What is its future?
Peter Scott
This,
the first conference organised by the Europaeum addresses the future of European
universities, a theme that is both timeless and timely – but it further addresses two
more specific, and potentially contradictory, themes. The first is the idea of borderless
education, which is typically associated with the forces of globalisation (and so with
the liberalisation, and even commercialisation, of higher education). The second is the
idea of bridging Europe, which is associated with the process of creating a European
higher education space and, therefore, is the responsibility of nation states and of
other European institutions. The first, borderless education, is likely to be largely a
process driven by the enterprise of individual universities (or groups of universities)
and, therefore, will be essentially a market process, although national governments or
the European Union may play a facilitating role. The second, bridging Europe, is
inevitably a state (or, at any rate, public) process driven by the policies of national
governments. This is why there is a question mark in the title of this contribution to
the debate – ‘The European University: what is its future?’ Deep down there may be a fear
that the European university is at a disadvantage compared with, say, universities in the
United States (and possibly Australia) to meet the challenges of borderless education and
the wider challenges of globalisation. One reason for this apparent disadvantage may be
the European university’s subordination to state bureaucracies. Although significant
progress has been made in the liberalisation of higher education in many European
countries, and universities have been given much greater administrative (and legal)
autonomy, European universities may still be seen as insufficiently adaptable as
organisations to match the entrepreneurial drive of American universities. A second
reason may be the European university’s fundamental commitment to speculative science and
disinterested scholarship, the ideal of the so-called Humboldtian University – although
there are, of course, other traditions, notably what I will call the Napoleonic tradition
represented by the grandes écoles in France and the English tradition of liberal
education. But, despite this diversity within the European university tradition, it is
still difficult to match – let alone challenge – the utilitarian traditions of the
American land-grant universities. A third reason may be the continuing segregation
between universities, as providers of scientific education, and higher professional and
technical institutions, which provide vocational education, in many European countries.
Again this is not universally true. Sweden established a unified higher education system
in the 1970s; Britain followed a decade ago; and several other European countries have
created common legal frameworks for all their higher education, both university and
non-university. But, again, there is a concern that our systems are too regulated and
rigid compared with the much more fluid ‘market’ hierarchies typical of American higher
education.These fears may be groundless and concerns exaggerated. The European
university, even in its classical form, is at least as capable of meeting the challenges
of borderless education and globalisation as American (or Australian) higher education –
or other rival systems that may be emerging in East Asia, the Indian sub-continent (and,
eventually, in Africa – especially South Africa – and Latin America). Europe may be an
old continent, and European universities may be the original archetypes, but this does
not mean that the European university tradition is exhausted. The argument presented here
is the opposite – that, just as late-20th-century forms of globalisation in which markets
were dominant are being complemented by subtler and more pluralistic (and ‘political’?)
forms of globalisation, so the European university with its strongly ‘public’ ethic, and
critical and scientific culture, may actually be better placed to respond to this
shifting environment than, for example, American universities which have nailed their
colours so firmly to the mast of the ‘market’. Globalisation
This may appear to be a counter-intuitive, even a revisionist, argument. Of course, if
globalisation (and so borderless education) are interpreted exclusively in terms of the
‘market’, then it is difficult to deny that the average European university is a less
market-oriented institution than the average American university. There are many
exceptions to both average institutions and, therefore, that European higher education is
likely to lag behind. But, if globalisation is regarded as a much more complex process
characterised by tensions and contradictions, this outcome may no longer be inevitable.
The most obvious of these tensions and/or contradictions is that globalisation is not
simply a technical process in which the power of new information and communication
technologies have created the capacity for the operation of round-the-globe
round-the-clock financial markets, the spread of global ‘brands’ such as Coca Cola and
the global penetration of the mass media. It is also a powerful cultural process, which
is reshaping individual, class and gender identities. Creating hybrid (or so-called
‘Creole’) cultures in which ‘western’ brands and icons take on new and sometimes
radically different meanings. Nor can globalisation be simplistically equated with the
‘End of History’ and the triumph of democratic capitalism. Even before the events of
September 11 ‘History’ was very much alive – even, or particularly, here in Europe in the
former Yugoslavia. And the physical and political resistances to the IMF / World Bank /
G8 ‘new world order’ have been apparent on the streets of Genoa, Prague, Seattle,
Washington and also in the activities of organisations such as ‘Green Peace’. These
resistances are part of globalisation, as are the re-invented nationalist rivalries in
the Balkans or Islamic fundamentalism. Finally globalisation is as much an ‘internal’ as
an ‘external’ phenomenon; it is not only about the world-wide projection of ‘global’,
i.e. American, culture, power and global markets; it is also a powerful element of a
wider process, often labelled post-modernity, in which the classifications, categories
and systems characteristic of modern society – such as the state, the market, culture,
science – are becoming increasingly fuzzy. These old demarcations are being constantly
transgressed and it is far too simple to reduce these complex phenomena to the triumph of
the market. Borderless education
Borderless education, which can be regarded as an aspect, a sub-set, of globalisation, is
therefore an equally complex phenomenon. Too often it is interpreted in conventional
spatial terms simply as education that transcends national boundaries – the establishment
of global learning and researching alliances by universities in different countries,
perhaps in partnership with mass multi-media corporations; the establishment of “branch”
campuses by universities from one country in other countries; the more intense use of
information and communication technologies in higher education. (Arguably the Europaeum
is an aspect of this straight-forward account of ‘Border-less Education’ – although, as
has already been suggested there is a tension between being European and being global, or
border-less).
