Chapter 3: Negotiating Institutional Autonomy: The Accreditation Process Analyzed

Universities are institutions. As such they are constantly being observed and evaluated by other institutions. In these sociopolitical processes the fate of universities becomes constructed. What is reported in the following is intended to answer the question of whether and how sustainable structures of an education and research organization in the subject of psychology can be developed under the specific conditions of an Austrian private university. This analysis is crucial since private universities in Europe in general and in Austria in particular are historically new innovations in the landscape of higher education. We would like to distinguish between our viewpoint that derives from the traditions of German-speaking universities and any developments in the Anglo-American higher education sector. Whereas the Anglo-American higher education sector has a rather long tradition of private institutions, the private university sector in German-speaking areas has a relatively short history. Therefore, we are concentrating in our case on current events, more precisely, the last two decades of local changes in university education in Austria. We believe that there is something to be derived from our experiences that could be interesting for colleagues who are dissatisfied with the current state of psychology and are looking for alternatives. It also constitutes a part of the systematic analysis of the whole general institutional structure we are used to call university—that is the focus of the present volume.