Universities need restructuring and modernisation
Universities in Europe need in-depth restructuring and modernisation if they are to achieve their full potential, said Jan Figel, European Commissioner for Education and Training. He told the Brussels launch of a Centre for European Reform pamphlet entitled “The Future of European Universities: Renaissance or Decay?” by Richard Lambert and Nick Butler, that reformed universities,would help Europe to meet its Lisbon-strategy objective of becoming the most advanced knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Lambert and Butler point out that only two of the world’s top ten universities are in the EU, and Europe’s higher-education institutions are slow moving and under-funded. Moreover, if Europe wants to stem the “brain drain” to the US it must devote more resources to research, improve teaching, build centres of excellence, strengthen links between education and business and give universities more autonomy.
Their pamphlet also says that Europe needs more diversity in its higher education in order to support different regional and national needs. It requires more efficient and selective funding mechanisms, and better systems of governance. It must be made easier for academics and students to cross borders in order to pursue their work.
However, the authors argue that what Europe does not need is a common model of higher education, or any top-down attempt to graft new institutions on to the existing systems, such as the European Institute of Technology, as proposed by the Commission. In addition, competence in higher education should not be transferred to the Commission or to any other pan-European body.
Mr Figel agreed with the broad thrust of the authors’ argument. He said:“If you compare the number of universities that consider themselves to be“research-intensive”, we have in Europe 14 times the number in the US. Alas, they aren’t. The American sector is much more sharply segmented between those that see themselves as providers of tuition and those that aspire to engage in globally significant research. Our 4,000 universities have a high degree of uniformity in their aims. They can be counted together but they are all administered within national or sub-national systems, each with their own aspirations in terms of meeting tuition demand and serving national or regional cultural, social and research objectives.
“We are both asking too much and not enough from them. We have not had a proper debate about how best to fund universities, about what sort of mission’s universities should have or what constitutes excellence for different types of university. The result is that incentives drive universities to aim for the“research-intensive” model, even though many of them would do better to work on other local, regional or national objectives. Similarly, student numbers have risen dramatically, but funding has not. In Europe generally, about 4 per cent of the 20-24 age range were students in 1950. This had risen to 24 per cent in 1978, and now stands at nearly 60 per cent. Funding, however, has not risen fifteen-fold in real terms. At the same time, other sources of funds– private funding for research or for targeted educational activities, and tuition fees – have not been exploited. We believe that a minimum of 2 per cent of gross domestic product should go into higher-education systems where these are modernised and efficient. At present, that target is met easily in the US, where over half of it is privately funded. No European country is at that level. Then there is the place in the world of Europe’s universities. There are fewer and fewer European universities in the top 50. The widest-used world ranking of universities comes from Shanghai Jao Tong University. Its top 50 list includes nine European universities – of which five are in the UK and one each are in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and France. Two are from Japan and 39 from the US. California alone has six in the top 20.”
It was rare, according to Mr Figel, for European businesses to be present on university boards. And some researchers in Europe retained a resolutely anti-commercial view of the results of their work. His recommendations include:
Governments should invest more in research, give universities block funding rather than line-by-line budgets, and “withdraw the cold hand of bureaucracy from the lifeblood of knowledge”.
Competition in the university sector be increased, and a more forceful attitude to excellence be taken.
Research funding be concentrated on a small number of genuinely “research intensive” universities.
Mr Figel said he differed from Lambert and Butler only over the planned European Institute of Technology (EIT). “The Commission sees the EIT as a way to help to respond to the problems of scale,” he explained: “It should be a network organization, based on the excellence that is already to be found in Europe, but which today is fragmented geographically. We envisage a small central structure driven by a governing board with equal shares of scientists and business people, and a set of knowledge communities whose business would be to bring together excellence wherever it exists in the EU and to help it flourish and expand. These knowledge communities would be bottom-up. They would carry out research, they would teach at MA and PhD levels, they would be in the business of using the intellectual property they produced. They would involve different sorts of partners – universities, research centres or companies, user companies, and others – perhaps regions or banks. Knowledge communities would be the scientific powerhouse.”
