Their finer details, implications and consequences have been closely studied by the higher education research community both within individual systems and comparatively by the higher education research community as well as by discipline-based scholars making forays into the higher education sphere as an area of application for their particular body of knowledge. And whilst all of them, each in their own way, serve to give the last quarter century its distinguishing features, they are individual dimensions rather than attempts at overall synthesis. It is very precisely an attempt to establish a synthesis, which is all the more necessary if we are to judge the significance of Bologna by setting the context of the period in which Bologna is sited itself in an historical perspective.

Vocabulary, Banality and Cycles of Legitimation

One of the more noteworthy trends that tend to go hand in hand with periods of radical change is the coining of a new vocabulary and terminology, which serves as tools of usage. In turn, this jargon acts as vehicles of, and channels for, the rapid assimilation of those new norms that the revised vocabulary brings with it. Precisely because this equivalent in the world of higher education to technical terminology provides the bedrock for the new interpretation of higher education’s purpose, the terms themselves rapidly assume the characteristic of takens-for-granted. They slough off very quickly the radical status they had at their conception. They have, effectively, become the referential terms in which political debate is now conducted. And, just as they acquire this very quality, so their one-time radicalism evaporates. That is what “normalisation” entails. Terms once radical become the pensée unique – the one true way of how things ought to be done in a given domain, in this case higher education.

Shifts in such terminology are both a pointer to, and a handmaiden for, legitimising the priorities they underwrite through constant use, repetition and application. Making the radical banal is then as important a function in higher education policy as implementation itself. Indeed, because banalisation shapes the discourse in which policy is conducted, it is very often a prior condition to securing the success of the latter. At the same time, a contrary and parallel process runs alongside the task of assigning new meaning. It is a counter current. It involves the stripping away of precisely that significance and the legitimacy that had built up around it, which once accompanied the policy terminology of a previous age – or of a previous policy cycle. Thus, the central concepts, priorities and values that constituted debate in the previous “policy set” – equality of opportunity, social justice, for example – are rapidly discarded as irrelevant, an irrelevance held to be all the greater for having given rise to the very conditions it is now necessary to overhaul. It was precisely this function that the concept of “marketisation” performed in the wake of the economic crisis during the early Eighties in Western Europe. Shifting the terms of debate also shifted the locus and significance of key functions in the higher education system, amongst them Quality, Efficiency and Enterprise.

Though quality, efficiency and enterprise have in degrees greater or lesser always been present in higher education, only during the Eighties did they assume the centrality they now possess as the basic credo in Higher Education’s counterpart of the New Theology by being directly associated with gauging and scrutinising output and performance – institutional, disciplinary and individual. Nor is this latter-day Triptych alone in having undergone such a metamorphosis. Other values and functions have also been attributed further operational purpose – competition, internationalisation, the nature of academic time, and the nature of the community higher education ought to serve.

Each of these dimensions will be dissected in turn. By doing so, I have two aims in mind – first, to remind ourselves of the extremely radical nature of the transformations the once-new interpretation – now today’s established Orthodoxy of Neo-Liberalism – injected to the public end and function of the university. In short, to make us alert not just to the “challenges” that lie before us on the path to the New Electronic Jerusalem – by definition, challenges there always are – and very rarely if at all foreseen in detail. The second purpose is to analyse this period from an historic and dynamic perspective. In short, what has been done and what its significance is, viewed from the standpoint of the historical development of Western Europe’s universities, rather than lamenting over their as yet undemonstrated capacity to commit themselves to being instrumentalised around a single agenda identified solely with the European Cause (EUA 2007).

Setting the Stage of Interpretation

To the literary minded, a good case can very certainly be made for setting the thrust of reform as higher education’s equivalent to a Nietzschean “Transformation of All Values” – Umwertung aller Werte. Others may incline to the view that the burden of reform is a classical illustration of the aphorism made almost a half century ago by Clark Kerr, one of the United States’ most subtle actors, observers and shapers of its higher education system. In the Godkin Lectures of 1964, Kerr noted that the university very rarely brought about change from within. Reform, Kerr remarked, and his experience was second to none, came from outside the university and not least from government (Kerr 1964). This observation leads us to the first of the ostensible paradoxes that have accompanied Europe’s reforming its systems of higher education.

The Enduring Challenge and the Attendant Risks

Amongst the various reasons advanced for reforming the relationship between government, higher education and external society was the conviction that the detailed control and oversight national administration had long exercised over that institution were largely incompatible if not utterly dysfunctional in an age where economic competition demanded both rapidity of response and flexibility in meeting the demands that society, business and the market posed. The paradox did not lie, however, in the principle of the market driving learning, still less in its shaping the acquisition of knowledge. On the contrary, similar tensions between how knowledge should be valuated, how it ought to be organised and which forms of knowledge and in which mode the university should dispense it – theoretical, applied, useful or practical – have long been an abiding source of much heat and only occasional light in the world of academe between ancients and moderns from the days of the Enlightenment onward (Ben David 1978).

Even if we take at face value the liberating and the invigorating benefits an unfettered market may bring – and to say the least they are not without their ambiguities and often devastating social cost – the dilemma that Western Europe faces is precisely how to attain that freedom without the need for a legislation so detailed and stultifying that it beggars both the patience of Nations and exhausts the charity of their citizens. One cannot, as Michel Crozier (1979) argued with great force these two decades and more ago, change society by decree any more than one may decree greater freedom.

The setting down of new boundary posts, the formalisation of new criteria of institutional and national achievement, even though intended to unshackle institutions of learning and enquiry from the weight and constraint of an overburdensome past, entail a very real risk. That risk is to outstrip, in sheer legislative weight and by sheer procedural impenetrability, even those obstacles and practices from an earlier policy cycle which legislative enthusiasm set out manfully to hew down. The legislative effort required to set down new boundaries – liberal though they may once have been – often appears to be in blatant contradiction with the original Neo-Liberal intent to roll back the frontiers of the State, to give citizens a new stake in higher education and higher education a greater latitude to serve the community. In short, the fundamental premise of reform was that all would appear very different. And so it does indeed appear. But, one is faced with a most inconvenient truth: namely, that, having lavished untold effort in reforming governance, funding, in giving more publicly verifiable responsibilities to academia and to its leaders, the resulting topography of power, control and oversight may indeed have changed radically. But that in no way changes the horrid prospect that the procedures put in place to ensure the brave new marketable world may effectively be as adamantine, unyielding and invasive as those which in earlier times held the wicked old world together. Perhaps more so.

Four Dimensions that Characterise the Current Policy Cycle

From my perspective, there are some four dimensions that stand as the most sensitive and at the same time the best illustration of the transition to what is variously alluded to as the “Knowledge Society”, the “Stakeholder Society” or in a more Utopian tradition a “Global Society” which, whether separately or in combination, have shaped indelibly the context in which Bologna is set. They may be analysed and discussed from a plethora of different dimensions: structural change, shifts in methods of resource allocation, of institutional differentiation and performance and the reassignment of formal administrative responsibility either at national or at the institutional level. However, I am less concerned with the minutiae of reform so much as the shifts in “the shaping beliefs and assumptions” that urge on, underpin and lie behind operational and grounded change. Nor, by the same token, am I greatly concerned with the full range of reform. Instead, I will focus very specifically on four key problématiques that permeate across several central dimensions in the present policy cycle and which impart to it a particular quality within the recent history of the universities in Europe. These are:

  1. 1.

    Competition

  2. 2.

    Internationalisation

  3. 3.

    Academic Time

  4. 4.

    The Community Served.

It is through the examination of these political and economic constructs that we may gain both insight into, and purchase over, the claim that the years post-1981 in Europe were in truth a transformation unprecedented in the basic values that have shaped the institutions of higher learning.

Competition

Competition stands as the central driving force in the Neo-Liberal Weltanschauung, though other political theories do not necessarily endorse it so wholeheartedly (Neave 2006a, 2006b). It is amongst the most powerful technical and political rationales behind contemporary reform in Europe’s systems of higher education. Seen from the daily experience of Europe’s universities, this credo was more than a little curious. For in truth the issue at stake was not to install competition into the universities. On the contrary, the contest for what the American sociologist, Burton R. Clark, has called the “gold coin of repute and excellence” (Clark 1983) was every bit in evidence and no less feral for that. The real issue emerged elsewhere and at two levels. The first involved no less of a paradox, namely, who was to determine the distribution of esteem and to what purpose that esteem should serve? Or, presented in a slightly different light, how might that intellectual excellence – above all in the area of research and research training – best be harnessed to public purpose rather than serving the interests of scholarship, internally defined and largely driven by the Academic Estate via its members sitting in Research Councils?

