Higher Education in 2040

A Global Approach

Bert van der Zwaan

AUP

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from Utrecht University.

Also published in Dutch: Bert van der Zwaan, Haalt de universiteit 2040?
Een Europees perspecties op wereldwijde kansen en bedreigingen (ISBN 978 94 6298 415 8)

Translation: Vivien Collingwood

Photo back cover: Arnaud Mooij

Cover design: Wat ontwerpers

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press.

ISBN 978 94 6298 450 9

e-ISBN 978 90 4853 516 3 (pdf)

e-ISBN 978 90 4853 517 0 (ePub)

NUR 740

Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)

G.J. van der Zwaan, 2017

Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).

Preface

The university is one of the oldest institutions in the world. After eight hundred years, it is still going strong where many other institutions have foundered. The university even appears to be flourishing: in the Netherlands for instance, as elsewhere, student numbers continue to rise, the research enjoys a good reputation and Dutch universities’ results are impressive – certainly if one takes the size of the country into consideration.

Nevertheless, these are turbulent times. There is criticism from all sides: criticism of the mass nature of education, the focus on efficiency and research output, the lack of collaboration with industry, and the relatively meagre attention that universities are said to pay to societal problems. And that is just criticism from the outside world. Within the university community, the voices of lecturers and students can also be heard. They are often critical of administrators, ‘who have transformed the university into a factory’.

As well as criticisms of the current situation, there are also challenges for the future. Information technology is leading to rapid changes in teaching and research. Across the world, it seems that university teaching is gradually being privatized and governments are no longer automatically funding research. The labour market is set to change fundamentally, and with this, education for students. What is more, the world faces major problems when it comes to distributing dwindling supplies of food, energy, water and raw materials across a growing global population. This, too, means that the university faces new questions and, no doubt, new responsibilities.

How is the university tackling the existing problems and how is it preparing for the future? Where will the pressures and opportunities lie in the coming 25 years? Or, to put it differently: how can the university best survive? In this collection of essays, I search for answers to these questions. Owing to its form, the book became a kaleidoscopic exploration rather than a systematic study. Many of the essays are based on blogs, columns and speeches that were originally written from a global perspective. The emphasis has shifted slightly in this collection, in that I make comparisons between Europe on the one hand and North America and Asia on the other. I do not consider other parts of the world, because comparing these three continents already proved complex enough. In practice, the emphasis of the essays is not on the whole of Europe, which proved impossible, but on Western Europe and England, whilst for Asia, I focus on China, Hong Kong and Singapore. When it comes to North America, I discuss a relatively large number of problems affecting the US. Here and there, I sharpen the focus a little by referring to the current debate in the Netherlands. In some respects, this differs from the discourse unfolding at the European level. It is striking here that student activism is throwing the issues the university is struggling with into much starker relief than elsewhere. I attempt to explain this difference, among other things, with reference to the specific agreements that the universities made with the Dutch government.

Although I have attempted to present a balanced discussion of all aspects of the university system, there is somewhat more of an emphasis on research universities. The various international comprehensive universities are easy to compare, whereas the other parts of the system of higher education differ greatly from one country to the next. In the Netherlands, for example, there is a clear separation between the research-intensive university on the one hand and the ‘applied university’ or ‘polytechnic’ on the other, while in other countries these are all part of the same system. As a result, while they are all referred to as universities, there are significant differences in quality, which makes it virtually impossible to effectively compare them with one another.

This book is divided into three parts. The first is the most descriptive, the two successive ones are of a more opinion-based character. In the first part, I attempt to trace the origins of the problems with which the university is grappling. On the different continents these are admittedly different problems, but we nevertheless find surprising similarities, too. It is useful to return, time and again, to the origins of today’s problems, because analysing them often reveals solutions. The short, essay-like character of the analysis in this book brings a risk, however: it makes it easy for critics to point to lacunae or other explanations than offered here. This is a risk I am willing to take, particularly because the first part is also meant to offer an overview for the reader who lacks a ready knowledge of the developments within the university in recent decades; an overview that may prove helpful when reading later chapters. The different sections can also stand alone, however, and the essays can be read in a random order. To allow for this, the reader must forgive some repetition here and there.

