Links
Archives
Monday, June 12, 2006
THE CER REPORT I’ve now read the entire report (you have to pay to have them send it to you online) about European universities written by Richard Lambert and Nick Butler for the Centre for European Reform, and I want to say a few things about it. The report doesn’t bother with a polite opening paragraph about the glory of Europe’s intellectual past, and the impressive bits of that past that persist despite present “crisis” conditions. It barrels right into the truth -- “Europe’s universities, taken as a group, are failing…” -- and keeps going. State-controlled, compelled to accept almost everyone who wants to attend for as long as they want to attend, lacking autonomy, perennially underfunded, top-heavy with research universities (which do little significant research) instead of diversified into colleges and universities, poorly governed, lacking many of their smartest students and faculty because these people have left for American academic institutions, profoundly averse to competition, peer review, and excellence, unable to charge tuition, liable to generate violent political opposition if they mount even modest reforms… It all tells “a grim story for Europe.” How can it hope to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” - the strategic goal of the EU’s economic reform (‘Lisbon’) agenda - when most of its best universities are so clearly in the second division? And how is it possible that such a rich and diverse set of countries should have found it so difficult to build and sustain world-class institutions? An important part of the answer appears toward the end of the report: Elite universities … cannot develop within a funding system which is primarily geared to regional policy or to general ideas of equality and fairness rather than to excellence. So long as you think of universities primarily as generators of social justice and distributors of jobs, rather than as generators of knowledge, the authors argue, you will never “create future global winners.” Lambert and Butler accuse European universities of grandiosity and self-delusion: “Too many European universities believe that all that stands between them and the status of Harvard is a large bundle of cash.” These universities don’t recognize that the larger impediment is that aspect of contemporary Europe that Robert Kagan isolates in his book Of Paradise and Power -- the withdrawal from the world political stage and the embrace of quietism. Many of Europe’s universities simply want to be left alone. |