What was paradoxical in the extreme was not that proposals to redefine the terms of competition targeted the elite parts of mass higher education. The paradox lay in the fact that the strengthening of competitive oversight by governments implied if not a condemnation of what was virtually the private nature of the way research support was conducted by the Academic Estate, then, at the very least, it expressed misgiving. In short, in certain domains, privatisation was not always conducive to the public good (Massy 2004: 15). No less ironic, the principle of competition was applied in a way that, viewed within the mental set of Neo-Liberal doctrine, seemed suspiciously like a covert form of “nationalisation” that in other areas of the social fabric national strategy sought to terminate with extreme prejudice.

The second level, which saw competition unswervingly applied as a principle of policy, focused on the undergraduate level. If anything, the notion of introducing competition at this level appeared even more surreal. Few, if any, of the conditions that in the United States had grown up organically over decades and which made competition there so powerful a policy lever, could be said to exist in Western Europe. On the contrary, with the exception of the United Kingdom, where institutional differentiation along with the social class stratification that had long characterised those islands were dominant characteristics, the majority of the higher education systems on the Mainland, subscribed, at least formally and legally, to the very opposite principle. As a public and national service, all universities within national jurisdiction were equal in status, a very clear expression of that principle, long established, of legal homogeneity (Neave and Van Vught 1994). For this reason, there was, at least officially, no competition between universities. More to the point, no incentive existed for there to be any, a situation evident in such systems as France, Portugal and the Federal Republic of Germany. Student fees, where they existed, were more symbolic than an irresistible spur for the individual institute of higher education to compete for students. Moreover, unlike the United States, enrolment fees in Europe were nationally fixed by central government and rarely revised. Nevertheless, at undergraduate level, competition certainly flourished. But it was competition between students for places, rather than competition between universities for students. Even in the United Kingdom, the power that competition could exert to mobilise change in higher education was so feeble that the government found itself obliged to take on the ideologically schizophrenic role of acting as a “pseudo market” (Williams 2004) the better, one imagines, to disentangle higher education from the very toils central government had itself forged and applied qua national administration!

Competition: The Centrepiece in Ethical Re-engineering

Put succinctly, the principle of competition is both the ethical centrepiece of Neo-Liberalism, the encapsulation of the vision it has for Society and thus, the central core of its operational policy. By similar reasoning, it lies at the heart of our contemporary Umwertung aller Werte. Seen from this angle, the reform of higher education is simply one facet in a far-ranging political enterprise. That enterprise is to put in place the administrative agencies, to adapt the allocation of resources and to make sure that the new ethical order commands the necessary compliance to guarantee its perpetuation and – here is the novel aspect of the affair – to devise an effective instrumentality – legal, technical, institutional and behavioural – to inflict penalty and grant reward according to the reticence or enthusiasm individual actors and institutions display. Given the complexity, the scale, its geographic coverage and its unfolding across Europe this decade and a half, not least because of the belief that Neo-Liberalism and competition form part of a sustainable European identity, it is without a shadow of a doubt, the greatest exercise in dedicated Social Engineering the university has had to endure in the nine centuries of its existence.

Early Attempts to Use Inter-institutional Competition as a Policy Lever

Yet, it would be wrong to assert that the principle of competition has not been applied at other times to higher education policy. There are, for instance, examples of governments employing it as a lever for system reform through introducing the policy of sectoral segmentation during the Sixties (Furth 1992; Pratt and Burgess 1974: Sandvand 1976; Doumenc and Gilly 1978). The development of what was known as “short cycle” higher education in the shape of the British Polytechnics, the French University Institutes of Technology and the Norwegian District Colleges has certainly been interpreted as an indirect strategy to leverage reform in universities (Brosan and Robinson 1972). And there is some evidence that a few innovations developed by short cycle establishments, mainly in such areas as programme development, were taken up by some universities (Furth 1998). But the target of inter-institutional competition – the Student Estate – with the exception of the United Kingdom, remained largely unmoved by attempts to inveigle it into the non-university sector. Rather, student demand remained obdurately fixated upon the university. Thus, the creation of a supposedly competitive alternative fell, as the Biblical expression has it, “upon stony ground”. For without students voting with their feet, short cycle establishments posed not the slightest threat to the university and with that threat echoing emptily, competition provided not the slightest leverage for reform.

Variations in the Use of Competition to Leverage Reform

There is, however, one other variant in the use of competition to spur reform onward and it is particularly significant. Indeed, some of the early projective analyses into the future of Bologna saw it as posing a fundamental dilemma in the construction of a European Higher Education Area. What was to be the principle that underpinned the advancement of a multi-nation system of higher education? Was it to build upon the principle of competition? Or, on the contrary, was it to reside in the diametrically opposed ethic of cooperation (Huisman and Van der Wende 2004a)? Since one of the strategic purposes of the Bologna Declaration was to strengthen Europe’s place in a world grown more competition-minded by the year, the apparent reluctance of its universities to go beyond cooperation and resolutely endorse the principle of competition in their intra-European relationships was surely hobbling themselves before the race had even begun?

In effect, whilst the dilemma was – and remains – ever present, it posed no less of a dilemma in the days when higher education policy was wholly determined within the Nation State. But the way in which competition – or, to be more precise, its rhetorical appeal in gaining acceptability for reform – worked, was very different. If one turns one’s attention to the major changes to higher education in Western Europe from the Sixties onwards, one feature they all shared was the incessant cry that reform was necessary to improve the Nation’s competitive stance.6

Failure to carry reform through, so this appeal to patriotism ran, would herald the first step in national decline. Or, worse still, would see the Nation overtaken by one’s neighbours! What is interesting about this tactic of persuasion is that it did not imply that competition provided a remedy. Rather, competition was seen as an external threat. The purpose of this politique d’épouvante was to bolster internal consensus – or, put another way – to give new impetus to internal cooperation and agreement inside the Nation, to put reform in train very precisely to resist that threat. If one examines the Bologna Declaration, this same duality of internal cooperation, the better to improve external competitivity, is no less evident.

Internationalisation

Though universities have exchanged students and students have wandered from university to university – the time honoured Peregrinatio academici – almost from the time the Universities were established in Europe (De Ridder-Symoens 1992), over the past two decades, in sheer numbers alone, student mobility has assumed mass dimensions.7 Today’s version differs in several respects from its historical predecessor, however. Though there are signs that the older edition, often know as “wild cat” (sauvage) mobility (Masclet 1975), is making a come-back (Veiga, Rosa and Amaral n.d.), today’s mobility is highly organised and, no less significant, involves more than the movement of students between universities and across national frontiers. It is also an instrument of policy in its own right, the purpose of which is to make the younger generation aware of the opportunities Europe offers and to provide an “educational experience” beyond the limits of that which is available in the “national environment”. Under the auspices of the EU Student Mobility Programmes – Erasmus, Leonardo, Socrates – mobility has become so much accepted as part of the “student experience” that it is seen as usual that some proportion of study time will be spent abroad. Student mobility has a high visibility and, whilst it is taken to be a useful pointer to the individual university’s dynamism and efficiency, it is by no means the be all and end all of Internationalisation which, even confined to higher education alone, covers a broad range of activities – some central, others marginal in the degrees of institutional engagement they demand whilst also reflecting different organisational modes from the ad hoc to the systematic (Veiga, Rosa and Amaral n.d.: 5).

A Major Shaping Influence

Despite the antiquity of the practice, there are solid reasons for seeing the dynamic behind Internationalisation as one of the most significant processes shaping the contemporary history of the Universities in Europe, a development that effectively gives a unique identity and profile to the current policy cycle. Some may care to debate whether the role of the universities as prime agents in the international traffic of students and ideas – two of the key components in the global knowledge society – is that of initiator or respondent. For though universities are the most obvious vehicles for international exchange, they are very far from being alone. Earlier and more elite forms of cultural exchange and the government agencies whose mandate this was, continue to operate, projecting the Nation’s cultural presence, above all in countries that share the same language or are influenced by a shared legal or administrative tradition, often inherited from the days of colonialism. Indeed, one may argue with great cogency that Internationalisation involves not simply the massification of student mobility but emphasises, yet further, the importance of cultural diplomacy. Cultural presence often weighs heavily in the balance especially when individual universities from contending national systems of higher education are engaged in the hunt for foreign students as a means of supplementing their budgets (Veiga, Rosa and Amaral n.d.: 7–8). Thus, the commodification of Knowledge alters that relationship between Education and Diplomacy, which Philip Coombes (1964) identified more than 40 years ago by coupling it explicitly to the service of the cash nexus. In place of Education serving Diplomacy and winning “hearts and minds”, cultural diplomacy serves Education, assisting it to win contracts and to harvest full-cost fees. Just how important this new form of trade is in the Knowledge Society emerges very clearly when one recalls to mind the major reorganisation that took place during the Nineties as the main historic “referential systems” in Western Europe8 – Britain, France and Germany – overhauled and modernised their agencies responsible for projecting cultural presence – the Agence de la Francophonie in France, the creation of UK Ltd as a quasi-commercial successor for cultural and education exchange in Britain and the expansion of the Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst in Germany.

