Paradoxes of the self: self-owning universities in a society of control

Jakob Williams Ørberg and Susan Wright[i]

Introduction

Of all self-governing institutions, universities, with their ideologies of academic autonomy, offer one of the best sites for critically examining what is meant by self-governance: what kind of a ‘self’ does a university as an institution create or project? What relations does the governance of this organisational ‘self’ entail with government and the ‘surrounding society’? The OECD and the Trends Reports of the Bologna process both call for reducing state control and increasing university autonomy. The Danish government responded by passing a law in 2003 which, it said would be ‘setting universities free’. Danish universities were taken out of the state bureaucracy and given the legal status of ‘self-owning institutions’. That is, by becoming ‘self owning’ universities were to be made into coherent organisations that would govern themselves in an accountable fashion (hence, selvejende institutioner is translated as self-governing institutions in the English translation of the law). Partly, as we have argued elsewhere (Wright and Ørberg 2008), universities were subject to the same reform as had already been implemented for most other education institutions, and indeed most other ‘service providers’ in the modernised Danish welfare state. Through government setting the ‘aim and frame’ for steering a sector, by converting parts of the bureaucracy into ‘self-owning’ service providers and entering into contracts with them, and by only paying if the service provider met the outputs and performance indicators specified in the contract, the aim was to give politicians much stricter and stronger control over service delivery and the machinery to ensure that, when politicians changed their aims, contractors responded quickly. By these means, contractors would be held to account to the public and especially to parliament for the spending of public funds.

Following this ‘modernizing state’ discourse about reform, which originated in the Ministry of Finance, the new status of universities turned them into just another service deliverer contracted to the Danish state: the reforms removed rather than increased any special legal status associated with ‘university autonomy’ and although the law states that ‘the university’ must protect research freedom, it put the conditions for exercising such freedom in question. Another strand in the discourse of university reform, emanating from the Ministry of Research, highlighted that the purpose was very specifically to set universities free, or at least give them ‘degrees of freedom’ to organize themselves to meet the challenges of the globalizing knowledge economy as imagined by organizations such as the OECD (OECD 1998, 1999, 2004). The subsequent Globalisation Strategy gave universities a very special role of not just providing a service to the state or the economy, but of driving the initiatives and the knowledge transfer that, it is assumed, will ‘maintain Denmark’s position as one of the wealthiest countries’ in the world (Danish Government 2006: 4). In sum, the 2003 University Law contained a two-way movement: it both reorganized the universities with a stronger and more unified management capable of strategic planning and increased independence from direct ministerial control; and it used other steering instruments to tie the universities’ activities more closely to government and ministerial policies. The Danish university reform can be seen as a case of empowering universities to govern themselves according to government ambitions.

The 2003 University Law brought a range of developments and experiments that had been set up during the previous 20 years into a new assemblage: output based funding for teaching (the taximeter system), development contracts between the university and the state, changes to degree programmes associated with the Bologna process; systematic evaluations of teaching quality; knowledge transfer as a major third leg of university activities; and the first examples of self owning universities (the Danish University of Education in 2000, and the Danish Technical University in 2001). These developments happened at different moments over the 1990s, each informed by a different political logic, and some resting on quite contrary rationalities of governance to others. As the concept of the self-owning institution, the centre piece of this assemblage of governing technologies, was gradually formed through the 1990s, it meant quite different things at different moments. This paper focuses on three moments – the introduction of development contracts in 1999, the passage of the University Law in 2003, and the subsequent definition of accountability procedures in 2007 - to analyse changes in the meaning of self-governance.

The literature on self-governance tends to focus on the shaping of the self of individuals in new strategies for governing society (e.g. Dean 2007), whereas we focus on the subjectivity of an organization. Where the literature does consider the self-governance of social institutions, this is often quite abstract (Kooiman 2003: 79-95). In contrast, we focus ethnographically on the precise ways that a government’s methods of steering require an institution, such as a university, to develop and perform a particular kind of self. The kind of institutional ‘self’ and its form of ‘self-governance’ will also be specific to a particular country or a different moment in time. As this book makes clear (chapter 1), there are substantial differences in the emergence, causes and consequences of the politics of using self-governing institutions in different regimes, for example, in a market-state like the UK as against a social-democratic state like Denmark. We contribute to teasing out those differences. But our central purpose is to explore the changing meanings of the two separate terms ‘self’ and ‘governance’ and their hyphenated relationship. What is the kind of self that an institution is meant to produce and stage at different historical moments? What is the role of that institutional self in processes of institutional management and in relations of power and systems of national governance? These questions are central to an understanding of the new forms of rule discussed in this book, but they have not been sufficiently explored. There is a tendency to treat the ‘self’, both of organisations and of individuals, as self-evident, unitary and consistent, uncontested, and stable through time. Yet feminist scholarship (Moore 1994, Hollway 1984) has long identified that people juggle with multiple selves, which are in multiple power relations with different family members and surrounding people and institutions. Making these diverse selves into a coherent whole and staging a performance as a single actor is at best a stupendous effort, and may be unrealistically over-ambitious. Is the ‘self’ of self-owning institutions similarly multiple and located in diverse power relations with the institutions of government and the surrounding society? Does it take a similarly stupendous effort to stage this self as a coherent unity? How are the internal forms of institutional governance mobilised to create an image of a competent actor? And how is that projection of a coherent and competent institutional self deployed in the politics of governance in the modernised Danish state?

