Introduction: An Ethnography of University Reform

Abstract

This chapter introduces an ethnographic study of how universities, which are often seen as stable and hard to reform, have nonetheless undergone extensive change in Denmark in a short timespan. The project explores the composition of the reform agenda and traces the process of transformation to show how it became so extensive. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Denmark has engaged in radical reforms of its universities with a new University Law in 2003 and a sequence of further reforms over the next fifteen years. Denmark became known for adopting high potency doses of international reform agendas and this, along with the pace and intensity of the reforms, makes Denmark an excellent optic through which to analyse such a complex process of transformation. There were two main contexts for the Danish university reforms: to make them a driving force in a purported future ‘global knowledge economy’; and to include them in a major reformation of the state and its steering of the public sector. This chapter introduces the main features of the 2003 University Law and subsequent reforms and explains how the authors conducted the study. The authors avoided making the goals of the reforms into a normative baseline against which to read off the reactions of university leaders, academics and students. Instead, our ethnographic approach enabled us to follow the layer upon layer of reforms through time and across scales, capturing the multiple sources of changes. Central to our analysis was the concept of enactment, as the university was being enacted in a double sense. First, the university was being reformed through the enactment or passing of laws to try and bring about ‘top-down’ changes; and second, managers, academics and students were enacting their insitutions ‘bottom-up’ through their daily activities. The tension between the dual meanings of enacting a law and acting in everyday life is at the core of the study. This introduction sets out the way the project conceptualised universities as politically contested spaces, continually re-enacted by a range of actors, with moments of suspense and always the possibility of surprising things happening, and with no single vision emerging intact.