Two Historical Phases

It is convenient to see the rise of Internationalisation in the affairs of higher education along the lines of two historically distinct phases: the first being concerned with a traditional geographical scope of operation and application; the second with its extension to the world beyond Europe. Obviously, Bologna fits into the former perspective and it is equally clear that it is also both a response to, and an instrument for, linking the two spheres of operation. The distinction between the two phases reflects what is probably best described as a “shift in mentality” and in the perception of what is deemed to be international. In effect, this altered perception points towards the essentially dynamic nature of this field.

When higher education operated wholly within a Nation State context, international linkages were largely conceived in terms of geographic proximity, or cultural affinity – mainly, within the European framework. There are good grounds for arguing that this construct, which reaches back to medieval times, drew heavily from the renewal of aristocratic interests in the origins of proto “national cultures” during the 18th century Enlightenment in the form of the Grand Tour, was a model that began to wane in the mid-Eighties. In effect, it was overtaken and superseded by the expansion of student mobility programmes and the extension of opportunities for mobility to scholars and administrators.9

Replacing the historic definition of “international” as designating immediate neighbours by the notion of “a European dimension” is, not surprisingly, a process conceived with deliberation and a vital element in the quest for both an acceptable vision and consciousness of an European entity transcending the Nation State. But this first step towards a “European identity” coincided with an equally radical reinterpretation of the basis of the relationship between Nations in general. This second redefinition involved two very substantial shifts in perspective and meaning. Globalisation is a powerful concept though it has to be said that attempts to seat it historically are as unsatisfactory as they are numerous and most particularly because each of the once Imperial Nations seeks to locate the origins of Globalisation within the canons of its own history.10

Globalisation and La Vénalité de l’Université

Globalisation is a powerful notion because, just as competition serves as the essential lever for social Engineering within the Nation State, so Globalisation acts as the main vehicle for legitimising Neo-Liberalism as the basis for the world order on which the relationship between Nation States rests. Not only is it the prime vehicle in the substitution of economics for politics in determining social priorities, not least in Higher Education. It exerts a powerful influence in aligning the prime activities of that institution – teaching and learning, generation and transmission of knowledge – firmly and irrevocably with the cash nexus. Indeed, the transition from cultural outreach to revenue generation as a raison d’être cannot be more clearly demonstrated than in those analyses that equate cultural outreach with “an international market” explicitly referred to – and moreover valuated – in terms of so many billion $US. Precisely because the relationship between Nations, as presented in a certain literature on higher education, is conceived as predominantly commercial, so the International Dimension both precipitates and speeds up a very particular shift in values in the world of scholarship. This transmutation is best viewed as a variation upon “venality”– that is, the readiness to subordinate both what is learned and how it is taught – to the central objective of “revenue generation”.11 True, la vénalité de l’université’ may not have its origins in the International domain. On the contrary, the motivation, which urges on so spectacular a transformation to institutional purpose, finds its clearest expression there. Venality’s origins are rather to be found in the financial “squeeze” universities face on their “home market”.

The Shape and Form of Venality

Regardless of where “venality” has its roots and origins, as both a process and as a statement about the purpose of higher learning, venality has profoundly altered the relationship between mainstream provision of higher education and some of its more marginal but self-proclaimed “successors”. It has conferred a degree of acceptability – which is the first step to legitimacy – upon a species of learning which, until very recently, was scarcely to be considered higher education at all. This species of “skills formation” was dissociated from higher learning, either because based in firms – and therefore unfree by nature – or because it endorsed a principle profoundly antithetical to the historic ethic of higher learning. This ethical engagement, long rooted in Western Europe, was prolonged by the principles that the Welfare State incorporated – namely, that learning should be gratis et pro deo’ – thereby extending in time and in scale a collective act of public solidarity between generations which involved the polity underwriting the basic purpose of the university – that of passing systematically the experience and the advanced knowledge of the mature on to the young.

Thus, the rise of “for profit” establishments, of proprietorial bodies, is an event central to the current policy cycle in Europe. Whether it stands as a significant disengagement from community solidarity may be debated. Nevertheless, the rise of private higher education is a very concrete expression not simply of another dimension where profound shift has taken place in the purpose and the values that today inform higher education (Slancheva and Levy 2007). It is also central to a number of inter-related concepts that each in its own way shed a different facet on the broad face of venality. The notion that knowledge should be saleable supports a range of different constructs: as the veritable heart of the knowledge society; as the final penetration of advanced capitalism into a body obdurately clinging to the outward forms and trappings of a world that has not been with us for many centuries; or as pointer to what, in the calculated jargon of consultants and functionaries, is wrapped up in a term that deliberately seeks to confound the advantageous with the unpalatable by giving both metaphysical status through the term “commodification”.12 This is as good a technocratic description as ever one might wish of those values that an earlier age called “venality”. The overtones that accompany the new “edu-canto” are themselves an indication of how radical the shift has been in the values that both justify and define the purpose of contemporary higher education. By the same token, they also show how rapid that transformation has been. The notion of “commodification”, like that of Globalisation itself, emerged in higher education at the very earliest only at the end of the Eighties.

Caveat, Emptor!

That universities are encouraged to sell knowledge, whether to make ends meet or to make money for those who own or who, alternatively, have a stake in them, brings firmly to an end a very ancient form of gift relationship. It is not, however, the only displacement in purpose and values. More significant by far is the subtle but no less rapid transmutation that has emerged in parallel to Globalisation and to the rise of an international market place for higher education. It has to do with what is to be considered as “universal knowledge”. The exact relationship between what might well be the supreme example of the “revaluation of all values”, with Globalisation and Neo-Liberalism, has yet to be explored systematically across different national cultures and systems of higher education. What are now considered as the “universals” in the domain of knowledge are, not surprisingly, linked to that other shift in intellectual perspective mentioned earlier – namely, the triumph of the Economic over the Political. In this instance, the shift involves putting aside the Humanistic perspective which holds that what is common to Man is spiritual and cerebral –in short, his Humanity – and thus, following the classic Aristotelian dictum, that Man is the most appropriate study of Man. Globalisation effectively stands Humanism on its head. Humanism can no longer boast – as it has since the Renaissance – of having universal status and still less of being that knowledge which unites Humanity. Rather, the Humanities take on a new character as an expression of cultures that, in the world market, represent knowledge that is local and particular. Or as an alternative explanation, that the universal nature ascribed to the Humanities reflects a universalism at a very particular historic juncture – one associated with the rise of the Nation State, of forging national identity and cultural specificity (Neave 2001).

In a world equated with exchange and market, however, this earlier version of universalism has been ousted by types of knowledge that have a very specific end, namely, to serve, uphold and sustain a world market internationalised. The new universalism is defined by those competencies and skills – that is, by the applied dimension of knowledge, by knowledge that is both operational, “relevant” – and for that reason ephemeral. The “new universalism” of knowledge may at a pinch be spiritual. But it is supremely pragmatic, applied and utilitarian. It confers access not primarily to fraternities of knowledge but rather to transnational occupational strata and to employability on a world market. Such knowledge, whilst located and dispensed within the Nation State, has a context beyond that level. It is universal less by dint of commonalties of intellectual set or systems of belief as by the pragmatic and assessable competencies that, acquired in one system of higher education, allow its benefits to be reaped elsewhere in the form of employment, status and quality of life. Universalism in its new trappings has to do with employability on the world market. In a very literal sense, for he – or she – who possesses the requisite knowledge, the world is indeed an oyster! Amongst those fields one may equate with the “new universalism” are Economics, Business and Management Studies and, most significant of all, the Sciences – Natural, Exact, Biological, Chemical, Medical and Engineering.