However, borderless education can be seen in ideological as well as spatial terms. This
may take essentially benign and unthreatening forms, such as the drive to
internationalise higher education. From a European perspective this takes two forms: (a)
what can be termed ‘short-haul’ internationalisation within and adjacent to the European
Union through the Erasmus-Socrates and successive Framework programmes; and (b)
‘long-haul’ internationalisation, principally the recruitment of international students
by European (and American and Australian) universities. Sometimes the motive is
sentimental, to maintain post-imperial connections; sometimes it is much more
hard-headed, to exploit the new global knowledge by boosting university revenues or
importing human capital. But it can also take less benign and more threatening forms. One
example is the development of a new ideology of higher education that is highly
instrumental and thoroughly commercialised, which treats universities as ‘knowledge’
businesses. Closely related is another new ideology of higher education that rejects the
traditional culture of science and reason characteristic of the University as elitist and
imperialist. Both these new ideologies seek to uncouple the processes of modernisation
from the values of modernity, although for different motives - the first is concerned
with profit and the second with politics. Europe
Just as there are different aspects of globalisation (and so of borderless education), so
there are different accounts of Europe and of the European university tradition. Europe
is both a place, a continent, and also an idea, a culture. But neither is
straightforward. Even in spatial terms Europe has always been notoriously difficult to
define. First, there is the European Union – but even within the European Union there is
a distinction between the ‘Euro-zone’ and the rest. Next, cross-cutting the EU’s
boundaries, there is the contrast between northern – really ‘Atlantic’ – Europe and
‘Mediterranean’ Europe, inaccurately aligned with the contrast between Protestant and
Catholic Europe. Next comes the contrast between ‘West’ and ‘East’, the latter once
represented by Orthodox / Ottoman culture and more recently by Communism (although Karl
Marx lived his whole life in western Europe and is buried in north London). Another, more
recent, dimension is the multi-culturalism of modern Europe, certainly Western Europe.
Europe is now a microcosm of the global world. So where are the boundaries of Europe to
be set – at the old-Soviet frontier which may eventually coincide with the borders of an
enlarged European Union (expelling Tolstoy from ‘Europe’); or on the Amur river; or in
eastern Anatolia (but surely Boston or Buenos Aires are as ‘European’ as Istanbul or
Irkutsk?)?
These difficulties of definition which, of course, have to be, and are, resolved for the
practical purposes of designating a European higher education space in the context of the
Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations or European Union exchange and co-operation programmes
– demonstrate the dialectic between the particular and the universal which is at the
heart of the identity of Europe. And it is this dialectic, which it can be argued,
constitutes the European university’s advantage in confronting the challenges of
globalisation – in a profound cultural rather than superficial ‘market’ sense. Goethe’s
whole life was spent in a small space, bounded on the west by the battlefield of Valmy
and the east by Cracow, on the south by Venice and the north by Hanover (certainly he
never saw the Baltic) – yet this experience and his existence were universal. In this he
was an archetypal European. The physical canvass of Immanuel Kant’s life was ever
narrower. Two centuries later this dialectic between the particular and the universal
enables the European university navigate among the various dimensions of a global,
borderless, world.
Europe is not simply a place, an ill-defined continent; it is also a space in our
consciousness, an idea and an ideal. This is not intended to be reactionary reference, a
throwback to the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages in which the first universities were
created. Universities are really novel institutions, re-created in the turmoil of
Revolutionary Europe at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries (notably,
of course, in Berlin) and ceaselessly re-engineered later in the 19th century and
throughout the 20th century to meet the new challenges posed by the industrial revolution
and the advance of democracy. Even here in Europe, the university’s ancient heartland, a
majority of universities has been established in the last half-century. Europe is a state
of consciousness because of its role as the cradle of modernity. It was here on this
continent somewhere between 1770 and 1850 that recognisably modern societies emerged.
