        
UNIVERSITY MANAGEMENT, PRESENT AND
FUTURE: HOW AND BY WHOM?
Report of the International Workshop on
University Reform, 2011
Organized by: Research Institute for Higher Education, Hiroshima University              

RIHE International Seminar Reports
No.18, July 2012ᵰᶃᶎᶍᶐᶒᴾᶍᶄᴾᶒᶆᶃᴾᵧᶌᶒᶃᶐᶌᵿᶒᶇᶍᶌᵿᶊᴾᵵᶍᶐᶉᶑᶆᶍᶎᴾᶍᶌᴾ
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HIROSHIMA UNIVERSITY

University Management, Present and Future:
How and by whom?
Edited and Published by
Research Institute for Higher Education
Hiroshima University
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i

FOREWORD

Higher Education in Japan is expected to become more globalized throughreforms to both its teaching and research. Indeed, higher education should be
the engine for the growth and economic prosperity of Japan, as well as of benefit
to people around the world.

Symbolic of this, the University of Tokyoannounced in January this year that, within the next few years, they will change
their academic calendar to accept all undergraduate students in autumn instead ofin spring, as at present. The main purpose of this change, they say, is to educate
students with a more global aspect by giving them more international
opportunities to learn.

It is still uncertain whether other higher education

institutions will follow the attempt of the University of Tokyo, but theannouncement implies for us that we should be changing approaches touniversity management, as well as to teaching and research.
The Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) at Hiroshima
University, through special funding by the Ministry of Education and Science in2008, has been implementing a research project on the reform of higher
education in the knowledge-based society of the 21st century. Research into thedesign of the future higher education system, including university management,
is a very important part of this project. Within this framework, RIHE hosted thefourth International Workshop on University Reform under the theme of“University Management, Present and Future: how and by whom?” from 16 to
17 November, 2011, at Hiroshima University, which was followed by the 39th
Annual Study Meeting on the same topic.
We invited four speakers whose activities are internationally recognized: Dr.
Mary-Louise Kearney, Special Adviser for Global Higher Education, Project
IHERD (Innovation, Higher Education and Research for Development), OECD;
Dr. John A. Douglass, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Studies in Higher
Education, University of California, Berkeley, USA; Dr. Don F. Westerheijden,
Senior Research Associate, Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS),
University of Twente, The Netherlands; and Professor Masao Homma,
Vice-President, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan. I sincerely

ii

appreciate the contributions of the four guests to the International Workshop.
I hope that this volume, the record of the International Workshop, will
advance the understanding of those who are interested in the future of higher
education systems around the world, as well as in Japan.
July, 2012
Shinichi Yamamoto
Former Director of Research Institute for Higher
Education, Hiroshima University
Professor, Graduate School of Higher Education
Administration, J. F. Oberlin University

CONTENTS
Foreword
Shinichi Yamamoto ······················································ i i

Presentations
Presentations
Presentation 1
Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the
Knowledge Economy
Mary-Louise Kearney ···································································· 1
Presentation 2
University Devolution: How and why American research universities are
becoming even more tribal
John Aubrey Douglass ·················································· 13
Presentation 3
University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World:
Influences of Bologna and ranking on strategy development in higher
education institutions
Don F. Westerheijden ····················································· 37
Presentation 4
Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses
Masao Homma ···························································· 57

Conclusion
Conclusion
What Kind of Governance and Management Arrangements should bemade in Universities in the Future?
Futao Huang ······························································· 73

Appendices
1. Conference Program ································································· 77
2. List of Participants ··································································· 79

Presentations

RIHE International Seminar Reports, No.18, 2012

1

Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance andManagement in the Knowledge Economy

Mary-Louise Kearney∗

Introduction: The global context in late 2011
As 2011 advances to its close, the geo-political and socio-economic context
shows marked variations as the world anxiously watches the global economy andits still unsuccessful efforts to recover from the worse financial crisis since the1930s. The performance of the G8 is stumbling, badly hampered by the serious
banking and Euro crises, while the BRIC nations (and the G20 in general)continue to advance. Regionalization is a critical force especially in Asia where
China is the main motor for growth. In each region, specific countries are
emerging as important economic champions (e.g. the Republic of Korea in Asia
and Chile in Latin America). Certain economies are prospering (e.g. Australia,
Finland) though their neighbours may be less robust.
Paying the ongoing-crisis bill presents all countries with serious challenges:
increased taxation, the threat of inflation, regaining investor confidence inbanking and financial markets, addressing ageing populations (in OECD nations),
rethinking immigration policies, striving for a more stable labour market (which
is characterized by cuts in public sector jobs and increased employment in theservice industries and SMEs), reducing youth unemployment (at 13% worldwide
in 2010 and at 19% in 2011 – often with higher figures for university graduatese.g. 33% in Spain), containing rising health and education costs, and honouringgreen pledges in areas such as energy and agriculture.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, in May 2011 the OECD Ministers of
Economic Affairs drew up a list of priority goals to underpin their vision for the∗Special Adviser for Global Higher Education, Project IHERD (Innovation, Higher Education
and Research for Development), OECD, Paris, France, e-mail: kearneyml@gmail.com