Constructing Europe: The House of Science and the Republic of Letters

These latter disciplines, however, should serve to remind us that much of our perception and interpretational framework that accompany Internationalisation are rooted, as indeed is the study of higher education itself, in the phenomenon of higher education’s massification. We tend to identify Internationalisation from the perspective less of the exact sciences than the social sciences, that is to say from a disciplinary perspective firmly grounded in the Nation State and one that moreover draws in, on average, some two-thirds of all university students at undergraduate level (Giglioli 2006).

Yet, there is another interpretation of Internationalisation, which differs very radically from those which evolve within the Republic of Letters. This parallel interpretation has its origins prior to the massification of student mobility qua cultural exchange. It also rests on its own very particular interpretation and claim to universalism – namely, the universality of Science, a powerful claim the distant origins of which are to be found in the 18th century Enlightenment and the rise of verifiable, replicable and testable knowledge. Seen from the House of Science, Internationalisation, cross-national collaboration at a very high level, long-term multi-national research programmes are neither recent in origin nor, for that reason, seen as pioneering ventures – as one may argue is today the case for the massified disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities. In short, the international dimension viewed from the House of Science, today, continues to revolve around what are long-accepted routines of working, though in contrast to both the Social Sciences and Humanities, they tend to be elite activities grounded not in undergraduate study so much as in the research training and research system – at postgraduate and post-doctoral levels (Clark 1994).

The House of Science is powerful not simply because of its long established cross-national and cross-Continental networks – an excellent illustration being the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire – but also because it enjoyed the status of a priority activity from the very moment the EEC was brought into being in 1957 (Neave 1988b: 5). Thus, the presence of the House of Science in European affairs antedated by some three decades the conferment of a legal base on the remainder of the activities of higher education within the purlieu of the EEC. In addition, the close ties between government, research agencies and laboratories at the national level give the House of Science a degree of access and a specific field of action through national science policy that are not shared to the same degree by the Republic of Letters. Though unkind, it is not entirely inappropriate to point out that many of the objectives that are currently assigned to Internationalising the undergraduate body – the peregrinato academici, studying across multiple systems, dual qualifications and “hands-on experience” in acquiring advanced learning – may be seen as little more than projecting back onto the undergraduate level and onto the mass university, policies and practice both tried, tested and proven over many years within the home of the scientific elite.

The House of Science as Locomotive for Reform Through Internationalisation

If we look back on the reforms which, from the standpoint of the Republic of Letters, were often interpreted in terms of governments adjusting to the demands of international competition, for greater efficiency in student output – above all at the postgraduate level – the introduction of evaluatory and performance procedures as well as modernising programmes of doctoral study – a remarkably appealing alternative explanation springs to mind. This alternative view sees such reforms, whether in the shape of injecting “an Anglo Saxon” PhD structure in France of 1987 and a similar initiative in establishing a research doctorate in Italy, for instance, less in terms of political ideology than as reflecting the determination of the House of Science to bring the Republic of Letters up-to-date and in keeping with what the former held to be the best, most successful and proven practices available. That many of the leading figures in the world of science had either studied, been trained, taught or researched in the world’s premier research system, which happened also to be the first higher education system in the world to assume mass status – the United States – is not coincidental. For it was in these disciplines that the principle of competition, efficiency in output and the capacity to respond rapidly to external challenge – whether from firms or from competing teams and colleagues elsewhere – spurred on achievement and stimulated innovation.

It is equally clear, however, that the House of Science employed the International Dimension in a very different way from its colleagues in the Republic of Letters. And in some measure, this difference reflects the reversal in their role as universals. If we confine our attention to Western Europe alone, it would appear that the modus reformandi of the House of Science involves reinforcing international scientific norms by backing their being imported – and embedded by agency control – into the Nation State. Amongst the examples one might cite in support of this idea are the variations upon the American Graduate School introduced in the Dutch Onderzoekschool, the French Ecole Doctorale and the German Graduierten Kollege. In marked contrast to this is the tactic pursued by the Republic of Letters, which seemingly seeks to preserve established national practice by calculated adjustments that permit an acceptable degree of compatibility within the European Qualifications Framework. That is, to limit the degree to which newly devised European norms are permitted to penetrate into what the American sociologist, Martin Trow (1975), once alluded to as “higher education’s private life”.

Vital Differences

These differences in strategy and interest are important. And whilst they are far from being dismissed by those who, within the analysis of higher education policy, view matters largely within the canons of the Social Sciences, they are often presented within a conceptual framework which, if alert to the role played by competition and by the technical prowess of communications technology, tends to be less sensitive to the fact that communications technology, which is the channel through which these concepts are examined, is but one room in the House of Science which has many mansions! If we are to have a satisfactory purchase over the way Internationalisation has shaped Europe’s systems of higher education over the past quarter century, it is as well to remember that the interests involved have very different views on the issues at stake and the remedies to be applied depending on whether their intellectual allegiance rests with the Republic of Letters or dwells in the House of Science. And, to add further to our burdens in the matter, it is no less crucial to bear in mind whether the centre of their interest or concern rests at the undergraduate or the research training level.

Academic Time

One of the more original, though no less controversial, features of the Bologna Declaration was to lay down a schedule for the completion of its six objectives. This is set for the year 2010. Whether the timing is exquisite, feasible or realistic is largely a matter of hope and belief, the evidence for which is, at best, ambiguous. That a date line should be set at all, however, is significant and not just for the success of the larger Bologna process. One of the more interesting innovations to be imposed on Europe’s systems of higher education and very particularly since the early 1990s is an unprecedented speeding up in the expected “response time” between legislative enactment and the final process of embedding the legislator’s will in individual institutions. Naturally, this process has rallied around it all manner of feline phrases to describe it. Some hail directly from the inimitable jargon of logistics. Thus, for instance, universities are encouraged to adopt managerial techniques that allow “just in time” delivery methods. Management is encouraged to “speed up delivery” – an unfortunate expression which suggests that qualified students and innovative research can be organised for “consumption” – read “use” – in much the same caring way as detergents, pampers and deodorants!

Academic Time vs. Productive Time: A Very Long Perspective

Leaving aside the unpalatable association expressions such as these conjure up, they remain for all that part of another substantial reassignment of purpose to the university that has grown up in the course of the past decade and a half. This is commonly alluded to as “productivism” – that is, the direct harnessing of university output to industrial and commercial purpose – a notion that is usually attributed to Neo-Liberal reform of the 1980s but which echoes to an amazing degree the re-engineering of Russian universities during that period 80 years ago known in Soviet history as the New Economic Policy (Carr 1974; Afanassiev 1992)!

There is, however, another facet to “productivism”. It relates directly to the notion of “academic time”, which has been central to the way the university has functioned for many years indeed. For the best part of nine centuries, the one element over which academia had great if not total mastery was precisely over time – time to teach, to learn and to acquire knowledge. Agreed, universities tend no longer to consider their mission sub specie aeternitatis. Nevertheless, the days are not too distant when the pursuit of higher learning was still possible without major research grants simply because the prime value – time itself – was academia’s principle and unique capital. That is what tenure and its granting are all about – the pursuit for knowledge irrespective of the time it might take.

The command of time was the essence of academic freedom, even in the days when knowledge itself was revealed rather than scientific (Neave 2006c). Evaluation and assessment regularly undertaken as a national exercise are in effect the essential lever to ensure that “academic time” mutates into, and is replaced by, “productive time”. Even if this is nowhere written explicitly into the list of objectives assigned to such agencies of Quality Assessment, Accreditation, Audit or Public Accounts that are given over to regular scrutiny of institutional performance, this reassignment is nevertheless evident and has been a central theme for the past decade and a half in Europe. The essential truth is that the conversion of academic time into “productive time” is a salient and hugely significant trend in present-day higher education policy.

The Externalisation of (Academic) Norms and Functions

Changing academic time into productive time stands at the intersection of a number of separate processes all of which involve fundamentally redefining both university identity and hence its relationship with society. The introduction of “productive time” into the groves of academe can of course be justified as a necessary development and very particularly so when change is held to be continuous rather than as a stop/go process and above all when the function of the university is to keep abreast of change rather than preserving anterior forms of knowledge. Productive time is also part of that process of “incorporation” which in turn has two meanings: the taking over of corporate business practices, forms of organisation, job description, hierarchy and very often conditions of service (Enders and De Weert 2004); second, the redefinition of the university no longer as a unique organisation – with a unique task – so much as one sub-set in a broader series of linkages sometimes qualified as the “innovation system” (Neave 2006b).