This is where industrial and urban societies emerged in which customary and traditional
patterns of social engagement were replaced by new form of mass society. This is where
the nation state, still the dominant element of political organisation despite the great
strides made in recent years towards European integration, reached its most mature and
enduring form – and, some would say, also its most lethal form because it was within the
growth of a modern consciousness that virulent nationalism flourished. Europe is also
where democracy, particularly the highest forms of democracy represented by the
achievements of social democracy and the welfare state, has its strongest roots – despite
the tragic interludes of totalitarian rule.
Europe is also where not only the structures but also the values of modernity have been
most fully expressed. The Enlightenment was both a European, and a universal, achievement
– or, to adopt more contemporary language, it was both a local and a global phenomenon.
Europe is where the culture of science – or, perhaps more broadly, the culture of secular
rationality – has been at its most powerful. And Europe is also where modernism, in an
aesthetic sense, with all its contradictory resistances to mass society was at its most
intense. But two points in particular deserve to be emphasised. The first is that, when
‘Europe’ is spoken of as an idea or an ideal, this does not imply that these achievements
were the particular possessions of the inhabitants of this continent – however prominent
the role played by Europeans in their creation. These ideas and ideals, structure and
values, were (and are) the first and fullest expression of globalisation (although that
word has only been recently coined). In this sense ‘Europe’ is both a metaphysic and a
universal. The second is that the European idea or ideal is not a thing of the past. The
rhetorical contrast between a tired ‘old world’ and a vigorous ‘new world’ is almost two
centuries old – and it is no more accurate today than when it was first drawn. The
centrality of European institutions in the construction of the ‘modern’ (perhaps today we
must also speak of the ‘post-modern’) is undiminished.
So far this contribution to the debate on the future of the European university has
concentrated on, first, the multiple dimensions of globalisation and, consequently, the
multiple possibilities of border-less education (The argument has been that it is
misleading to concentrate almost exclusively on the ‘market’ dimension of globalisation
and, consequently, to over-emphasise the ‘commercial’ possibilities of borderless
education); and, secondly, the diversity of Europe – in terms both of geography (Europe
is the least well-defined of all the continents); and of ideology (where the idea of
‘Europe’ is equally ill-defined because of the dialectic between particular and
universal). In the light of this analysis Europe may be well – not badly – placed to meet
the challenges of globalisation (and so of borderless education). It is now necessary to
consider more directly about the European University. European and American higher
education
The contrast between America and Europe is an inevitable one – the American system of
colleges and universities is seen as market-oriented and student-focused, open and
adaptable (and much is sometimes made of the presence of a significant private sector);
European systems, on the other hand, are seen as hide-bound and bureaucratic with little
regard for students (at any rate as ‘customers’ on the American pattern) and a very
limited entrepreneurial capacity (partly because state regulations inhibit, or forbid,
such activities but also partly because they go against the academic grain). But, like
all ‘inevitable’ contrasts, it may also be misleading – at best exaggerated and at worst
simply wrong. As always, stereotypes are treacherous. Most American colleges and
universities are state institutions, many of which are more tightly regulated than the
average European university (and are much more exposed to direct and partisan political
pressure). The private sector is a very mixed bag of institutions, extending all the way
from Harvard with an endowment equal to the GNPs of many nation-states (and, therefore,
able to preserve an exceptionally high degree to academic autonomy) to colleges that are
simply in the training business and have no real pretensions to provide proper higher
education.
It is the same story with Europe. Two points are worth emphasising. First,
generalisations about European higher education are fraught with danger. Within Europe
there are at least three separate traditions – the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with its
emphasis on liberal education; the Humboldtian with its emphasis on scientific education;
and what was earlier described as the Napoleonic tradition (because it is most fully
expressed through the French grandes écoles) that emphasises professional education. And
there are very many exceptions within these broad traditions and the sometimes-deep
differences between individual institutions. It will take much more than the convergent
pressures embodied in the Bologna Declaration to make all European universities the same
– and, of course, this is not the intention behind the proposal to create a European
higher education space. Secondly, there are many non-university institutions in many
European countries (only Sweden and Britain have tried to unify their higher education
systems; the rest of the continent has maintained a binary division of higher education,)
are at least as socially and vocationally relevant as many American colleges. In fact
‘fachhochschulen’ here in Germany or HBO (higher professional) schools in the Netherlands
are probably more focused and more relevant than most American community colleges in
which general education, recreational education and technical education are all combined.