The first part provides a conceptual framework – a springboard, as it were – for the two successive parts. In these, I state my opinions freely in an attempt to discover where the university is headed in future, whilst remaining aware that for each of the continents or even the individual countries discussed, one could add a lot of additional information that would transform the black-and-white sketch offered here into a watercolour. More than nuance, however, there is a need for a broad debate: a debate in which society and the university look one another squarely in the eye to discuss the question of what would be desirable in future, not only for the university, but also for society. We are seeing far too little of this, partly because there is such mutual distrust between the universities and the policy world and politics. I therefore wanted this book to contribute to broadening and advancing the debate. That is why I opted for short and relatively accessible essays, rather than an in-depth study, which would have run the risk of being accessible only to experts.

The chosen structure of short essays allows for accessibility and freedom of thinking. As remarked earlier, I allowed some repetition here and there so that it would be easier to read the chapters on an individual basis. However, the loose structure also requires a bit more brainwork from the reader, because rather than having a single, tight line of argument, varying perspectives are presented. This is the case, for instance, for the conceptual framework that was used. In the first part in particular, there is a strong emphasis on explaining the university and its modern problems with reference to the historical context. Already in that part, however, as well as in the second and third parts, many of the developments could be explained from an economic perspective. The debate between what is known as ‘historical institutionalism’ on the one hand, and ‘resource dependency theory’ on the other, which stresses the economic framework as the motor driving the developments within the university, has the potential to create confusion. But exploring this in more depth would have been to the detriment of the relatively short and opinion-based character of the essays.

Something similar applies to the extensive literature that exists on the differences and similarities between the continental European and Anglo-Saxon universities. In order to describe all of these nuances in detail, it would have been necessary to employ an extensive system of footnotes and concepts. In this book, these have been provided only in part. I have referred to sources for further information when necessary, but this, too, is limited to an emphasis on the main outlines. This is also the case more generally: almost everywhere, I have opted for a very limited selection of sources, mainly to keep the book readable, whilst nevertheless helping the reader on their way should more information be desired.

This collection of essays is the product of the short four-month sabbatical that I enjoyed between May and August 2015. During that period, I talked with many colleagues from around the world; it is impossible to acknowledge them all separately. Many of them were fellow rectors or university administrators, but I also spoke to interested parties from government, the private sector and NGOs. I am extremely grateful for the generous way in which they were prepared to share their knowledge with me.

It was in Spain that I first summarized and organized all of the data that I had collected during my sabbatical. In Miranda de Castañar, Govert Dibbets and Yvonne Arends offered their hospitality and allowed me to work completely undisturbed. Richard de Waard, Reinout van Brakel and Marijk van der Wende helped me to find the statistical data I needed. Annemieke Hekking provided secretarial support with finding data and checking references. Kurt Deketelaere, Peter Vale and Marijk van der Wende made special contributions in the form of long discussions, but also by providing material and numerous new insights and, last but not least, helping to organize discussions. Frank Miedema, Hans de Jonge, Esther Stiekema and Sietzke Vermeulen provided extremely helpful criticism on parts of the manuscript at an early stage; Marijk van der Wende, Kurt Deketelaere and Melanie Peters commented on the first full draft. Naturally, any errors that remain are my responsibility alone.

The sabbatical proved to be a wonderful time for my partner Wilma Wessels and myself, due to all the travelling together and the time abroad. During the whole period, we were able to do much more together than we normally can, given the busy lives that we both lead. We also talked at length about the content of this book. For both these reasons, this book is for her.

Utrecht, January 2017

Table of contents

Preface

Introduction: a sinking ship?

Part 1. Ancient problems and modern dilemmas

1. The idea of a university

2. A history of secularization and democratization

3. Grappling with change

4. Rising costs, selection and governments in retreat

5. On size, bureaucracy and distrust

6. The successes and failures of the entrepreneurial university

7. Under the spell of production and quality

Part 2. The key factors in the coming decades

8. The key trends

9. The economy determines the future

10. Urbanization and global knowledge hubs in 2040

11. Information technology as a disruptive force

12. Digital or campus teaching?

13. The labour market and lifelong learning

14. The civic university

Part 3. Contours of the university of the future

15. Quid durat?

16. The need for legitimization

17. Old and new core values

18. The government and the higher education system of the future

19. The global university and the knowledge ecosystem of the future

20. How will the comprehensive research university survive?

21. The curriculum of the future

Conclusion: the transition to 2040

Bibliography

Introduction: a sinking ship?