Passing of Time and Measurement of Performance

These developments, disparate though they might appear, nevertheless possess a common thrust, namely, the subordination of long-held university norms and their realignment upon external practice – a trend that reaches its fullest expression in the notion of competition itself.13 In effect, ensuring competitiveness is a direct consequence of comparing common items of performance and output within a stipulated period – the time set for measuring academic productivity. It is a task that lies at the heart of the growing instrumentality which has emerged in the course of the past two decades in higher education and which stands in addition to the well-established battery of oversight based on legislation. Ranking, benchmarking and institutional achievement represent dimensions of comparison. Contractualisation, construed less in terms of targets set than as the period stipulated for their fulfilment, defines the common time-frame for institutional assessment. In virtually all instances, the decision about what is assessable just as the periodicity of that assessment, lie not in the hands of the university, but with specialised “agencies of public purpose”, external to the individual institution. To put no firmer point on it, the concept of “remote steering” (Van Vught 1989) or the loosening of what has sometimes been called the State control model of university higher education relations (Neave and Van Vught 1994) is replaced by an even more invasive instrumentality grounded in a species of agency governance that determines those operational expectations and negotiated requirements that go to make up productive time as too the period over which they are to be judged and weighed in the balance.

Bold Presumptions

Yet the speeding up of institutional response to external change – and in this context the Bologna process is simply another example of the general problématique – makes a number of presumptions, which neither within the individual Nation State nor at a European level are either legitimate or even close to the reality that research has thrown up over the years. By far, the most indelicate is the belief that the transition from academic time to productive time is a uniform and homogeneous undertaking. Yet, the accumulating literature on disciplinary cultures is very clear on this very point. What a particular discipline produces and the rhythm at which it is produced are subject to immense variation (Becher 1989; Becher and Trowler 2001; Clark 1993). Disciplines vary in their capacity to adapt to external priorities, whether these latter derive from the market or are handed down on behalf of The Prince by his agency servants. “Blue sky research” is often frowned upon as academia indulging itself at the taxpayers’ expense. For the theologian, c’est son métier!

This is not to deny the presence of large numbers of disciplines and organised bodies of knowledge for which the market, external funding and ways of self-organisation have been finely honed by the twin imperatives of rapid response and external competition. In effect, the transition and the organisational re-engineering required in the move from academic time to productive time, though not necessarily couched in these terms, have been analysed with great deftness by Michael Gibbons and his colleagues (1994). The assumption in their study, as too in the procedures that underpin the evaluation of institutional performance, can best be described as having led to a form of “evaluatory homogeneity”.14

Evaluatory Homogeneity and Adapting to New Norms

Put succinctly, the public procedures that underpin the rise of the Evaluatory State are normalised around the modes of operation, production, rhythm and output found in the House of Science, in the belief that, under external pressure, they will be assimilated rapidly by the Republic of Letters – a vision also shared by Gibbons and his colleagues. It may well be that, in the long run, nominal forms of compliance will be found within the Republic of Letters to satisfy such hopes. What we do not know – and it is an issue of considerable importance for the unfolding of the Bologna process itself – is how long it will take for this conversion to productive time – be it token or genuine – to be completed and very especially when it involves bodies of knowledge such as the Humanities and, to a lesser extent, the Social Sciences that do not share to the same degree – if they share at all – the long-established modes of production dominant in the House of Science.15 Interestingly, though not, I believe, wholly coincidentally, it is precisely in those areas of knowledge whose status has undergone radical revaluation from being historic universals to becoming forms of local or national knowledge, that the degree of adaptation required is greatest.

Homogeneity in evaluative procedures is, naturally, a necessary thing, without which meaningful comparison remains a dead letter. Without meaningful comparison competition becomes a ritual based simply on manufactured perception and historic prejudice. Still, the dangers that accompany homogeneity are no less redoubtable – and very particularly when the results of the procedures through which that homogeneity is imposed have consequences – sometimes swift, even dramatic – for the individual institution, above all in the area of institutional repute, standing and funding. However, there is another aspect to homogeneity – or, to be more precise, the belief – which homogeneity engenders. This is a notion present above all in the pays politique that homogeneity in evaluatory procedures reflects a homogeneity already achieved in the changeover from academic to productive time.

Contrary Imaginings

This is a devastating situation. Those in academia faced with implementing what is a fundamental, delicate and extremely complex metamorphosis, as much collective as individual, in the way they go about their work, are confronted by a pays politique which believes this self-same undertaking is already a species of droit acquis – an established practice. Nor is this the end of the misunderstanding. Comforted by their perceptions, the political world blithely and with gusto sets out to pile new items onto the original agenda of 1999, which every indication suggests that even today – eight years on – is scarcely begun at institutional level, let alone nearing completion (EUA 2007). Regardless of obvious differences and diversity in individual systems and within individual systems between individual universities and establishments of higher education, the application of similar procedures appears to reflect a broad similarity in establishments. Comparison is, surely, comparing like with like? And since comparison is made, what is comparable is eo ipso similar. In short, that evaluatory homogeneity is but one step – and a very major one indeed – towards homogenisation in purpose, objective and institutional policy. From this it follows, that as the time of response to external change speeds up through the organisational changes involved in replacing academic time with productive time, so the pace at which further elements are added by the pays politique to the reform agenda also gathers speed, in the belief that their wish is father to its own execution.

The Community Served

One of the more entertaining hypotheses that higher education has had to endure these past 15 years is one that argues the place of the Nation State in the life of the individual university or establishment of higher education, is under threat. For some, of the Souverainiste school of thought, that threat comes from Europe with the strengthening of a supra-government layer. For others, the menace lies elsewhere in the gathering momentum behind Globalisation and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which includes Education as one of the commodities to be hawked across national frontiers (Knight 2002). Given that the Nation State in Western Europe was the first systematically to incorporate higher education as a State service and that this particular relationship is nowhere more venerable than in Europe (Neave 2001), such fears are understandable. Whether they have a foundation other than in projective speculation flustered by the feats and efforts of a few well-publicised predator institutions and systems beyond Europe is, however, a different matter. Still, an external threat – or a menace that some feel to be in the offing – does wonders in rallying to a common cause what in other times would be a certain querulous hesitation, as the Bologna strategy itself bears witness.

Many Communities, Many Visions

Yet the community that higher education is held to serve is a deceptively complex issue. Like most issues in higher education, it lends itself to a suitably eclectic analytical range, drawing inter alia on economic impact studies and the influence the individual university may have upon its region (Brownrigg 1974; Boucher, Conway and Van der Meer 2003; Florax 1992), on the procedures and regional agencies that link the two entities, through to the political consequence of injecting members of national intellectual elites into local and regional cultures and a contrario (Ryan 1977; Paterson 2001). Defining which community higher education serves is an intimate part of the political process and thus tends to reflect the dominant ideology and cultural constructs the latter places upon the role of the university at the moment when definition takes place. Moreover, there are many definitions of “community”. These are best understood as a species of continuum ranging from the classical configuration set up in the 19th century by centralised governments such as France (Durand-Prinborgne 1998), Spain (Garcia Garrido 1998), Italy (Martinelli 1998) and Sweden (Svensson 1982) where the community defined was national. Such a model was predominant above all – though not exclusively – in the Latin countries of Europe. At the other extreme stood those systems where the power of the central state was deliberately limited and the community defined as local, proximate and denominational. The latter profile tended to dominate in the “Anglo Saxon” systems of higher education: Britain, the United States and others that formed part of the English speaking world. These two models, each in its own way, represent diametrically opposed views on the role of the local community in higher education, views that in turn reflected the predominant political values of the day. The “Latin” model detached the university from the local community the better to ensure that the interests served by the university were wholly and exclusively those of the Nation, as opposed to particular interests that occult lobbies might otherwise exercise at the local level (Huisman, Maassen and Neave 2001). The “Anglo Saxon” model, by contrast, held central government at a distance the better to ensue that local diversity and local community interests were adequately reflected in the type of services the university purveyed and which often determined the support the community was prepared to give it (Trow 2003).

The Historical Dynamic of Regionalisation in Higher Education

Over the past quarter century, one of the abiding trends in Western Europe has been the emergence of an intermediary layer of administration and coordination at the regional level. Thus, if we are to entertain the thesis of a weakening role of the Nation State in higher education, by far the more weighty and immediate source of that revision is probably best seen as a species of voluntary self-dissolution from within – though that is not to deny the possibility that the predicted consequence of Globalisation may not accelerate that process from without.

