Professor Susan Wright ( University of Arhus)
Envisioning and Enacting the Future University
My project is to complete the book Enacting the University: Danish
University Reforms in a Comparative Perspective and to use the
empirical and theoretical results, in the light of previous research in
UK universities, for a comparative discussion of university futures.
Denmark has engaged actively in international policy circuits which
have produced increasingly radical ‘scenarios’ for the future
university in the global knowledge economy. Denmark provides an optic
through which to study high potency doses of the international cocktail
of university reforms. In the project’s multi-sited ethnography, one
strand has traced how ‘the problem of the university’ has been
repeatedly re-formulated and ‘the future university’ re-imagined in
public debates since 1980s. As in Austria and the other Nordic
countries, these reforms also derive from an agenda to modernize the
whole public sector ¬– an aspect absent from the literature. A series
of University Laws (2004-8) inscribed new roles for universities in
society and new steering technologies aimed to change the identity and
behaviour of managers, academics and students.
Three other project strands focus on how managers, academics and
students have been just as actively re-imagining and enacting the
university. We trace how each of these figures is envisioned by the
current reforms, then explore ‘telling events’ through which they come
to be enacted in new ways. The university is treated as a contested
space in which, although politicians, managers, academics and students
do not have equal power to shape their institutions, each is actively
contributing to the re-imagining and enacting of the future university.
The study engages with theoretical issues of wider relevance to the
study of university futures and processes of transformation. First, how
to avoid the trap of treating a university a priori as an entity?
Reminiscent here is Ryle’s foreign visitor to Oxbridge who, after being
shown the colleges, libraries, administrative offices etc, asks, ‘But
where is the university?’ If the University is conceptualised as the
continual interaction of its constituent elements, this calls for new
forms of ethnographic depiction. A second problem is the
still-prevalent assumption that government reforms ‘trickle down’
through organisations to employees and clients ‘on the ground’. One
senior figure said our study was premature: the law’s provisions for
dismantling the university’s elected decision making, appointing new
‘strategic leaders’, making plans and prioritising budgets had yet to
be put into effect; ‘nothing has happened yet!’ On the contrary, ‘the
law’ was an active presence in debates among students, academics and
managers as they strategised to create, or forestall, possible futures.
The fieldwork and preliminary analysis are complete. Springer has
offered a book contract. The chapters will be drafted in the spring.
The aim of the fellowship will be to edit the book as a whole and,
through discussions at CRASSH, hone these wider theoretical issues
about the transformation of universities. Substantively, the study
contributes knowledge on policy migration; impacts of governing models
on the organisation, funding, auditing of universities, their academic
freedom and role in society; and on envisioning the university of the
future.