2

Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the Knowledge Economy

future of the global economy: sustainable growth, promoting job creation via
innovation and skills acquisition, further green growth, better economic
empowerment for women, social equity as the base for development (by attaining
the UN’s Millennium Development Goals), and favouring trade which creates
employment.
To succeed, this vision requires strengthened levels ofentrepreneurship, equality, employment, education and environmental
awareness.
This context demands that higher education (i.e. tertiary education), R andD, and innovation make ever more effective contributions to the current
Knowledge Economy, an economic environment resulting from the recent IT
revolution. How can this be done? In the tertiary education sector,
institutions and their missions must diversify further to ensure that the specificneeds of research and of teaching/learning are satisfied. In addition, the steadyrise of private ‘for-profit’ provision to meet increased demand will requiremonitoring by governments to maintain quality standards. Already, it isrecognized that IT technology and its potential will be the cornerstone formeeting these challenges. For example, Africa has the world’s fastest growing
mobile phone market including the use of Internet-related services which can
extend to education. In the R and D field, public investment must be
maintained along with the balance between ‘blue skies’ and applied research.
In the latter case, new research alliances (such as the Association of Pacific Rim
Universities, APRU) are being forged based on common development agendas.
As well, innovation must be redefined beyond science and technology alone so
as to support new approaches and products in a broad range of areas.
These challenges will rely heavily on increased investment in skilled humancapital in order to address the complex questions involved: what is the value ofan academic credential today? What are the new types of jobs requiring tertiary
education? Will volatile and mobile job markets become the norm? Can
entrepreneurialism be taught or is this an innate skill? How can teaching andresearch become more attractive careers? While searching for positive answers,
governments and their social partners must never forget that the fields of tertiary
education, R and D, and innovation have social responsibilities which entail,inter alia, striving for more equitable globalization, debating priorities and theirsocial impact, creating a culture of enquiry, ensuring access and equal
opportunity across all strata of society, nurturing citizen and community values,
and building solid stakeholder dialogue. Engagement to meet these goals will
foster not only a stronger Knowledge Economy but a more equitable Knowledge
Society worldwide.

Mary-Louise Kearney

3

As this paper presents its arguments, the Tertiary Education sector – as led
by its governance and management – will be seen to constitute a vital force for
effecting meaningful social change in the Knowledge Economy.

The knowledge dividend: A sure investment?
Today knowledge in numerous forms constitutes the wealth of nations bothas a crucial commodity and in terms of their human capital equipped with theintellectual and practical competences necessary to deal with life and work in the
21st century.
However, ‘knowledge’ is diverse and so requires definitions andexplanations.
High-level scientific knowledge has become the key motor forsocio-economic development, and the higher education (i.e. the academic area of
tertiary education) and research sectors are vital nexuses for its production andapplications.
An adequate national research base is essential for all countries, in order toaccess the global pool of knowledge and to adapt this to resolving local
challenges. Yet the global context reveals many inequalities regarding accessto and possession of this knowledge. R and D expenditure and investment as apercentage of the gross national product exemplify this problem with high levelsof funding in OECD countries but woefully meagre resources devoted to thisarea in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia/Pacific. Priorities are the issue
here as middle and low-income countries (known as MICs and LICs) are facing
major problems regarding basic education, health care, sustainable agriculture
and IT capacity. Hence, they cannot devote the same funding as theirhigh-income counterparts (HICs) to R and D.
However, MICs and LICs do recognize that they must find ways to accesshigh-level knowledge, even if their respective systems will take many years tobuild improved capacity. Numerous examples of good practice augur well forthe future. For instance, in each region, significant investment in higher
education and R and D made by individual countries can benefit their neighbours.
Examples of this phenomenon are South Africa, Singapore (whose respective
cohorts of research scientists and engineers have risen exponentially in recent
decades), the Gulf States, and Brazil (which is the engine for LAC growth alongwith Mexico and Argentina).
Though contextual differences must be considered when designing
strategies to strengthen knowledge systems, certain fundamental lessons from

4

Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the Knowledge Economy

high-income countries are the guiding force:- To achieve excellence in graduate education, a concentration of intellectual
talent, adequate funding and universities run with far-sighted governancestrategies are vital, and tertiary education in general requires top quality
faculty as its foundation (Altbach & Salmi, 2011).
- National innovation systems are complex entities composed of multiple
areas (such as a national policy framework, intellectual property
agreements, and market structures) which both help nurture creative andentrepreneurial talent and ensure that new ideas are developed into products
which will fuel economic growth. The OECD Innovation Strategy, which
includes a listing of the numerous relevant policy sectors involved in thisprocess (e.g. consumerism, science/technology capacity, industry and trade,
territorial development) added education and skills to the traditional fields
for the 2010 version, thus affirming that countries cannot perform in the
Knowledge Economy without sound policies to produce the expert humancapital necessary.
- Investment in sound IT capacity is essential to underpin higher education,
R and D, and innovation. While the now famous Digital Divide
demonstrates how 80 per cent of IT resources are concentrated in 20 per
cent of countries, it also shows that many MIC and LIC nations are notmaking the necessary investments in this crucial area. As a result,universities in these countries cannot offer new disciplines such as
bioinformatics, a field that deals with data management systems related to
the life sciences. This field is taught at over 150 universities in North
America but at very few in Africa (8), the Middle East (5) and Latin
America (3). As such areas of knowledge will be needed to help create
the jobs of the future, judicious investment to obtain such expertise – or toensure access to it – has become a major priority for national policy-makers.
Again, this challenge reiterates the benefits of the knowledge dividend forsocio-economic development.
However, in parallel, a much deeper understanding is needed with regard to
the link between knowledge and skills and the job market. Writing in the
Financial Times on 23 August 2011, Michael Lind of the New America
Foundation even suggested that the Knowledge Economy has failed given thestagnant employment in OECD economies, the loss of middle-skilled jobs andthe rise of unskilled immigration. In a similar vein, experts such as Richard

Mary-Louise Kearney

5

Florida of the Toronto University Business School, argue for serious R and D
investment to better understand the labour market – notably the service
industries which employ the majority of people (albeit in non-permanent jobs in
response to market demand). To date, economic aspiration has been promoted
based on the value of academic credentials – yet, as job creation continues tostall in many OECD countries (with grave consequences for youth and graduate
employment), there are calls for fresh emphasis on economic security as theproper basis for productive labour market policies. As this debate evolves,tertiary education must be vitally involved in the search for solutions. In thisregard, the sector must demonstrate leadership which is both bold and pragmatic.