In this collection of essays, I start by exploring the factors that led to the modern university systems with which we are familiar around the world. These different systems are experiencing different problems – which means there will often be different solutions. This also means, though, that the solutions that work in one country will not necessarily work in another. All too often in the Netherlands, for example, attempts are made to solve problems by imitating American or English universities, even though the nature of the Dutch system might make this impossible. In the second part, I identify the major challenges that the universities are facing as a result of societal changes. These can also differ by continent, or even by country. In the third part, over a number of essays, I consider the question of how universities will respond to the pressure emanating from these changing social circumstances: new threats will emerge in the coming 25 years, but also great opportunities.

Will the university make it to 2040? Many solutions have already been proposed for the problems that the university currently faces.1,2 These solutions are often relatively abstract, however, and it is unclear whether they will work in the current system. The question we should be asking is: which key do we need to press in order to achieve real solutions? A further question is also relevant here: does it actually help if we press the keys – does the university itself determine what happens? – or is the university simply a product of societal processes? The first part of this collection focuses mainly on processes within the university, and is thus concerned with the keys that the university could press in order to achieve a better balance where necessary. The second part looks in more depth at the factors lying beyond the university that will have a major impact in the coming 25 years.

It is my aim, with this collection of essays, to gradually build the impression that whilst the university is by no means a sinking ship, as some have claimed, it needs to make a clear about-turn in order to survive. Almost every aspect of its existence will be transformed. Teaching will change radically, but above all, the students who follow its educational programmes will change. No longer will a degree be the ultimate objective, but made-to-measure courses that give a good grounding for a career in a fundamentally different labour market. No longer will there be research that is mostly disciplinary, but research that is carried out in the exceptionally dynamic world of big data and changing collaborations, including digital partnerships. No longer will there be a university where financing is the leading factor, but one where contributing to the world beyond forms a leitmotif for its actions. It is troubling that the debate both with and within the universities tends to be about budget cuts or the government’s vision, when it should in fact be about how we should approach the major changes that are inevitably coming. As a result, the university often lacks a broadly shared set of values with which we could tackle the problems of today and tomorrow.

In contrast to all these concerns and problems is the fact that the university is actually the most hopeful community that has ever existed, filled with young people who are looking to the future, and clever souls who are opening up new scientific horizons; a community that has shown for the last eight hundred years that it has the resilience to survive.

1 Barnett, R., 2011: Being a University, Routledge, 188 pp. Wide-ranging study on the core values and objectives of the university.

2 Elkana, Y.& H. Klöpper, 2012: Die Universität im 21. Jahrhundert. Für eine neue Einheit von Lehre, Forschung und Gesellschaft, Edition Körber-Stiftung. Overview of the objectives of the modern university, mainly written from a continental European perspective, including many examples from educational practice.

Part 1

Ancient problems and modern dilemmas

This part contains a succinct analysis of how and why the university came to be what it is today. Which problems were inherited from the past and have to be solved for the future? Is the basic idea of the university still tenable? Whilst the university has been successful for almost eight hundred years, the number of pressure points – which are often rooted in the past – is increasing. Today, the question is whether the government is still willing or able to fund university education: private education is on the rise around the world, often paired with increasingly stringent selection. What is more, the universities can hardly keep pace with the growth in student numbers, also in view of falling state contributions. This growth is rooted in the sharp rise in participation in higher education that began in the mid-twentieth century, when, under conditions of growing prosperity, access to university was democratized to a profound degree. Ironically enough, despite the rise in student numbers, universities are increasingly being assessed on the basis of their research, which is receiving more and more funding from third parties. This is bringing the core values that were inherited from the Enlightenment, in the form of freedom of research and the independence of the university, into question. Under pressure, the university is looking for new solutions.