Interestingly, the first moves in strengthening the “regional layer” of national administration occurred prior to the present policy cycle in the shape of the 1977 reforms in Sweden. They were not greatly successful (Lane and Stenlund 1983). They conferred upon regional authorities the power to negotiate and to fund courses and programmes held to be of immediate relevance to the regional community, whilst preserving central national control over degrees and diplomas held to be of nation-wide importance. Though the earliest example in higher education planning of new powers being assigned to the intermediary level of administration, the Swedish initiative is probably best interpreted as the last step in a major university reform that began in 1968 and was completed the year previously (Premfors 1984). It stands then as one of the last reforms undertaken as part of the previous policy cycle, the principle features of which were central planning, equality of opportunity and social justice.

The Driving Forces

“Regionalisation” as a way of redefining the community higher education serves, however, was driven forward by many considerations, some complimentary to one another, others not. Nor is it always to be equated with the tenets of Neo-Liberalism and marketisation though, in practically all instances, regionalisation was closely associated with increasing institutional efficiency. But such efficiency was associated with very different priorities and ends. Nevertheless, irrespective of the particular priority, one may detect a common presumption – namely, that proximity between services rendered, the establishment rendering them and those who stood to gain from them, would be more efficient, more appropriate and, from the standpoint of sheer administrative execution, less protracted and more sensitive by shortening the lines of communication and responsibility, directing them where possible away from central national administration and entrusting them to the region.

Broadly speaking, the rationale behind regionalisation can be classified along two dimensions: the political and cultural vs. the technical, managerial and financial. Obviously, these are not exclusive categories. Indeed, earlier initiatives justified by political and cultural considerations move on and add other functions – managerial and financial – later. Even so, the first moves towards regionalisation – 1983 in Spain and 1988 in Belgium – obeyed a rationale that was predominantly political and cultural. The former created some 17 Autonomous Communities in part to reinforce democratic participation in a country recently freed from Dictatorship. The latter took place with the Federalisation of Belgium along linguistic lines with the two Communities – Flanders and Wallonia – responsible for the full range of educational provision – higher education included.

The Cultural Dimension and Other Priorities

To a very considerable degree, these two particular instances of devolving responsibility to the region obeyed the rationale of compensatory legitimation, that is, to give greater public participation in determining activities that, earlier, remained within an administrative purlieu (Weiler 1983). An alternative interpretation is to see the same initiative as providing an institutional base to the claims to a particular cultural identity – a consideration of considerable significance both in the case of the Basque country and Catalonia in Spain and to the Flemish speaking community in Belgium.

Pressures to recognise cultural and linguistic identity form only part of the rationale for strengthening the regional layer. Speeding up institutional response by foreshortening the chain of command was also present and urged on by other considerations, not least of which was financial. The French policy of regionalisation provides a suitable illustration. At the political level, the general press for devolving routine educational responsibilities away from central government, and, no less significant, the transfer of financial support to the regional budget and to regional taxation, stood well in evidence and formed a Leitmotif throughout the Nineties. Rather more complex, however, has been the regionalisation of funding higher education in the United Kingdom, where separate Higher Education Funding Councils were set up for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. In addition to funding higher education, these agencies exercise oversight within their respective regions for such matters directly related to higher learning as regional skills needs, monitoring the state of the economy, as well as social and cultural issues (see, for instance, Scottish Funding Council 2005).

The Third Task: Labouring in the Regional Vineyard

Providing the region with the legal remit, administrative means and budgetary responsibility go very far indeed in ensuring that universities take on additional responsibilities for the fortunes of their region, over and above the impact they have simply by dint of their being where they are. This additional commitment now is beginning to acquire a very specific significance, above all in Scandinavia, where it is seen as the “Third Task” along with the historic mission of teaching and research (Dahllöf and Selander 1996; Vakkuri 2004). The “Third Task” – comparable to the more voluntary notion of “community service” in American universities – is self-evidently a major dimension in what has sometimes been called “the Offloading State”. It also reflects that conviction central to the Knowledge Society of the critical and strategic role of the University in underpinning both the transition of regions to, and their subsequent development in, the knowledge economy.

Further Issues of a Heretical Nature

However, if one mulls a little longer over the implications regionalisation poses, further issues float to the surface. They have indirect bearing on the Bologna process itself. The first of these is that the laying down of direct ties between higher education and the region is still en cours d’élaboration. Acquiring additional forms of accountability, evaluation and oversight is by no means complete, though the haste to do so is sometimes frenetic (Ahola 2006). The second issue, which follows directly from reinforcing the regional level of system governance, is that individual universities are now faced, not with whether to opt exclusively for a regional constituency, a national catchment area or an international profile, so much as with deciding the balance between these three elements. It is not whether universities will become more differentiated, depending on which of the three constituencies they set their sights. Differentiation is unavoidable. Rather more important is that each of these three constituencies, seen at the institutional level, endows the student body with a different degree of mobility. In other words, depending on its choice of which community it wishes to serve – or the “mix” between them – between the regional, national or transnational – the university also determines the level and type of mobility it is prepared to cater for. By the same process, viewed from a slightly different angle, the university also decides whether the community it has opted for is predominantly local and static, mobile within the Nation or mobile across National frontiers. And this consideration cannot but loom large in how far and how speedily individual establishments are prepared to “embed” the Bologna principles in their daily practice or whether their commitment is simply that of lip-service and tokenism.

The Incredible Shrinking Nation?

The third issue is whether in reality the Nation State has been weakened by the self-denying ordinance16 the transfer of power to the regions apparently involves. Indeed, the question that is no less relevant must surely be whether power has moved out of the Nation State at all. No one will bother to deny that Bologna has created a focus and a regular venue where the universities of Europe and their representatives may consider how far the current priorities in developments proposed for higher education policy are acceptable – although rather too little attention has been paid to whether they are feasible and within what time span. Even so, none would deny that legislation and the emergence of new forms of voluntary coordination between establishments do not play their part. But claims about the shrinking place of the Nation State in higher education’s affairs make two presumptions: first, that the distribution of influence and power is a species of zero sum game – that power cut back at one level means assigning it to another. In this case, that reductions at Nation State level mean an increase in the influence of the European – or supra-governmental – level, on the one hand, or the diminution through the flow of economic power outside the Nation, if not outside the European Community, on the other. Second, such reasoning is based on strategic considerations rather than on the immediate experiential perception of the workings of power and influence in their daily manifestation. The experience an institution may have of them is largely to be had in the metaphysical rather than the pragmatic dimension. The same, though to a far lesser degree, may be said about the idea of Europe and the place of higher education in it.

Yet, regionalisation is significant. Whether this dynamic is seen as fragmenting the Nation State, shattering an older and perhaps more stable identity or as the shape of things to come, one thing is most certainly neither to be denied nor to be disputed. The reality of regionalisation, regardless of whether it is an expression of cultural identity or financial efficiency, is that it is firmly within that framework set inside the historic Nation State. There are transfrontier regions and, though there are obvious exceptions,17 they tend to have an existence in the administrative mind rather than grounded in either historic or linguistic commonalties. Thus, a very weighty case indeed can be argued, namely, that regionalisation is in effect a renewed and more immediate version of the Nation State, the Nation State revived from beneath through close and direct contact with higher education and very precisely so in that very area where both Europe and Globalisation are largely abstract hypotheses – namely, in the quotidian, in the sustained daily exchange the university has with its immediate environment. From this highly pragmatic view, regionalisation has not weakened the Nation State in the slightest. On the contrary, whether as a cradle of less recognised cultures or as an administrative stratum, the thickening administrative rind and the development within the region, of agencies of oversight and coordination – and financial clout not least – has conferred a very real weight, presence and consequence of a very immediate sort to that level within the Nation. There is, in short, a very good case for arguing that the local is every bit as important in the daily life of higher education as the Global, if not more so. It is only fair to point out, however, that propinquity cannot always serve as an infallible formula to enhance a university’s awareness of regional needs. One consequence of shortening the chain of communication is to personalise what previously obeyed the niceties of bureaucratic politics. Regionalisation of university policy may even serve both to politicise the relationship between university and region and to insert partisan politics even more deeply into the groves of academe.18

Regionalisation stands as an especially clear example of that other transformation in the relationship between higher education and society, namely, the end of what is sometimes described as the “Guardian Relationship” in which the state, or other intermediary bodies, served as a “buffer” to shield scholarship and learning from external pressures. By the same token, it also illustrates the rise of the opposite construct, which may be variously described – in terms of economic exchange as the Stakeholder Society and in cultural terms, as “repatriating” or “restoring” to the local community the classical institution – the university – which, until very recently, upheld a very different identity and cultural heritage.