Building and understanding knowledge societies
Building Knowledge Societies and understanding how these function indiffering socio-economic contexts is a process which comprises a number ofdiverse dimensions. These include promoting research into the components ofknowledge systems themselves, investing in the research imperative to meetlong-term development goals, and ensuring that the outcomes ofinter-disciplinary research are linked to more effective policy-making. Beyond
their own national objectives, countries need to play their respective roles in theprocess of global problem-solving. In this regard, forging inter-university
linkages and participating in international research agendas are critical strategies.
National research capacity is a complex and multi-faceted domain ranging
over policy-making, adequate funding resources, fostering a robust culture ofenquiry, building national capacity both for high-level research with relevant
local applications and for the evaluation of this, understanding innovation in
relation to context, and ensuring participation in the international researchcommunity. In OECD countries the knowledge infrastructure is usually strong,with research-oriented universities co-existing alongside counterpart entities
such as research councils, institutes and ‘think tanks’. However, in many MICs
and LICs research infrastructure is much weaker, with the university as the main
– and even sole – source of knowledge generation. In today’s tough economic
climate, all countries are obliged to make strategic choices to ensure that theirknowledge capacity is of high quality. To this end, the World Bank has madethe following recommendations:- That HICs meet demand through diversified systems with institutions
which fulfil different mandates so that quality teaching, research and6Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the Knowledge Economy

training – which are distinct missions – are all provided.
- That MIC and LIC countries be much more selective in their systemic goals
and strategies. For example, flexible and less specialized curricula,shorter-term programmes, more adaptable regulatory frameworks and lessrigid public funding systems so that higher education institutions can adapt
to market demand. Small countries face particular challenges due to theireconomic scale. The World Bank encourages policies that facilitate
sub-regional partnerships to optimize resources, give strategic focus toinstitutions, and support negotiated franchise arrangements (including
options for distance learning) with external providers.
In the current IT-driven era, all countries are challenged to maintainadequate investment in science and technology so as to provide for strong future
performance in these disciplines. OECD nations invest fairly heavily via
higher education, R and D, and IT capacity, and certain MIC countries are
increasing resources for these areas (e.g. Singapore, Brazil, the United ArabEmirates). In contrast, LIC states continue to struggle to find the necessary
funding and so risk falling behind as the global Knowledge Economy advances.
In this regard, many African nations are in real danger due to their weak
infrastructure (notably the lack of efficient and affordable IT capacity), small
cohorts of top quality researchers, and the continued brain drain of African
academics. Evidence of this is the limited number of scientific publications
with internationally recognized status produced by African nations. In contrast,
China has dramatically increased its global research collaboration by promoting
co-authored and referenced papers with partners in OECD countries. Trying toredress this critical situation in Africa has been a major goal of the international
donor community over the last three decades. While some progress has been
made, efforts must continue so that the gulf between African development andthe rest of the world does not widen.
Last but certainly not least, mention must be made of the progress of
women in the Knowledge Society and Economy. Here, the role of educatedwomen is a vital motor for social advancement (in domains such as familyplanning) and economic empowerment (since women often represent more than
50 per cent of a national workforce). Women with tertiary qualifications haveparticular potential since they can take their place not only in the skilled labour
market but also in national decision-making roles including governance. Many
countries now report that women form the majority of student numbers at bothundergraduate and graduate levels (including fields such as medicine and law)Mary-Louise Kearney7

and this trend will certainly have important ramifications for the workforce incoming years. Yet problems persist in relation to how development aid for
women’s activities is perceived and distributed. The OECD Development
Assistance Centre has noted that aid for women is only about 20 per cent of all
such assistance (i.e. about $4.6 billion of $22 billion). Moreover, this aid
usually flows to the most distressed areas such as agriculture, health and theeradication of illiteracy. In contrast, little support is available to women who
have already managed to attain higher levels of education in terms of helping
them to capitalize on this achievement. Increased support is warranted for
women qualified in areas such as transport, energy, banking and health services.
In many countries (even OECD states), salaries for women do not equal those ofmen for the same work and there is very uneven recognition of the economic
value of women who are full time homemakers (assessed to be worth at least
US$30,000 per person, per year in a recent study from New Zealand). Other
key areas of concern are politics, where women constitute only 19 per cent of all
parliamentarians worldwide despite their voting rights, and business, where thepresence of women on company boards is less than 12 per cent. Clearly,
though women’s rights may be more recognized, too much lip-service still exists
in relation to women’s actual social and economic empowerment. Until thisoccurs, and women become full partners in social decision-making processes,
their contribution to the knowledge society remains less than optimal.

Who is doing what in IHERD?
The good news is that considerable positive action is taking place in the
IHERD area. A critical mass of data and useful experiences are documenting
how countries are adapting to reinforcing their knowledge systems with a viewto resolving their specific development challenges.
Examples of good practice include the following:- Qatar is leading the Gulf States in spending (at 2.8 per cent) on higher
education and scientific research (e.g. the Education City project involving
eight American universities) and the country is partnering with private
sector partners in this endeavour in order to offer students optimal
conditions for their courses.
- In the Caribbean region, the Centre for Marine Sciences at the Universityof Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) has organized critical research aroundthematic clusters in order to better serve national energy interests.