1. The idea of a university

At first sight, universities are doing better than ever. Never before have there been so many good institutions of higher education, which conduct what is often fantastic research and where students receive better teaching than ever. On closer inspection, however, the bitter wind of a fundamentally changed society is whipping around the university’s ancient, originally twelfth-century, form. Many believe that the old university has been transformed into a teaching factory, where students, as modern consumers, protest against the value for money they receive. The compact institutions of the past have become large businesses in which many scholars no longer feel at home. The image of focused study in silent libraries has largely been supplanted by a deluge of complaints about the pressure of work, in a setting that is more reminiscent of the care sector than a peaceful temple of learning.

The arrows of discontented lecturers and students are aimed at administrators, for steering universities in a way comparable to the captain of the Titanic hitting the iceberg, or at the government, which is blamed for ever-increasing levels of bureaucracy in the universities.3 In essence, the question that is often tabled in these frequently passionate debates is: to whom does the university belong? Lying behind this, however, is also the question: what is the university, in fact? These questions of ownership and identity have deep roots in the past, meaning that it is essential to have an understanding of the past in order to understand the modern predicament.

Whilst the roots of the modern university undeniably stretch back to the Middle Ages, the university in its present form is largely a product of the Enlightenment. It was in that era and after that ideas about the utility and necessity of university education were formulated. Many of the conflicts that are currently coming to light can be traced back to the question of whether these ideas are still valuable or will hold out in future. Within the university, a considerable number of lecturers and students wish to return to the ideals of the past: a significant role for teaching, and the academic atmosphere that is typical of relatively small universities. But society is demanding a number of other things as well, such as contributions to social, and above all, economic needs. It is with these and other diverse views that the university is currently grappling.

Two core nineteenth-century ideas can be seen as having played a major role in the development of the modern university: one proposed by Newman and the other by Von Humboldt. Given that both are frequently cited in the debates, it is almost self-evident that we should begin our quest with them. Building on the ideals of the Enlightenment, over 150 years ago, Cardinal John Henry Newman4 put forward a number of pioneering ideas in his celebrated book, The idea of a university, that are still cited approvingly today. It is striking, though, that these approvingly-cited passages are often lifted unilaterally from his work by people who have obviously barely read it, as the modern university has now moved very far from the ideal picture painted by Newman – and that is a good thing! For Newman promoted the notion of a university that was totally focused on teaching, and even went so far as to describe the transfer of knowledge as the ultimate goal: ‘If its [the university] object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a university should have students.’ In other words: students are the justification of the university’s existence and research has no part to play.

As a good Roman Catholic, Newman was part of a long-established ecclesiastical tradition, stemming from the Middle Ages, in which the university was seen primarily as a teaching institution and the guardian of knowledge; an idea that no one would endorse today. Newman’s argument remains important, though, due to his conviction that the first years of university should feature a broad educational curriculum in which students develop on the basis of their talents. Newman defended this as follows: ‘All branches of knowledge are connected together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator.’ Although this would hardly be conceivable today, given the religious bent of his words, Newman’s ideas had a major influence on the Anglo-Saxon model of liberal education, which aimed to provide a broad educational foundation within higher education for a career in society or possible further study in a more specialized area or discipline. And it is this notion of a broad, general education that is rapidly gaining currency in the European debate, in the wake of a long period of increasingly specialized university teaching. The textbox sets out the key similarities and differences between Europe and North America in this respect.

Key similarities and differences between the university systems in Europe and North America

In North America, the higher education system is based on colleges that provide a broad preparatory academic education, partly analogous to the Bachelor’s phase in Europe. Traditionally, this phase has been highly developed in Liberal Arts and Sciences colleges; the latter distinguish themselves by providing students with a wide range of subjects from both the sciences, and the social sciences and humanities. There is great variety among the colleges. This phase of education is known as the undergraduate phase.

A limited number of the students in North America go on to the Master’s programme, which is mainly seen as preparation for gaining a doctorate during the PhD phase. The entire Master’s and PhD phase is known as the graduate phase.

In continental Europe, the university Bachelor’s degree is not usually seen as an endpoint (at least, not yet), whereas this is often the case in North America. In Europe, the great majority of students go on to a Master’s programme after obtaining their Bachelor’s diploma.

