University Reform: International Policy Making Through a Danish Prism

Abstract

This chapter provides a historical and international context for the Danish university reform. It analyses Danish policy makers’ participation in the international forums that, from the 1980s to the 2000s, were sites of debate and contestation over different ideas for university reform. First it sketches out the principal international agencies and their contrary visions for universities. Were universities to foster international exchanges of ideas, cultural understanding and world peace, or to drive the competitiveness of countries and world regions in a projected global knowledge economy? In the 1990s, Danish policy makers focused most on the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development). A detailed analysis of the OECD’s report, Redefining Tertiary Education, reveals the rhetorical strategy or ‘double shuffle’ by which it kept both the above visions for the university in play, and the tricks and tropes of time that made the ‘global knowledge economy’ look like a certain future which was moving fast into the present. The chapter explores the formation of an ‘epistemic community’ around the OECD and the technologies of soft power by which they brought OECD reform agendas into national policy making. The Danish case study shows the intense interaction of members of this epistemic community across the Danish-OECD interface. Far from ‘Denmark’ and ‘OECD’ being discrete entities, national policy makers, who were deeply involved in creating the OECD’s agenda, invited other members of the epistemic community to make recommendations about the reforms necessary for Denmark to be competitive in future. The Danish policy makers then received this as objective and authoritative advice marked with the OECD’s imprimatur. The chapter shows how, in a short time, a small number of activists successfully mobilised a radical agenda of university reforms using forms of power that were ‘soft’ not only because they depended on networks and the spreading of advice and best practice, rather than rules and regulations, but also because they were diffuse and hard for those outside the epistemic community to grasp, let alone resist.