8

Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the Knowledge Economy- Some African universities (e.g. in Zimbabwe and Zambia) are reporting
multi-faceted approaches to research to address poverty reduction.
- In Pakistan the STEP Initiative (Science, Technology and Engineering forPakistan) sought to retain national talent in cooperation with universities
abroad, until political changes terminated the project after 2009 (thusillustrating the importance of political stability for sustained development
action).
- Fresh ways of organizing university networking based on addressing
development issues (inter alia: Universitas 21; World University Network;
Academic Consortium 21) are based on changing geo-political alliances
and interests.
- Emerging private partners in Tertiary Education provision (such as
foundations, the for-profit sector, and various open/distance learning
entities) point the way towards opening access to this sector in response to
growing demand.
- More equal levels of government and private expenditure on R and D arebecoming common across OECD countries (e.g. Australia).
- Major changes are occurring in the academic profession as a result of baby
boomer retirements, which involve up to 30 per cent of staff in OECD
universities. The rising global demand for tertiary education (due tomassified enrolments) coincides with moves to reduce academic tenure andits benefits (already reduced by 20 per cent in the USA) in favour ofcontracted teaching arrangements. In the coming years, these trends will
have an important impact on the attractiveness of academic careers.
- Massive increases in international students flows (from 2 million in 2009 tosome 8 million expected in 2025) are accompanied by shifts in preferred
destinations. While the USA and the UK remain the top locations forstudy abroad, countries such as Australia, China and Singapore are
becoming increasingly popular destinations.
- The rankings of higher education institutions (HEIs) is a fast-moving
phenomenon. From the original assessment by China (i.e. Shanghai Jiao
Tong rankings) to identify top research universities with strengths inscience, technology and medicine, other systems (e.g. the rankings
managed by The Times Higher Education, the European Union,
U-Multirank) have emerged to recognize other parameters of equal value.
These may include aspects such as an institution’s context and openness toboth national/regional engagement and international contacts, fitness forpurpose status, teaching excellence and the employability of its graduates.

Mary-Louise Kearney

9Overall, rankings may be considered as a positive step since they boost
quality assurance and the accountability of HEIs with regard to their major
public or private funding sources. Moreover, beyond the controversy,
they attest to the critical importance of TEIS/HEIs for governments.
- Establishing top quality research universities (RUs) has become a goal formany emerging economies, including economies of varying scale (e.g.
India, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Qatar). This attests to a
general recognition that the Knowledge Economy is global, requiring that
HEIs adopt multi-level approaches to ensure their optimal participation inits benefits. International strategies for RUs include long-term investment
in human capital, increased university partnerships at all levels, fresh
alliances based on targeted research, selected faculty and student mobility
arrangements, and a common commitment to the role of the academy inresolving global problems and in reinforcing social development.
These examples demonstrate innovative approaches to teaching, training
and research. In all cases, governance and management are vital elements toconceptualize, steer and successfully implement projects.

Governance and management: Articulating the key challenges
The recommendations of the 2010 OECD/IMHE Conference placed special
emphasis on governance and leadership as the motors for finding sustainable andlong-term solutions in a context of ongoing economic constraint.
Four trends were deemed to drive the current situation:- Resolving the dichotomies which mark the tertiary education sector (interalia, teaching/research, access/equity, control/autonomy, education/training,
scale/quality, tradition/change).
- Preserving the productivity of research universities which contribute tonational growth and competitiveness while, at the same time, ensuring thatmeasurement practices in this area are really effective. Researchassessment exercises, evaluations and ranking systems now threaten to
dominate the landscape because their results are widely published. Yet
too little is known about whether such practices actually boost productivity
or help retain talented young researchers.
- Satisfying increasing demand for tertiary education through diversified
provision. This will involve closer dialogue with learners to understand10

Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the Knowledge Economy

their requirements and flexible management to make the necessary
adaptations to actual delivery.
- Encouraging the growing diversity within the sector since this attests to an
academy which is committed to modernization.
Forward-looking
strategies – such as doubling international student numbers in Japan by
2020, focusing on interdisciplinary curricula in Denmark, andexperimenting with new approaches to institutional management (viasmaller units with specific mandates and targets) in Australia – should be
supported as they are trying to use resources to better effect.
Against this background, sound institutional governance, leadership andmanagement entails major challenges, including:-

Setting the agenda for necessary change by proposing creative strategies
Responding to policy opportunities and to the diversity of learner demands
Protecting scholarship to produce quality research
Fostering bold experimentation in teaching/learning processes
Spearheading outreach and alliances with stakeholders in the institution’scontext- Communicating clearly and regularly both with faculty and with external
partners about institutional activities
For these reasons, governance and management/leadership are the primarykeys to achieving diversified tertiary educations systems which:- assure the educational attainment of a country’s population; and- help create an economy that will employ this population.
Although progress has been considerable, diversification is far from ageneral reality within the sector worldwide. Articulating and implementing thiscore change require policy frameworks which:- emphasize the diversity of institutional mission;- effect the necessary changes inside institutions;- find new ways for inter-institutional collaboration to optimize resources;and- experiment with new modes of delivery to complement traditional
academic practices.

Mary-Louise Kearney

11

As this transformation will enable countries to better cope in the next phaseof the Knowledge Economy, its importance cannot be disputed. Governance,
management and leadership are vital both to bring about this change process andto forge the necessary alliances with government and private sector partners.

Conclusion: Towards equitable and dynamic knowledge systems
for all
To help build such systems, the OECD has proposed a frameworkcomprising seven areas of action: governance, funding, quality, equity,
innovation, employment, and internationalization.
Taken together, these
constitute the modern academy whose task is to resolve current tensions between
past traditions and future imperatives. Balance is require to provide teaching
and research along with equitable access to knowledge systems, to devise correct
levels of institutional autonomy and accountability to public funding sources, toensure quality in educational provision of varying scale, and to harmonize urgent
measures with the longer-term solutions which are essential for sustainability.
Many dangers threaten progress towards this goal. For example, whatmight universities look like a few decades hence? The impact of New
Management Philosophy would suggest that academic credentials could beviewed mainly as a private good, thus justifying a user-pays approach to funding,highly directed research activity and an academic profession with significantly
reduced tenure. In the R and D area, similar issues prevail which relate to theownership and politics of knowledge, the powerful role of the private sector withregard to research funding, and the insidious nature of innovative practices infinance and banking which have almost destroyed public confidence in these
domains.
Looking further ahead to 2050, it is already known that major socialchanges will be in train involving dramatic shifts in currently held assumptions
and paradigms. Demographic patterns and cultural diversity are at the forefrontof these imminent global transformations. Moreover, the aftermath of thecurrent economic crisis could still be felt unless cooperation amongst regions
and nations is raised to new levels of effectiveness.
Choosing the option of cosmetic and disparate reforms would represent oneof the gravest dangers and should be avoided at all costs by decision-makers, toprevent further social fragmentation. In contrast, advancing fundamental
systemic change in tertiary education, R and D, and innovation via collaboration
is a more sound approach to building an equitable and sustainable Knowledge

12Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Management in the Knowledge Economy

Society. This investment is an imperative for all countries, whatever theireconomic scale. Visionary governance and efficient management are thecornerstones for success.