There is less variety in university education (public/private, forms of education such as that provided by the colleges, different types of university) in Europe than in North America. Whereas universities in Europe often combine teaching with research, in North American we find the research university, or the comprehensive research university: the broad research university. This is in contrast to the teaching university, which focuses mainly on teaching, comparable with for instance the ‘university colleges’ in the Netherlands.

In terms of form, higher education in England lies between the European and the American systems.

There are significant differences in relation to what is understood as a university: whereas in the US and England, there is a gradual transition between higher vocational education and the university, in the Netherlands and the rest of Northern Europe, there is a sharp division between institutions of higher professional education, or so-called universities of applied sciences or polytechnics, and the university. In Southern Europe, too, the distinction between higher vocational education and the university has traditionally been narrower, because universities in Southern Europe have traditionally had a greater focus on preparing students for the professions than those in Northern Europe.

The form of modern Asian universities is often similar to that found in the Anglo-Saxon system.

These days, Von Humboldt is also frequently cited with enthusiasm, although here, too, the suspicion would be justified that virtually no one has actually read his work. In Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, this nineteenth-century Prussian education minister is described almost affectionately as the founder of the modern university and the inventor of the concept of ‘Bildung’. But the form of education that Von Humboldt introduced as a minister in the then Prussian system was not new; it built on longstanding traditions in Western Europe. His contribution, however, was to institutionalize these traditions by arguing that good university education was characterized by the constant linking of teaching and research, whereby students had to be educated and trained (‘Bildung’) in a system that prioritized the acquisition of new knowledge. As he wrote in 1810:

Es ist ferner eine Eigenthümlichkeit der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten, dass sie die Wissenschaft immer als ein noch nicht ganz aufgelöstes Problem behandeln und daher immer im Forschen bleiben, da die Schule es nur mit fertigen und abgemachten Kenntnissen zu thun hat und lernt. Das Verhältniss zwischen Lehrer und Schüler wird daher durchaus ein anderes als vorher. Der erstere ist nicht für die letzteren, Beide sind für die Wissenschaft da.5

In other words, this was about much more than merely transferring existing knowledge – something for which Newman was still calling some forty years later.

Four problems with historical roots

The university has undergone a complete transformation since the days of Newman and Von Humboldt, and many of their ideas are simply no longer relevant. Despite this, they are frequently invoked in the current debate about ‘why we have universities at all’. In Europe, in particular, a sizeable movement can be seen and heard that believes that the university is focusing too strongly on research to the detriment of teaching. In his book, What are universities for?, Stefan Collini,6 for example, argues for a return to old values and a greater emphasis on teaching. Others, such as Crow and Dabars,7 argue to the contrary that it is vital to preserve a strong emphasis on research in the context of the modern research university. It is this question of the balance between the two that lies at the heart of the modern debate.

The second question, which gives rise to sharp differences of opinion, can also essentially be traced back to nineteenth-century views that are now coming under heavy pressure. Von Humboldt was an outspoken defender of a well-ordered polity, something for which Prussia was famous at the time. Within this tradition, in Germany and many other European countries there was for many years no debate about who should pay for the university: this was obviously the task of the state. Thus it is perhaps no coincidence that Newman, who wanted to found a Roman Catholic university – a private university, in other words – enjoyed so much influence in the US and in England: in these university systems, the state has traditionally played a much weaker role, and has even been notably absent in many respects. Take the American universities, which are privately funded to a great extent and where the government plays a modest role in funding higher education. This means that universities in the US and in England, to an extent, face very different problems from those in continental Europe. On both continents, however, and probably in Asia as well in future, how to fund the university is an extremely important and growing problem.

