The Conditions under which Higher Education operates:

Leftovers…

MPhil/HEEM Programme in Higher EducationIntroductory semester, Unit 3, lecture 4Peter MaassenOslo, 27 September 2007

1. New Public Management (NPM)2. Bologna process3. Changing conditions?

New Public Management(Managerialism / reinventing government)

“The New Public Management has championed a vision of public managers as the entrepreneurs of a new, leaner, and increasingly privatized government, emulating not only the practices but also the values of business”(Denhardt and Denhardt 2000)

New Public Management

NPM assumes that market competition rather than centralised bureaucratic regulation will deliver to the public ‘value for money’ from public expenditures.However, NPM has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and cracks are appearing in its intellectual and ideological foundations

Institutional governance/management is about managing the gap between intentions and reality.

NPM addresses the gap by denying its existence.

Challenges:

1. Find an appropriate balance between academic and administrative management and leadership2. Find an appropriate balance between managinginternal and external interests3. Find an appropriate balance between managingpublic and private institutional activities and structures

How to manage a hybrid institution?

Given all the signs of an increased political interest in higher education, and the developments in the sector – what evidence do we have that the conditions under which HE operates are changing?

Do we witness a new and different HE sector appearing, or are the changes witnessed more a continuation of central characteristics of HE?

Articles summing up recent research on this question: Musselin (2005), Kyvik (2004) and De Boer & Goedegebuure (2003)

• Musselin (2005) European HE reforms- Policy convergence?

- Similar systems?

• But were European HE institutions similar from the beginning? (Humboldtian, Anglo-Saxon, South-European university models)

• Hence, ”similar” reforms may produce very different outcomes- UK: Self-regulated but more state influence later

- France: Academics and government linked with a weak institutional level, but stronger institutional level in latter decades