Envoi

In this chapter, I have set out to view the Bologna Declaration as part of a policy cycle the origins of which begin in 1981. In turn, I have analysed that policy cycle along four dimensions of abiding change which serve to characterise the past quarter century and which also serve to distinguish it from the previous policy cycle. These are Competition, Internationalisation, the rise of “productive time” in the university and finally, Regionalisation. It is important to draw a line between “abiding change” and change tout court and very particularly so in a world that sets such store by change as a sustained, continuous and necessary activity, an imperative which in itself is also an identifying quality in the mentality of the Age.

Abiding Change: A Central Concept

As a concept, Abiding Change bears a certain similarity to strategy but with this difference: whilst strategy is the means of attaining a long-term goal set in the future, Abiding Change is less a technical affair than an irrevocable shift in mentality, values and ways of viewing the purposiveness of human action or the purposiveness of institutions through which that action is channelled. It stands as a necessary prior condition to change in policy. It is less a technique in the toolbox of the policy maker, consultant or administrator. Rather, “Abiding Change” is a device for seeking different explanations as to why, how and under what conditions change did in effect take place. Thus, since it focuses on what has taken place, rather than what ought to take place, “Abiding Change” is, in essence, an analytical perspective for the use of the historian or those concerned with developments across time, which is one of the most sensitive items that allow us to grasp the basic dynamics – or their absence – in human groups, institutions, procedures and beliefs. Put another way, change can be modified, even undone. This is the short-term edition of the phenomenon and may be seen as change qua adjustment. That adjustment is possible presumes the essentially provisional nature of the measure involved. Abiding Change, however, is intimately bonded with change that is irrevocable, that cannot easily be reversed without grave threat to their basic functioning in the case of institutions or dissolution of social ties and solidarity in the case of groups. When it has run its course, nothing can be exactly the same as before. Abiding Change is nothing less than a break point, a rupture in the unfolding of an institution or the evolution of a group which marks the point of transition between the world we once had and the world the building of which devours our energies, imagination and a great deal of our treasure.

How Things Were Done and Why

Evidence for the “abiding nature” of the changes underpinning the current policy cycle was explored less in terms of the classic methods applied in the study of higher education – structural change, developments in the institutional fabric, resources, patterns of administration national or institutional, student access and performance. Rather, I have sought to go behind these formal exteriorities, the better to concentrate on changes in belief, values and perception that subsequently shape – and are also used to justify – both policy and action. In a way, this approach bears greater kinship with the History of Ideas or with the Histoire des Mentalités than it does to the policy analytic mode in the study of higher education. To underline this approach, I have employed a rather strange literary analogue. It drew upon the idea of the Devaluation of all Values, a theme developed by the 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. It is a highly potent, though not necessarily sensitive, way of dissecting changes in the assumptions underlying higher education policy since 1981 and thus provides us with a grasp over those individual aspects that combine to form “Abiding Change”.

This examination of the significance of Bologna – in its successive forms as a Declaration, as a statement of intent and as an instrument of policy – posed two questions. Is Bologna a watershed in the history of higher education in Europe? Or does it represent a species of continuity? In the more circumscribed setting of higher education policy, is it the Alpha – the start of all that is new – or is it, on the contrary – the Omega, the end of an earlier tale? There is, of course, a third possibility – that Bologna is effectively part of an ongoing venture and thus an example of that most interesting of all conditions – continuity in the midst of change.

Omega and Alpha

Let us take the “Omega hypothesis”. It is clear that in Western Europe, the major reforms in re-engineering the task, the resources, the priorities and their verification that governments required of the world of higher education, were largely complete or in process of completion before the Bologna Declaration. From this perspective, the Bologna Declaration and the six basic principles it contained, served as a species of package deal, reflecting issues – employability, transparency and readability, etc. – already present on the agendas of most of the long-term Member States of the EU. In effect, the novelty of Bologna lay in two areas: first, the creation of a new architecture around a common model for the duration of study, erected into two cycles; second, the bringing together under a single Declaration at European level a number of policies which, at the Nation State level, were pursued under separate heads. Bologna effectively grew out of an initiative by the Ministers of three Member States to inject new life into the Union’s stagnating higher education policy (Marçal Grilo 2003). The Sorbonne Declaration of June 1998 was a Nation State initiative, and from that standpoint, Bologna is a continuation of that decision.

From what we now know and what many of the case studies in this volume reveal, is the nature of the benefits both Member State and European instances could expect to reap from this “package deal”.

Benefits Bestowed

For the first, elevating such items as readability and employability onto a European level provided Member State governments with an undeniably powerful leverage and rhetoric in the conduct of domestic policies aimed at higher education. It conferred both plausibility and a justification for accelerating the process of reform. Or, to put a slightly different nuance on matters, to accelerate their completion. An additional advantage came in the opportunity to put a gloss on domestic policy in such a way that it could be seen as corresponding to the principles in the Bologna Declaration, either one or severally. Adjustment in rhetorical focus thus served to increase policy leverage on the home front.

For the second, the benefits were no less worth having and most especially so given the tensions that existed between the commission and the universities in Europe over the former’s persistent and obdurate definition of the universities’ role solely in terms of constructing Europe through serving technology and industry (De Wit and Verhoeven 2001). To be able to proclaim success in the realisation of one amongst the Bologna “objectives” allowed success to be associated with the policy in general, an interesting case of the d’Artagnan principle “All for one and one for all” applied to the first multi-nation agenda for the development of higher education in History! Such a gambit finds a ready and virtually instant echo in successive Reports on the progress of the Bologna process, undertaken for the commission by the European University Association in which, after less than two years experience to go on, success was proclaimed loudly and persistently from the rooftops (Haug and Tauch 2001).

Overt Goals, Covert Functions

That Member States made use of Bologna to leverage domestic reform – or even, in some instances – to use the time-honoured tactic of the threat of decline vis-à-vis other European partners to gain leverage over issues which, in purely domestic circumstances, had over the years proven singularly impervious to the best laid intentions of mice and ministries,19 raises an interesting and delicate question. That question has to do with the real function of Bologna as opposed to its publicly ascribed purpose of bringing a greater degree of coordination across the different systems of higher education. More particularly, it casts an interesting light on the recent assertion by two Dutch scholars that the European supranational agenda threatens their domestic counterparts (Huisman and Van der Wende 2004b). What is evident is that some Member States saw Bologna as an extension of national policy, though whether they accepted it on that specific condition must for the moment remain a matter of surmise. Yet, if we make the assumption that such an undeclared view existed, then we are obliged to conclude that from the standpoint of certain Member States Bologna was acceptable only as a sub-set of national policy rather than having to swallow the converse – namely, that national policy was a sub-set of the Bologna process. Another way of saying the same thing is to parody Von Clausewitz’s famous dictum about war and politics, namely, that, for some at least, Bologna was the pursuit of national policy by other means. Such a scenario, once again, tends to reinforce the “Omega” thesis.

Alpha Minus Minus

It would, of course, be both imprecise and uncharitable to dismiss the Alpha thesis out of hand. Though it has taken a little time to bring all the formal constituencies of higher education – the Academic, the Administrative and the Student Estate – together in a single and predictably regular venue20 this has been achieved. It is an achievement without parallel in the history the Universities of Europe. Very certainly, the opportunity for Europe’s world of learning to speak Truth to Power without having to be economical with the former is a watershed of a most substantial kind. To consolidate this newly acquired prominence will not be easy, however. Important though Bologna seems to governments, national agencies whose purlieu includes activities beyond the Nation’s frontiers and to those who themselves waltz as part of the European Round, Bologna has yet to figure in the immediate awareness of even the majority of members in the Three Estates. Bologna as a Declaration, let alone as a Process, has yet to be seen by the Three Estates as having the slightest relevance to their daily lot. What ought to be, is something whose time has yet to come.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The view of the Commission of the European Union is very clear. Thus, in the Bologna Follow-up Group Report of 2003 (p. 7):

    Decisions of the Spring European Councils, in particular of Lisbon (2000), Stockholm (2001) and Barcelona (2002) as well as consecutive EU Education Councils have gradually altered the status of the Bologna Declaration [their italics] from a voluntary action to a set of commitments in the framework of the follow up of the Report of the concrete future objectives of education and training systems, endorsed in Stockholm in 2001.