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Challenges for a New Era in Higher Education. Higher Education in Europe, 34 (3/4),
299-560.
UNESCO/ISSC. (2010). The World Social Science Report: Knowledge Divides. Paris:
UNESCO/The International Social Science Council.
World Bank. (2011). Putting Higher Education to Work (Report on East Asian Economies).
World Bank, Japan.
Lynn Meek, V., Teichler, U., & Kearney, M.-L. (Eds.) (2009). Higher Education, Researchand Innovation: Changing Dynamics. INCHER/University of Kassel, Germany.

RIHE International Seminar Reports, No.18, 201213

University Devolution: How and why American
research universities are becoming even more tribal1

John Aubrey Douglass∗

Introduction
In the wake of the Cold War, America’s research universities became
increasingly characterized by a tribal mentality among schools and departments,
and disciplines. The surge in research funding, and the tremendous growth rate
among the major public universities in particular, fostered the idea of the“multiversity”: universities become less communal and less aware of theircollective purpose. These patterns have accelerated over the past two decades
in the US reflecting two relatively new realities or influences:• Within the public university sector, decreasing public subsidies haveinfluenced a movement toward internal management decisions andorganization forms that have eroded a previous model of revenue sharing(in tuition and fees, in overhead generated by extramural research, forexample) and strengthened an approach more focused on profit, loss, andprestige centers.
• This has been accompanied and reinforced by the concept that there aredifferent market opportunities among different schools, departments,
disciplines and their degrees and other services, and hence opportunity
1

This working paper was first presented at The International Workshop on University Reformorganized by the Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE), Hiroshima University,
November 16-17, 2011. Thanks to Neil Smelser, Karl Pister, Marian Gade, Ellen Switkes, C.
Judson King, Georg Krücken, Chun-Mei Zhao, Pat Pelfrey, Richard Edelstein, and Calvin
Moore for their input and comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
∗
Senior Research Fellow (Public Policy and Higher Education), Center for Studies in Higher
Education (CSHE), University of California, Berkeley, USA, e-mail: douglass@berkeley.edu

14

University Devolution

costs (in the tuition price of an MBA versus an English PhD, for example)
in which high income units increasingly seek to retain these monies.
This paper explores the development and impact of these various influences
on research intensive universities, with the theme that the internal concept of theuniversity is rapidly changing, influencing the behavior of academic leaders andfaculty, the organization of the post-modern university, the flow of funds, andultimately the perceived and real role of the research university in society. Past
observers of the life and times on universities have described aspects of this shift
as a movement from a larger sense of a university community among faculty to atribal mentality. But the current shift extends well beyond the weakening of
disciplines and departments, beyond faculty as individual actors, to the internalorganization of the academy and a relatively new concept of profit and loss
centers.
This shift toward what I call “University Devolution” or fragmentation is
influenced by the external political, social, and economic world. In Europe andelsewhere, neo-liberal ministries wield great power and have helped pushed
universities toward this model. In the US, it remains largely a phenomenon
influenced by reduced government investment yet ultimately driven by internal
decision-making related to privatization – thus far. The paper ends with a brief
discussion on whether the organizational behaviors in US research universities
are reflective of global trends, or are in some aspects unique.
Describing contemporary trends as “Devolution” is intentionally pejorative– used to describe a process that distracts institutions from their collective
strength and coherency. They are becoming, it seems, less then the sum of theirparts. However, such fragmentation might also be portrayed as a natural
progression or evolutionary tale in which market forces and the relevancy of
individual faculty and programs create greater operational differentiation within
and among universities. And in Europe, where both ministries of education and
an often recalcitrant faculty have made effective management of universities
extremely difficult (Ritzen, 2010), Devolution has other and more positives
meanings. But here I focus largely on the story of US higher education, pastand future.

Context and megatrends – Follow the money
The governance and management organizations in higher education reflect
real world trends and changes in the funding and political environment in which

John Aubrey Douglass

15

they exist. In the case of universities in the US, and elsewhere, recent
organizational behavior is also influenced by often long-standing practices andby the structure of authority – e.g., who has budget and personnel power, agoverning board, a president or rector, the faculty, or a government ministry.
America was the first nation to develop a mass higher education system,
starting in earnest in the mid-1800 with the establishment of a group of“Land-Grant Universities.” While initially supported by federal legislation in
the form of granting swaths of federal land to states to use for supporting or
establishing universities with public purposes, the authority to create and manage
new higher education institutions lay with state governments. Under the US
constitution, states have this authority. As a result, there is no Ministry of
Education at the national level prevalent in most parts of the world with theprimary authority in setting policy and shaping the governance and management
practices of their respective universities.
In turn, state governments in the US provided significant levels of
autonomy for both their publicly funded universities along with their collectionof private universities. While different in their missions and in their levels of
accountability, both public and private institutions reflect a corporate model inwhich state governments create charters approving establishment of a university(or college) and in the case of public institutions outline a structure ofgovernance that include a “lay” governing board (a body with representatives
largely from the larger state community they are intended to serve). In turn, theboard appoints a president (sometimes called a Chancellor), hires or fires that
person (they serve at the discretion of the board), and provides them withsignificant management authority including the selection of major academic
positions and budgetary decisions. To varying degrees depending on theinstitutions, faculty are generally delegated authority in issues related to theacademic side of the house, including what is taught and who teaches (a shared
responsibility with academic administrators who have authority for budgets).
I outline these basic characteristics of the US model to help provide context
for the following discussion on changing organizational behaviors of universities.
Up until the 1960s, and particularly between the end of World War II and 1970,
much of the attention of state governments and higher education leaders in the
public sphere was on how to grow enrollment, programs, and the number offaculty. It also included creating greater coherency in the network of colleges
and universities in a state – essentially building systems of higher education thatplaced public institutions (and sometime absorbing private ones) under a single
governing board. This required relatively robust and consistent new public