While the third focus of discontent within modern universities cannot be traced back directly to the Enlightenment, it is related to it; for it was from this time onwards, in principle, that the democratization of access to the university, or ‘education for the many’, in modern jargon, became anchored. Since the days of Von Humboldt and Newman, the university system has been subject to constant growth. It took many years, however, for the growth in student numbers to become established. Only since the Second World War has participation in university education increased explosively and at the same time the university’s role as a research institution become more and more prominent. As a result of these developments, universities have become so large that they are starting to resemble businesses, meaning that they are often managed as such: one increasingly hears terms such as professional management, professional fundraising, valorization and efficiency. Hardly anyone would doubt that given the size of the budgets involved – in many cases, ranging from half a billion to one and a half billion euros – good, professional leadership is essential. But this same need for tighter and more efficient management is causing great dissatisfaction among many lecturers and students. Again, it is Stefan Collini who comprehensively expresses the oft-heard complaint that traditional academic freedom has largely disappeared and that valorization has come to the fore: ‘universities have been transformed to the point where many are now principally centres of scientific and technological research and, increasingly, of vocational and professional training.’4 Although Collini enjoys much support within the academic community, such statements present the university as an otherworldly institution; one that is difficult to reconcile with the challenges facing the world, and one from which society is simply demanding visibility and commitment.

The dissatisfaction felt by Collini and many others becomes clearer, however, when we consider the fact that as a consequence of market demand, there is a danger that the research carried out by the ‘entrepreneurial university’ will shift unilaterally towards those areas where the greatest opportunities for valorization lie. Indeed, it is not difficult to show that since the Second World War and especially since 1980, the volume of research in the medical, biomedical and natural sciences has increased exponentially all over the world, often to the detriment of the humanities and social sciences. It is thus no surprise that these latter disciplines have been particularly harsh critics of the modern system: many pages of The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, Trouw and NRC have played host to scholars complaining about the lack of attention paid to the humanities, the liberal arts and sciences or the social sciences, in contrast to (from the perspective of those doing the complaining) the massive attention lavished on technology and the natural sciences. It is in this context that reference is often made to the ideas of Von Humboldt, and there are loud calls for universities to give more space to Bildung, without realizing that it was precisely the Humboldtian concept of the link between teaching and research that gave rise to the current situation in the first place.

The fourth and final major problem likewise shows how the university is wrestling with its modern identity. Rather than originating in the Enlightenment, this is a problem that has, according to the critics, become much more defined in recent decades, under pressure from the factory-like production of knowledge that changed the university beyond all recognition from the late 1980s onwards. For centuries, the university had a widely recognized duty to disseminate the knowledge that had been gathered. Scholarly treatises and publications are as old as the university itself, and served primarily to maintain an exchange of knowledge and above all, to record knowledge in a public archive. For hundreds of years, scholars published only in order to exchange knowledge and to establish their reputations; publication was hardly a commercial phenomenon. With the explosive global growth of the universities from the 1970s, however, the volume of research increased sharply. With this came rising demand for and a supply of publications, and what had previously hardly been a commercial market for scientific journals was rapidly commercialized. Whereas university publishers or learned societies, such as the Royal Society in England or the Royal Academy of Sciences in the Netherlands, had first served the market, large publishers assumed leadership of the professional organization of the whole process – for a fee, of course. The growth in publications was and still is explosive, but the university was only truly caught in its grip when publication output was measured on a constant basis. From that time onwards, a spiral of pressure to publish developed, and increasing costs for access to publications – publications that, ironically enough, were reporting the results of what was often publicly-financed research.8,9

The debate today

These four problems together form the main ingredients of the debate that is dominating the universities in different countries, to varying extents. In America, there is talk of the university in crisis, but in Europe, too, an increasing number of voices are claiming, often in vehement terms, that there is something wrong with the entire system. It is an international debate, in other words, with different emphases. Usually, though, it is about the tenability of old values and structures, and the question of whether these remain adequate in the twenty-first century. The debate also questions the core values of today’s university; these, too, were largely inherited from another age, meaning that we also need to ask whether they are still relevant. Viewed the other way, it is often asked, especially in Europe, whether we should not take a step back from modern developments, and a case is made for a return to old values.

