Implementing reforms or conceptualizing the university of the future?

Abstract

In the last couple of years there have been several conferences on the topic of the 'university of the future' so that we can make the legitimate assumption that the topic seems to be back on the agenda. At the same time many of the current reform debates concerning higher education are dominated by an economic discourse of costs and short-term profits and dearly lack any visions of the future which are needed to develop a viable concept. In the following contribution t have chosen a normative and discursive approach to the issue rather than an empirical one, because we do have quite a large empirical basis already at hand, but only very few attempts to integrate the findings into a coherent and comprehensive concept. 1 For different reasons in the Western world and in Central and Eastern Europe higher education and the university as an institution have been under considerable pressure in recent times. In Germany all actors in the 9 agree upon the need for reforms but there is no consensus about the what and the how of reforms. This has led, for instance, to the West German higher education system being simply exported to and implemented in the new German states of the former German Democratic Republic, instead of using the historical situation for a viable and integrated reform of both systems. Much criticism of the West German higher education system has been voiced not only from political actors in the field but from the public as well, as the respective media coverage shows. One possible explanation 9 why, in general, there is so much criticism of higher education was offered by Hoke Smith, president of Towson State University in Maryland, during a conference on 'Concepts for the University of the 21st Century' in Washington in 1993: One of the reasons that higher education is under pressure and the university is under pressure is, we are no longer a peripheral element of society. We have moved to a central position. We are too important to ignore, and perhaps too important to be left to the scholars to define our role, to define what kind of people we are going to develop and what skills we will develop (Smith 1993).