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.
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Notes
- 1.
The video was accessed on the OECD’s website on 25 July 2007.
- 2.
In 2006 the OECD secretariat had 858 staff, which had risen to 2500 in 2019.
- 3.
By 2019, some countries in the global south (S. Africa. Bolivia, Ecuador, Indonesia and Tanzania) had terminated treaties that included ISDS and the EU was trying to negotiate an international ISDS-light system, a Multilateral Investment Court. However, the UK government aimed to work under WTO rules post-Brexit, with trade agreements including ISDS, and Britain has the third largest number of companies globally that are making claims against other governments under this system.
- 4.
These six scenarios bore some resemblances to Milojević’s six models of the university: a business corporation focused on students as consumers; a sanctuary for the pursuit of academic knowledge and truth, with academic leadership; the cultural arm of the nation state, educating people for citizenship; poliversities with multiple, shifting roles; global electronic university with open access and learning based on cooperation not disciplines and hierarchies; and the community-based institution emphasising public service and outreach to local populations (Milojević 1998).
- 5.
I am very grateful to Signe Pildal Hansen and Taina Saarinen for clarification of the concept of pragmatic presupposition.
- 6.
The Danish government impressed upon universities the need to create strategies that matched its vision for the long term, but has not evacuated the near future. As discussed further in Chap. 5, the government has sought to tightly steer universities through fluctuations in funding, control of cash flow and limitations on their access to borrowing. In this peculiar mix of long run and short term governing, it has been unclear how universities were meant to reconcile the government’s long term policy and short term manipulations.
- 7.
In repeated reorganisations during the 1990s and 2000s, the remits for higher education and research have been divided in various ways between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Research. Hence Bertel Haarder attended the 2006 OECD ministerial meeting as Minister of Education, even though his ministry was not responsible for universities, but only shorter cycle vocational programmes including e.g. teachers colleges. In 2011, the Social Democrats, Social-Liberals and Socialist People’s Party government allocated research and nearly all higher and further education (above the level of high school) to the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education collecting all relevant seats on international agencies into the same ministry.
- 8.
The universities of Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg, Southern Denmark, the Danish Technical University and Copenhagen Business School.
- 9.
Parliament finally approved the University Law on 8 May and it received royal assent on 28 May. In between, the OECD visit was held on 13-23 May.
- 10.
AC (renamed Akademikerne) is known in English as The Danish Confederation of Professional Associations. It is a coalition of unions concerned with the working conditions and salary negotiations of graduates of higher education.
- 11.
The recommendation to create larger multi-faculty units was taken up in the Danish Research Policy Council and became part of their policy suggestions (Danish Research Policy Council 2005). Later, the ministry used this same recommendation as a motivating factor for encouraging mergers.
- 12.
The report was undertaken by CERI whose work includes evaluations on a national basis and national policy recommendations. CERI had already made an evaluation of the Danish universities in 1997, where the taximeter system was praised as innovative. CERI had also reviewed the Danish universities’ effect on regional development, and later, CERI conducted a review of Danish capacity for research in education (OECD 2004b).
- 13.
There are also other ways in which ideas pass between the Danish ministry and the OECD: the interface is more diverse. The council of ambassadors had the final say on the allocation OECD’s 15 million Euro core budget which funded five committees and the secretariat. The Education Committee, then chaired by Torben Kornbech from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation had the mandate to govern the programmes developed by the secretariat in its area. But other organisations and activities within OECD are membership organisations. An example is IMHE (Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education), which organizes conferences and produces reports, articles and papers on the challenges and opportunities facing universities and their leaders. Its membership includes six Danish universities as well as Dan-Eurashe (an association of tertiary education colleges) and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. IMHE and other units including CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation), PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and PEB (Programme on Educational Building) are all funded by participating countries and each has its own governing board. A country can also make separate contributions to promote particular activities. There is thus considerable scope for active members of a national policy community or issue network, including civil servants at various levels, stakeholder organisations and university leaders as well as politicians, to influence the OECD’s agenda.
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Wright, S. (2019). University Reform: International Policy Making Through a Danish Prism. In: Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1921-4_3
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