16

University Devolution

investment in higher education by state governments. Federal investment was,and remains, largely focused on providing student aid to individual students
based on financial need and on funding basic and applied research – withtremendous investments after the startling launch of Sputnik in 1957.
Again with varying degrees of autonomy and controls on the use of publicmonies, most public universities – where the vast majority enrollment program
growth occurred over the past seventy years – could count on a steady flow of
public investment. Leaving aside federal research funding, there wererelatively few other major sources of income. Tuition and fees, for example, invirtually all public institutions, be it a community college or a research intensive
university, were extremely low in the 1960s. The historical development of thecorporate model and the high levels of public investment led to what might betermed an “organizational structure and culture of growth.” This included:• A positive academic milieu around building new academic programs andnew facilities.
• Relatively low and stable student to faculty ratios.
• Common faculty salary scales across the disciplines.
• Faculty and staff compensation levels that provided for middle-class status
and relatively high rates of home ownership, health care coverage, androbust retirement provisions for retirement.
• Relatively high percentages of tenure track faculty versus non-tenured (inUS parlance “lecturers”).
• Development of a relatively new cadre of support staff related to thegrowing basic research enterprise, new regulatory controls largely from thefederal government, and a growing array of student services.
• Arrival of other new support staff in areas such as student services.
• Adherence to the concept of revenue sharing in which funds were placed
where there was a sense of greatest need as opposed to allocating
proportionately according to actual revenue generation (e.g., in funding
per-student or research overhead monies from a particular department or
school).
• These and other factors led to a stronger sense of community among
academics and their administrative leadership – although tested at times bysocial strife including protests related to the civil rights and anti-war
movements.
This era is often called the “Golden Age” for American higher education.
Building programs and sometimes new campuses, and with adequate financial

John Aubrey Douglass

17

support, obviously creates different organizational behaviors and dynamics thanretrenchment and disinvestment. In addition, there was a sense of stability
created by relatively consistent public investment in higher education by state
governments and, for the research university sector, new and consistently
increasing federal funding for basic research justified to a large degree on thespace race and the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 and thesubsequent surge in funding support from Washington for research in scienceand emerging technologies, along with continued state investment to growprograms and enrollment capacity, seemed to portend lasting financial stability
for American higher education.

Source: Trends in College Pricing 2011, College Board (2011).

Figure 1. Average State Appropriations for Higher Education per $1,000 in
Personal Income, 1990-91 to 2010-11

But the political and budgetary conditions that supported this environment
had begun to change by the late 1960s. Among the major megatrends (focusingon public higher education, where some 80 per cent of all student are enrolled):• The beginning of a long-term decline in public investment in public higher
education relative to personal income and on a per-student basis. While

18

University Devolution

the US population grew, and demand grew for higher education,
universities increasingly had to, as they say, ‘do more with less’ (see Figure1). This is a nationwide phenomenon, but has become more pronounced
over the past decade, and more significant in a number of the states with thelargest populations and with the greatest dependency on public higher
education, such as California, Texas, and Florida.
• In turn, this has led to increasing reliance on tuition and fees, but not at
rates that can make up for lost per-student income from public coffers.
Figure 2 provides percentage changes in state appropriations for higher
education versus tuition and fees since 1979, and illustrates the general
inverse relationship.
• Decreased public investment and the volatility in funding from state
governments created a new (and more difficult) environment for university
management and resource allocation.

Source: Trends in College Pricing 2011, College Board (2011).

Figure 2. Annual Percentage Changes in State Appropriations for Higher
Education per Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Student and Changes in
Inflation-adjusted Tuition and Fees at Public Four-Year Institutions,1980̂81 to 2010̂11

John Aubrey Douglass

19

Figure 3.. An Example ofo the Shift fromm Public Fundding to Tuition anda Fees: theUniversity of California Systtem

45
41.1
40
1975

2009

35

30

29

24

25

20.5
20
16.8

16
6.1

19.4

15.1

15
1
10.3
10

7.6

5

0
me Tenured
Full-Tim
Fa
acultyFull-T
Time TenureTraccked FacultyFu
ull-Time NonTen
nured FacultyPa
art-Time Faculty