Moments and transformations

We address these questions through a contextualized reading of a number of policy documents pertaining to different moments in the transformation of Danish universities. We use the word transformation here to mark the difference between reform, which we see as the implementation of a defined political agenda for universities, and the actual process of change, which this agenda affects or plays into. The first moment, the introduction of development contracts between universities and government in 1999, challenged universities to project themselves as a new kind of ‘self’. We argue that the language and method of the first generation of these development contracts was one of self improvement on the side of universities. Universities were supposed to become better at defining overall objectives and priorities and at organizing themselves in a coherent and effective manner. Successful projection of a coordinated ‘self’, it was argued, would enable them to take on a strategic role hitherto played by central government.

The second moment is the passing of the 2003 University Act, which set universities up as self- owning institutions and brought together a number of existing measures, including development contracts, into a new assemblage of steering technologies. This moment was argued through and celebrated as the final emergence of the university subject, as a strategically-led and coherent actor in the Danish economy and society. To use Saskia Sassen’s language (2006: 9-10), we argue that this moment was a “tipping point”, when universities stood on the cusp of switching from one form of governance to another. We share Sassen’s view that an epochal transformation cannot be pinned down to ‘before’ and ‘after’ but can best be studied by focussing on the process of change, by seeing how a major state institution, like a university, becomes the site of its own partial disassembly and re-ordering according to a new organising logic. The ‘tipping point’ is when such a process takes on an air of irreversibility and points to a future model for the institution. The 2003 University Law set up the university as a coherent organization, no longer under direct state control but now able to govern itself according to national policies. After that, the government no longer directed its efforts towards the construction of the university as a coherent, self-managed and accountable organisation. The university as a subject is henceforth assumed to already have a solid existence. From now on, government’s attention is turned towards developing ways to secure state influence over the university’s self-governance, especially through measuring and rewarding universities’ outputs and performance. The law set up stringent conditions within which the university is to perform: the purpose of universities was expanded and defined more precisely and a new internal system for governing and managing universities was established, with responsibility for prioritising and performance. Universities were also obliged to change the way they reported their activities; and the subsequent state-wide introduction of accrual budgeting meant that universities had to calculate the capital cost of their activities and calculate their profitability. Further reforms meant that universities now rented instead of owned their buildings and began the process of relating outputs and performance to payments. These last two reforms in particular placed universities in a very clearly indebted position in relation to the state, which we shall argue is a key to understanding the power relations in which universities are located.

The third and last moment started in autumn 2007 and is still underway. A report sets out how the audit system for universities is being reconfigured. In parallel, the Ministry is developing a system for making all of a university’s activities count towards performance-based funding. Our argument is that these activities signal completion of the shift in the government’s steering system towards measuring the university’s activities rather than being concerned with the configuration of the university as a subject. The ability of the university, especially in the person of the rector, to stage a coherent self is now taken for granted. But just at this moment, the university as a coherent self becomes hard to hold together because the proliferation of different government funding and accountability systems makes it extremely difficult for universities to plan their finances and establish strategies and priorities. As the funding systems move towards output payments, this also means that universities will be in a debt relationship with government: they receive a cash advance at the beginning of the year, and pay back at the end of the year if their outputs are less than expected. We end our chapter by analyzing the performance of the Rector of Copenhagen University at the 2006 annual celebration.[ii] As if he embodied the current dilemma of the Danish state-funded, self-owning, indebted university, in his speech he promised to defend the classic university values, while creating an efficient organization and delivering on all the outputs and indicators contracted with the government. Fulfilling this ambitious institutional performance he described as a feat on a par with the invention of ‘the flop’ that transformed Olympic high jumping. This is a powerful image of the effort required to produce and project a coherent self, the prerequisite for effective performance in the politics of self government.