In addition to these themes, which touch on the past, there are also many questions about the future; about what the university will be like in the coming decades.10 Although there are many common elements, this future seems very different in all of the countries and on the three continents of North America, Europe and Asia. The university does not exist and there are many differences in the national contexts. In the Netherlands, for example, the debate about the problems with which the university is grappling has been more intense than in many other countries. In the spring of 2015, riots broke out in Amsterdam, with students explicitly protesting the state of affairs within contemporary universities. They occupied important buildings on the University of Amsterdam campus for quite some time, along with buildings belonging to other universities in the Netherlands, as movements emerged that came to be referred to under the banner of ‘The New University’.11

Why have the general problems in the Netherlands come to light in a more vehement fashion? It seems that this is related to a convergence of international and national events. The discontent about the pressure to publish and the almost-autonomous conveyor-belt of research against which the ‘Science in Transition’ movement6 in the Netherlands and comparable groups elsewhere are protesting, are widely recognisable phenomena at the international level, particularly in scientific and medical university departments. The complaints about valorization and the entrepreneurial university are also widely recognisable, now especially on the part of the social sciences and humanities. In the Netherlands, however, this broad international debate appears to have been put under further pressure by the performance agreements that the universities concluded with the government in 2012.9 Agreements were made by the then Cabinet on numerous elements that, taken together, were meant to lead to a significant improvement in the quality of education. Due to their detailed nature, however, they severely curtailed universities’ freedom. This, in any case, is what underlies the numerous complaints about ‘output-driven thinking’: the freedom is gone, and many believe that the university has degenerated into a teaching factory.12

3 Ginsberg, B., 2014: ‘College Presidents – New Captains of the Titanic’. Minding the Campus, July 2014. For the Dutch debate, see: Verbrugge, A. & J. van Baardwijk, (eds), 2014: Waartoe is de universiteit op aarde?, Boom, 296 pp. Provides a lot of background and information on the developments within the Dutch system, including what is often critical reflection, such as on the performance agreements that the Dutch universities concluded with the government in 2012.

4 Newman, J.J., 1852: The Idea of a University. It is important to emphasize that the differences between the systems in North America and Europe are also attributable, to a significant extent, to the Land Grant Act that was passed in the US, which defined the social contract of many universities in the nineteenth century. This established a university mission that was strongly oriented towards society, whereas in Europe, particularly under Napoleon’s influence, the connection with the state became progressively stronger. As a result, the core mission of American universities has traditionally been focused on contributing to the common good, much more so than in Europe.

5 Von Humboldt, W., 1810: Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin. The quote could be translated as follows: ‘It is furthermore a quality of higher scholarly institutions that they treat science as a problem that remains unsolved as of yet, and therefore always should remain inquisitive, because (normal) schools are only concerned with and teach cut-and-dried knowledge. The relationship between teacher and pupil is thus very different from how it was in the past: the former is not only there for the latter, but both are there for science.’

6 Collini, S., 2012: What Are Universities For?, Penguin Books. Critical analysis, written mainly from the perspective of the humanities in the context of an elite university.

7 Crow, Michael M. & William B. Dabars, 2015: Designing the New American University, John Hopkins University Press. Analysis of the situation of the universities in the US, paying significant attention to rising costs, government withdrawal, and the implications for the social divide in the US.

8 Dijstelbloem, H., F. Huisman, F. Miedema & W. Mijnhardt, 2013: ‘Waarom de wetenschap niet werkt zoals het moet, en wat daaraan te doen is’. Science in Transition, Position paper 2013. Critical argument about the mechanisms that lead to greater prioritization of quantity and production, and less prioritization of quality and content. See also http://www.scienceintransition.nl.

9 Wilsdon, J., et al., 2015: The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363. HEFCE. Offers a useful overview of the background to metrics in academia and their effects.

10 Barnett, R., 2011: Being a University, Routledge, 188 pp. Wide-ranging study of the core values and objectives of the university. Older but still very readable is Boulton, G. & C. Lucas, 2008: ‘What Are Universities For’, LERU position paper 2008.

11 Thomas, C., 2015: Competente rebellen. Hoe de universiteit in opstand kwam tegen het marktdenken, Amsterdam University Press, 213 pp.

12 Flikkema, M., (ed.), 2016: Sense of Serving. Reconsidering the Role of Universities Now, VU University Press, 184 pp. Critical reflection on the nature of modern university education in the Netherlands.

2. A history of secularization and democratization