Graduate Student
G
Employees

Source:: NCES Digest of Ed
ducation Statistics (2010).
(

Figure 4. Frrom US Full to Part-Time Facculty: 1975-2009

20

University Devolution

This new environment led to a number of efforts to reduce operating andcapital costs. Higher education is a labor-intensive sector of the economy,
essentially composed of highly trained professionals. The most effective way
to reduce operating costs is to increase faculty workload – essentially byincreasing student to faculty ratios – and by changing the composition of the
instructional staff.
In 1960, 75 per cent of college instructors were full-time tenured or
tenure-track professors. In 1975, they represented about 57 per cent of all
instructional staff in American higher education. By 2007, they represented amere 31 per cent of the total, with part-time faculty over 50 per cent of the
instructional staff (see Figure 4). More recent data indicates the trend
accelerated with the onset of the Great Recession that began in 2008. Faculty
members serving in ‘contingent’ or short-term appointments now make up morethan 75 per cent of the total instructional staff, with the most rapid growth beingin part-time faculty members.
The growth of “adjunct” faculty (part-time, short term contracts) is aphenomenon most prevalent at the community college level, but very significant
among major research universities as well, both public and private. For
example, at New York University (a private institution gaining in national andworld rankings over the past three decades) adjuncts teach some 70 per cent of
all undergraduate courses taught. In turn, this allows for lower teaching
workload for tenured or tenured tracked faculty. And while in 1960 mostfaculty had similar teaching workloads across the majority of disciplines,
perhaps around five courses a year in a semester system, there are now growing
differences.
Another indicator of change is the radical shift in the composition of
personnel at major research universities – including administrators and support
positions in areas such as student affairs, and administrative assistants forresearch projects. The University of California (UC) provides an example. It
is a research-intensive university system with ten campuses, including one
medical school campus (UC San Francisco).
Figure 5 provides data on all personnel at the UC, with the exception ofstaff at the various hospitals run by many of the campuses. It shows indramatic fashion two major trends. The first is the huge scale in growth in thenumber of both faculty and administrators, which in part reflects overall growthin enrollment, in programs, and in the complexity of the modern research
university.

John Aubrey Douglass

21

Source: Statistical Summary of Students and Staff, University of California, Annual publication
1958 – 2012.

Figure 5. University of California Faculty and Staff: 1958 - 2011

When Clark Kerr wrote his famous essay in 1963 on the “multiversity”
which described the growing functions and roles of universities, and theincreased decentralization of the institution into numerous communities withnumerous constituencies, it was a contemporary account (Kerr, 2001). As
indicated by these staff numbers, the shear scale of the enterprise today might
best be described as the ‘mega-university’ – so large and complex as to defy easy
definition although I will return to this issue later.
The second trend is the growth in support staff positions relative to faculty
hires and retentions. The faculty to administrators/support staff ratio in 1958
was 1 to 0.53; by 1996 it had grown to 1 to 2.4. After the Great Recession, anddespite cuts in administrative staff and limits on faculty hiring, by 2011 the ratio
declined marginally to 1 to 2.1.
What does this type of data indicate? One assumption, popular among
faculty, is that it indicates huge bureaucratic growth.
There have been significant increases in staffing related to the growth instudent services – including everything from career counseling, health programs,
housing offices, job placement staff, tutoring programs, community volunteer

22

University Devolution

units, ombudsman’s offices, and various opportunities for athletic pursuits.
This American university phenomenon, in which the university increasingly
takes responsibility for a student’s life and guides their activities, reflects a
tradition rooted in the idea of in loco parentis (Latin for “in the place of aparent”). But it accelerated considerably in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.
At the same time, federal mandates and funds for higher education also
grew mightily in that same decade. This included funds for programs to recruitand support minority and underserved student populations, along with reporting
requirements that required additional institutional research staff. Universities
established new administrative positions at the vice president or chancellor levelto oversee a growing number of sub-population specific programs at a time oflarge-scale enrollment growth.
Yet also an important influence on the growth in support and administrative
staff was the activities of faculty. In the sciences and in engineering, researchincreasingly required teams of graduate and postdoctoral students, along withsupport staff, and new centers and institutes were created in all the disciplines.
Federal regulations related to research also spawned administrative workload
including new budgetary reporting requirements and Institutional Review Boards
that oversaw medical studies and experiments that included human subjects.
Personnel data on UC shown in Figure 5 also includes medical faculty andstaff, where there has been a large-scale increase in people and expertise.
Combined, a story emerges of a significantly changed environment andorganization, but with the greatest change during the period 1965 to 1996, andmore marginal growth after that perhaps reflecting budgetary constraints andrising student to faculty ratios.

A new “Devolutionary” world
Much of the analysis on the management behaviors of research universities
in the US since the 1960s has focused on a series of efforts by university leaders
to adapt ideas and management theory to the practice of running a campus. As
state governments began to fluctuate in their funding support for public higher
education, leading to a general decline in per-student funding when adjusted for
inflation, universities looked for improved business practices and were told bypoliticians and business interests alike to adopt private sector management
techniques.
The history of American higher education is full of examples of businessinterests influencing university management and operations. Thorsten Veblen

John Aubrey Douglass

23

famously complained in 1918 that captains of industry were infiltrating the lay
boards of universities and demanding utilitarian goals and programs. They
were considered a threat to the values of free inquiry and the ideals of a liberal
education. To a degree generally not found in other parts of the world,
American universities, and in particular public institutions, where established inpart to help develop local economies.
But after a period of innovation in the early part of the 20th century,
influenced by the public administration movement (in part develop by
universities and influenced in reaction to Taylorism and similar efficiency
movements), management practices in universities, including resource allocation,tended to be largely removed from changing management norms and fads foundin the private sector.
As noted, revenue – whether in the form of public funding, tuition and fees,or what was until the 1960s rather meager income from endowments in both the
public and private universities – tended to be distributed relatively equitably andrelated to student workload. Beginning in 1958, increased federal researchfunding was accompanied by overhead rates established to cover theadministrative and facilities cost, often used as a source of revenue sharing(Baldridge, 1971; Birnbaum, 1989). Faculty salaries were largely similar
across the disciplines (Finkelstein & Schuster, 2008).
Two factors changed this dynamic:• First, the transition of an academic culture that moved from a broad senseof being part of a campus community to increasingly tribal mentality,
connected more explicitly to colleagues in research subfields in otherinstitutions.
• Second, in the case of public universities, responses to declining public
investment and changes in the academic culture helped launch new
approaches to resource allocation and university management.
Academic culture
It was a trend already in the making when Clark Kerr noted in 1963 that themodern research university had become not one but multiple academic
communities. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, both sociologists, added
to this notion with their 1968 book The Academic Revolution, stating that theacademy had been a parochial world, but was moving away from campus
loyalties to that of their profession – and more specifically to affinities with