  2. 2.

    As good an illustration as any of the shortcomings inherent in the use of legislation as a surrogate for – if not an anticipation of – implementation at the institutional level see the First, Second and Third Trends Reports issued by the European University Association.

  3. 3.

    It is a matter of considerable delicacy to determine when the association of the university with an earlier supra-governmental order that revolved around the Pope as supreme arbiter, accreditor and guarantor of quality, ceased to hold currency. The Peace of Westphalia, which rested on the legal principle Cujus regio, eijus religio (The Prince determines the religion of his subjects), is often cited as a watershed in bringing this medieval relationship to an end (Huisman, Maassen and Neave 2001).

  4. 4.

    This episode in the relationship between the universities in Europe and the commission in 1994 is a clear example of the tensions between the two worlds over the vision and the purpose the latter deemed the former should fulfil. It sprang from the commission’s interpreting the university wholly and exclusively in terms of vocational training and industrial skills provision, a view that, without great discrimination, replicated the stance taken by the European Employers Working Group on skills and formation. Though the commission grudgingly yielded by adding the word “culture” to subsequent documents dealing with higher education and European construction, (De Wit and Verhoeven 2001; Neave 2003; Neave and Maassen 2007) clearly this is an abiding source of tension as witness, for instance, the gradual return of undiluted “vocationalism” in the wake of the commission’s current tactic of splicing the agenda of the Lisbon strategy into the Bologna process. For a more detailed treatment of this see Neave and Maassen (2007).

  5. 5.

    “Commodification” is sometimes used as synonymous with the notion known in an American context as “marketisation”, that is, the reduction of value as being expressed simply in terms of price. There is another descriptor of the same general process which parades under the term “commoditization”.

    Commoditization refers to that process whereby products or services become standardized to the extent that their attributes are roughly the same … When a product or service is commoditized, it can be more readily compared with other products like, and competition revolves strictly around the price of the good (Weigel 2000: 14).

    Whilst this definition was applied to the US seven years back, the reader will have to decide for him or herself whether the seeds of a similar development are not implicit in the Bologna process.

  6. 6.

    A good example of this would be in Britain the so-called Robbins Report on higher education of 1963. There are naturally others – the Report of the Swedish U68 Committee comes to mind. Readers well-versed in the recent history of higher education policy in their own country will most certainly not fail to find other examples of this mechanism.

  7. 7.

    This point requires a little clarification. According to Martin Trow’s classic definition of mass higher education, the tipping point is reached when 15% or more of an age group enters higher education. By analogy, when 15% of all students enrolled in a country’s system of higher education spend one semester or more studying outside that system, it is reasonable to claim that mobility has attained “mass status”. On this criterion, given the very substantial growth in enrolments throughout the Nineties, it is likely that the proportion of students mobile as a percentage of all enrolled in a given national system of higher education has, effectively, dropped. This does not contradict, however, the continued yearly growth in the numbers of the mobile.

  8. 8.

    Referential systems of higher education are those whose example, organisation, administrative structures, structures of study, etc. served as a template in the development of others outside their country of origin. If we take a long-term perspective, they would be Spain – the earliest, having “exported its model” to Latin America in the 16th century, Britain from the 17th century with the establishment of the North American colonies, France from the early 20th century, Germany from the mid 19th century and the United States from the late 1940s onward. Nor should one forget the Soviet Union which if extinct nevertheless shaped the systems of higher education in Central and Eastern Europe after 1947. For a more elaborate treatment of this concept see Neave (1998).

  9. 9.

    Clearly, the launching of Erasmus in 1987 acted as a catalyst in the sphere of student mobility. And, though more restricted and deliberately conceived as a programme for an elite, COMETT – the COMmunity Programme in Education and Training for Technology – launched 18 months earlier (Lauglo and Lillis 1988) – may well have served to stimulate attention amongst key individuals in the Administrative and Academic Estates. That COMETT was a dedicated programme limited to the sphere of Technology is a revealing pointer towards the priorities the commission then entertained.

    We shall return to the issue of technology later since it provides a most important insight to the broader question of interpretive bias in the whole field of Institutional cooperation, sometimes known – erroneously in my view – as International Relations.

  10. 10.

    Amongst the erudite exchanges on the topic, I have heard claims for the historical origins of this world shaping idea attributed to the Roman Empire by an immensely learned physicist, to the 16th century Philippines, to the Spain of Philip II, and, following in the wake of John Hobson, author of the book “Imperialism” in 1902, to the United Kingdom. In short, like the story of M. Jourdain and prose, we seem to have been indulging in “Globalisation” sans le savoir and that in both the senses this phrase conveys.

    Yet, some scholars are giving serious attention to the possible historical origins of the phenomenon. Simon Marginson, well to the fore in researching the impact of Globalisation on higher education, is pursuing what may well turn out to be a much needed breakthrough in this field, by applying the work of Marc Braudel on the commercial and cultural shift that accompanied the move from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic during the reign of Philip II of Spain as an historical analogue to that contemporary shift in world focus from the North Atlantic to the Pacific Rim. For this see Marginson (2004).

  11. 11.

    The historically, rather than the economically, inclined will recall another term of more than ancient lineage that carries similar though less technocratic overtones: “venality” – that is, the eager willingness to see everything as purchasable or saleable. This, in an earlier age, included various forms of public office. The classic work which, significantly reinterpreted part of France’s history during the 17th century and laid weight upon the political and cultural dimensions rather than the economic, was Roland Mousnier’s path-breaking thesis, which he defended in 1945, La Vénalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII, republished in 1971 by the Presses Universitaires de France.

  12. 12.

    See note 5.

  13. 13.

    See Section 5.

  14. 14.

    For a more extensive but nevertheless summary treatment of this concept see Neave (2006c). The central point is that the rise of the Evaluatory State has effectively changed the mode and locus of the process of coordination through legal homogeneity, a hallmark of the “State control model” of relationship between government and university (Neave and Van Vught 1994) from input to output and performance with the rise of the Evaluatory State. Here, however, we are interested more in the impact this development appears to have on the substitution of academic time by productive time. Here, we are more concerned with the consequences this displacement has upon the way that the university is viewed and perceived by what I termed elsewhere as the pays politique (Neave 2002a).

  15. 15.

    The obvious exception is Economics, though even in this domain, there are sub-sets where the accumulation of knowledge is driven primarily by internal dynamics of knowledge and thus incline more to the notion of academic time than productive time. For this see Heen (2000).

  16. 16.

    For aficionados and the curious, the Self Denying Ordinance was passed by the English Parliament on 3 April 1645. It stipulated that, in time of war, no Member of Parliament could hold military office or, for that matter, any other office appointed by Parliament. Its purpose was to remove certain aristocratic Generals from the ranks of the Parliamentarians, who were somewhat reluctant to inflict defeat on the King, Charles I, then busily engaged in waging civil war with his subjects. By extension, a Self Denying Ordinance is a situation in which an individual or body, having the right and capacity to do something, decides unilaterally not to make use of it and thus voluntarily imposes a restraint on its own legitimate and recognised powers.

  17. 17.

    Amongst the historic and linguistic cultures spanning political frontiers are the Catalan, that spans the Franco Spanish border; the nomadic Sami (owners of reindeer) across Norway, Sweden and Finland; the Flemish speakers in Northern France, Belgium; and the Tyrolean found in Northern Italy around Bolzano and Austria. Amongst the administrative artifacts that cross frontiers, is the so-called “Euregio” across the German Dutch border at the height of Twente.

  18. 18.

    The lengthy kerfuffle around the creation of a new university in the Autonomous Community of Valencia shows some of the perils when the powers of budgetary allocation are wielded on partisan lines for partisan ends. For this see Warden (1996: 10) and “Feud Puts Science Project in Jeopardy.” Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 October 2000.

  19. 19.

    As Johanna Witte (2006) makes abundantly clear, Germany is an excellent example of this politique d’épouvante in relation to the long and persistent problem of study duration (Regelstudienzeit) which had bedevilled the Federal Republic for the best part of 30 years.

  20. 20.

    For instance, it was not until May 2006 at the Bergen (Norway) gathering that the Academic Estate was officially recognised and admitted in its own right – an omission understandable had it endured say a year. That the “non-existence’ of academia lasted six years at least, suggests that the omission was deliberate, though its justification, astounding at the best of times, was never explained, thereby adding insult to injury.