If the thesis is accepted that the Knowledge Society is as much about culture as it is
about commerce, it is by no means obvious that the more market-oriented American system
is better placed to respond to the challenges of the future than the European system (or,
better, systems) of higher education. Even if these challenges are seen primarily in
terms of developing marketable high-technology products and of educating students in
entrepreneurial ways, it is still not obvious why and how European universities are
unable to compete successfully with American institutions. But my argument goes wider. If
the challenges posed by the Knowledge Society and globalisation are posed in wider terms,
embracing social and cultural knowledge and also personal identities, then it seems to me
that the values and practices of European universities may actually confer on them an
advantages.
It is even possible to make an even wider point – and to argue that the European Union
represents an alternative attempt to transcend the limits of the nation-state, but in
terms of politics and, hopefully, democracy, not in terms of markets. This alternative
must be set alongside the vision of global free markets in almost everything – goods and
services, but also images and identities. It is an alternative that is more ordered and
more reasonable, as one would expect from an ‘old’ continent that first developed notions
of Reason and Enlightenment (which were then exported across the Atlantic!). But, it is
not an alternative that is less plausible; nor less likely to succeed. Indeed, if the
broad thrust of this arguments is accepted, the ‘European’ road to internationalisation
(and on to globalisation) may represent a more humane and civilised path than the
‘American’ road that focuses too narrowly on ‘markets’ and consumers rather than
communities (real and, increasingly perhaps, virtual) and citizens. The Future of the
European University
What, then, is the future of the European university? Of course, it is possible to
develop a counter-argument to the argument presented here namely, that the process of
European integration represented by the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations (or bridging
Europe) can be represented as an parochial exercise. Europeans can be accused of huddling
closer together for warmth in an increasingly cold and competitive global environment.
This process of integration can even be stigmatised as just another aspect of ‘Fortress
Europe,’ which also includes increasing restrictions on the entry of refugees and
asylum-seekers. This is not a comfortable thought – that the eloquent words spoken at
Bologna (or, more recently, in Prague) are an analogue of the patrols by border guards
along the vulnerable frontiers of the European Union.
But, it is not only unfair but also inaccurate to characterise the process of European
integration, and the efforts to create a common European higher education space, as
attempts to resist globalisation or to strengthen the external borders of Europe while
lowering internal European borders. It is clear that, even if a wholly ‘market’
definition of globalisation is accepted, this process and these efforts are designed to
promote ‘market’ objectives – in two senses. First, the closer integration of European
higher education systems, reflects the creation of a common labour market within the
European Union, which is itself an expression of economic liberalisation. Secondly, it is
designed to establish a more coherent European presence within the global ‘knowledge’
economy – and, in particular, the market for international students – in the face of
American, Australian and other competition. Europe, like the United States, is anxious to
import the-best-and-the-brightest from other continents to bolster its competitive
position.
However, if a much broader interpretation of globalisation is accepted, the European
university tradition has much to offer. There are two ways in which the European
university may be at an advantage. First, its very resistance to excessive
commercialisation of its mission enables the European university to understand better
those other strands within globalisation. For example, the global resistances to the
reductionism of the ‘market’ and the ways in which the local and the global, the
particular and the universal, are being combined to reshape individual and group
identities. But, there is a second, more important, advantage arguably possessed by the
European university. Globalisation is one element in the intellectual turbulence of our
ages, a turbulence that has been immensely fertile in terms of scientific discovery and
of the incorporation of new, more democratic, knowledge traditions. A higher education
system that sees itself as a ‘knowledge’ enterprise is perhaps less well placed to make
sense of this turbulence, volatility, contradictions – but also, of course, immense
creativity – than a university tradition that still holds to the critical values of the
Enlightenment.
There are other ways in which the European university is potential a leader, rather than
a laggard, in the encounter with globalisation in its fullest most subtle sense. So, it
is possible that we in Europe will be able to construct strategies for developing
borderless education. This is not merely a wish for the future. Europe is already engaged
in this project – even if the Erasmus / Socrates and Framework programmes are very
different from American initiatives such as the for-profit University of Phoenix or the
(apparent) proliferation of, again mainly American, ‘corporate universities’. The
European university is going through one of its most dynamic and creative phases – and it
is a key element in the building of a new Europe, a noble project because its
significance extends far beyond the frontiers of Europe however liberally drawn. This new
Europe represents nothing less than an alternative model of internationalisation to
‘market’ globalisation, a model that is far more compatible with the preservation of
civic values (because communities are destroyed by ‘market’ globalisation), with
democratic structures (because only consumers, not citizens, count in global capitalism),
and with a free and critical scientific tradition (because in ‘market’ globalisation
higher education is reduced to a ‘knowledge’ industry).
Peter Scott
Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University and former Editor of Times Higher Educational
Supplement. |