The Rector’s performance points to a paradox: the university for which he stands as the figurehead is assumed by government to be a coherent organisation, at the same time as the government’s performance criteria, on whose fulfilment much university funding depends, demand that the university splits its efforts in several directions at once. This is similar to Deleuze’s (1992: 3-7) image of the control society where the indebted person is split up like a divid (as opposed to an individual), by the diverse systems that constantly monitor the different kinds of activities in which he or she engages. The need for the university, as represented by its Rector, to keep performing in one context after another, each according to different criteria, also requires that it presents itself as different kinds of self in each instance. This reminds us of the people described by Emily Martin’s (2007: 275-280) who, with or with-out diagnosis of mental disorder, use pharmaceutical products to adjust moods so as to perform optimally in each of the diverse situations that make up their life. The Danish university, rather than being the coherent and strategically planned organization the government now presumes it to be, has become a manager of diverse performance-enhancing projects and is constantly stressed to live up to ever-increasing demands imposed from the outside.

Governing through body and a soul

The first moment in the process of transformation we are describing, the introduction by the Danish Ministry of Research in 1999 of a development contract with each university, is marked by an attempt, in Rose’s terms, to govern ‘through the soul’ (Rose 1989). To do this, the Ministry had first to persuade those who worked at universities to think of themselves as forming a ‘body’. Only if they thought of a university as having some kind of collective presence could it have a soul, a will or desire to achieve something. This collective presence was to be personified by the rector. A reform in 1993 had tried to establish clearer and more hierarchical university management, but the Ministry was concerned that the reform had not yet worked as intended. The reform had not brought about a more strategic leadership, nor had it increased the responsiveness of universities to ‘the surrounding society’ and especially industry. The Ministry now hoped to induce these kinds of changes by offering each university the voluntary possibility of entering into a development contract. The idea was that, in order to enter into a development contract with the Ministry, a university would have to coordinate its efforts and set up aims for future activities. In short, universities would turn themselves into more coherent and strategically-acting organizations. The then Minister of Research, social democrat Jan Trøjborg, outlined the concept of development contracts in the report Universitets- og forskningspolitisk redegørelse 1998 (Forskningsministeriet 1998). As the development contracts were supposed to be a voluntary tool for the enhancement of the university-ministry relationship they were not intended to be connected in any systematic way to the funding of universities. Rather they were presented as a technology the universities could use to organize themselves in order to become strategic actors within the new Danish research policy. Universities were supposed to be active players in the national knowledge system, so instead of simply carrying out teaching and research, universities were to become suitably outward-oriented partners for knowledge-producing research institutes and private sector innovators. Universities were expected to enter more actively into partnerships with such elements in ‘the surrounding society’ and to respond to increased government funding by reflecting concern for the needs of society in their planning and prioritizing of research. The development contracts were thus meant to enhance the ambition at universities and develop their efforts to organize themselves in such a way that they could begin to deliver on the diverse demands of society (Andersen 2006). In the so-called ‘modern welfare society’ universities would in this way take on responsibility for increased wealth creation.

With the first development contracts in place in 1999 two things became evident. First, as predicted, universities were called upon to transform themselves as organizations, and, second, their ability to centralize their executive powers and develop strategies covering the entire organization was put in question. Universities decided for themselves how ambitious to be in the activities and aims to be included in the development contracts. Many of the development contracts, especially those of the larger multi-faculty universities, were clearly attempts by the universities’ central governing bodies to establish cross-faculty initiatives or develop existing ones. Yet most of the universities’ activities still fell outside the development contracts as they were under the control of faculties. The development contracts provided evidence of both the university leaderships’ lack of strategic influence and their attempts to establish such a strategizing power. As stated in the 1999 report, Udviklingskontrakter. Stærkere selvstyre, stærkere universiteter (Forskningsministeriet og Undervisningsministeriet 1999), the development contracts were a means for universities to clarify and enhance their internal organization both for their own benefit and as a means of communicating their presence and activities to the surrounding world. It was expected that development contracts would increase the ambition of universities and that universities, if given the freedom to do so, would ‘consolidate, progress and innovate’ (ibid.: 4).

It is clear that the introduction of development contracts into the university system was intended to be more a tool for a university’s leadership to gain control of its organization than for the Ministry to control the universities. The new technology was a pedagogical instrument to enhance a certain organizational formation – or self formation - at universities. The development contracts were voluntary, not tied to funding, and built around universities’ own ambitions. If there was a wish by the Ministry to control universities, this came only second to the prime aim of encouraging universities’ self organization. The latter was an aim shared by the Ministry and many of the Rectors. Indeed, a centrally located official at the Ministry of Education told us in one interview that it was then a common practice for rectors to tell deans and other members of the university’s governing committees that ‘the Ministry’ wanted or intended certain developments, as a ploy, to get their own policies accepted. The development contracts in this sense were merely a formalization and continuation of this kind of politics.