Abstract
In recent years the national and internal administration of universities has undergone fundamental change. This change parallels developments in other sectors of public life. It is matter not just of the rise of managerialism and of a takeover of control by the New Public Managers, proxies of other non-academic interests, at the cost of professional autonomy. What we are confronted with is in fact another expression of the substitution of governance for government, and in this connexion of the rise of what is called ‘soft law’. All this is bad news not only for academia but for democracy.
Highlights
Every national European government has a higher education policy, even if some no longer have an education ministry within which such a policy is made
The British government, for instance, assigns to a ministry called the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills the responsibility for the universities, presumably on the heavily ideological ground that university education has as its primary goal to produce students-with-a-diploma possessing the skills needed to enter business, as well as to make a contribution once there to what in most countries is disingenuously called the ‘knowledge economy’
In The Netherlands: “a policy has been conducted [there] since the mid-eighties which is based on great autonomy for institutions of higher education.”
Summary
Every national European government has a higher education policy, even if some no longer have an education ministry within which such a policy is made.
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