Reform at the Cutting Edge: The Institutional Level

Abstract

It is one of the more outlandish paradoxes of our day that, at the very moment when the sheer administrative and managerial complexity of ‘post-modern’ higher education systems reaches such a pitch, the best minds in the nation’s permanent civil service elite throw up their hands and confess themselves unable to master it. It is scarcely less paradoxical that at the same time, executive decision making should be ‘handed over’ and concentrated in the hands of individuals who are not simply external to the university, but are part-timers to boot! The rise of the ‘external’ president in the Netherlands or Chairman of the General Council in Portuguese universities, and the extension of the ‘pool’ from which chairmen are drawn to ‘outside personalities’ are not, of course exclusive to Portugal. Indeed, the Higher Education Guideline Law of 2007 moved in the same direction (Portugal, 2008: Article 82, para 1). Similar measures, which have already been discussed, are evident from recent and current initiatives in France, Denmark and the Netherlands, among others.¹