24

University Devolution

colleagues in the same discipline (Jencks & Riesman, 1968). Tony Bechercoined the term “academic tribes” each with their “traditions, customs andpractices, transmitting knowledge, beliefs, morals and rules of conduct, as wellas their linguistic and symbolic forms of communication and meanings theyshare” (Becher, 1989). Others writing on academic culture have described theeffects of specialization and the increased pressure for faculty to produce
research (Boyer, 1990; Rosovsky, 1992; Massy & Zemsky, 1992).
Since then, it is widely understood that the shift away from the affinity witha campus (the employer of faculty) has devolved (or evolved, depending on yourview) further to a much more finite group of sub-disciplines and specialties.
This has been accelerated by three factors:• Huge growth in the higher education sector in enrollment and programs thatcreate different dynamics and reinforces specialization – creating a criticalmass of people in sub-fields, but usually in other institutions often dispersed
throughout the world. In 1950, there were 2.3 million students in higher
education in the US; by 1970 their numbers grew to 8.6 million, and by
2010 21.1 million (see Figure 6). At the same time, and as elaborated by
Neil Smelser and building on the notion of the multiversity, research
universities have continuously added to their portfolio of activities – somein response to societal desires and demands, some related to an internal
culture that seeks to expand the frontiers of knowledge. Smelser calls thisstructural accretion, what he defines as “the continued addition of new
functions and structures without shedding old ones.” (Smelser, 2012).
Universities are in the business of growing, if not in students then inprograms and fields. There is steady growth in science and engineering
occupations, including academics, in the US workforce. The rapid
expansion of knowledge production in all fields, but particularly in thesciences where funding for basic research has grown dramatically since1958. Figure 7 illustrates joint authorships between faculty and colleagues
abroad – one example of the increasingly global nature of academic
networks.
• An information and communication technology revolution that facilitates
new academic, professional and social networks both domestic andinternational.
• Increased university interaction with the private sector and the process oftechnology transfer that has enlarged or reshaped faculty and student
interaction.

John Aubrey Douglass

25

Sourrce: Digest of Educa
ation Statistics 2010
0, National Center fo
or Education Statistiics (2011).
Sourrce: Figure
Digest of 6.
Educa
ation
2010
0,n National
Center fo
or Education
Hig
gherStatistics
Education
Enrollment
G
Growthin Statisti
the US
Uics (2011).

Figure 6. Hig
gher Educationn Enrollment GrowthGin the US
U

Source: Sciience-Metrix, Inc.

Figure 7.. Scientific Colllaborations: In
nternational Joint Authorshipp of Scientific
Articles 2005--2009

New mannagement and resourcerallocaation
Withh increased exxternal pressuree by governmeents to ‘do moore with less’
emerging
g by the 1970s, university adm
ministrators incrreasingly lookeed to businessfor methhods to improv
ve efficiencies and practices.. University plannerspandadministrrators attempteed to adopt business moddels including e-Planning,
Programm
ming, and Bud
dgeting System
m (PPBS), Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB),Managemment by Objectives (MBO
O), Strategic Planning, To
otal Quality

26

University Devolution

Management/Continuous Quality Improvement (TQM/CQI), Business Process
Reengineering (BPR) and Benchmarking. As noted by one early critic, these“fads” may “arrive at higher education’s doorstep five years after their trial inbusiness, often just as corporations are discarding them” (Marchese, 1991, p.7).
Ultimately, the largest effect of these various management techniques wasseemingly marginal and largely provided temporal influences on the businesspractices of universities, including functions such as accounting and payroll, andaccountability frameworks, predominantly for the non-academic activities of theburgeoning research universities. On the academic side, greater influenceswere at play reflecting market forces, and where and how resources wereallocated. In this view, the adoption of various management practices, likeZero-Based Budgeting financing, were more reactions to realities on the groundthan to grand efforts to reshape the behaviors of faculty and an increasingly
powerful sub-group of departments and schools. This includes the following
old and relatively new trends – what might be viewed as acceleration in the tribal
character of major US research-intensive universities:• Increased costs for developing robust science and engineering programs.
• A correlating increase in the influence of faculty and academic leaders inscience and engineering fields on resource allocation and setting thepriorities of institutions.
• Elevated competition for top faculty with unequal payroll and start-up costs(laboratory equipment, housing assistance etc.) among the disciplines.
• The development of large disparities in faculty salaries among thedisciplines and professional fields.
• Increased focus on academic profit and loss, and prestige centers –essentially academic departments and schools that generate profits via
tuition income, research revenues, and gifts and endowments versus
programs that either “lose” money or break even.
• Movements toward differential fees among degree programs that reflect
perceived market price opportunity and largely divorced from actual
program costs. Figure 8 provides an example of differential fees among aselect group of thirty public and private universities in 2007 – before theGreat Recession – and increased tuition and fees imposed by public
universities (Douglass & Sobotka, 2009).
• Growing differences in the academic experience of students with thegrowth in curricular requirements demanded by the various disciplines
despite the American concept of General Education, contributing further toJohn Aubrey Douglass

27

the development of different academic cultures (Brint, Cantwell &Hannerman, 2008).

Source: Douglass and Sobotka, “The Big Curve,” 2009.

Figure 8. U.S. Universities Sample Group of Differential Tuition and Fees 2007

The following provides a few case studies that help illustrate aspects of this
Devolution or fragmentation.

The unraveling of faculty ladder
The success of the UC as one of the top research institutions in the world ispart due to an early devotion to a peer review process for faculty hiring andadvancement. In the immediate period following World War II, faculty
positions were categorized in the traditional ranges of Assistant Professor (thenormal entry position with a period of approximately five years before granting
tenure), Associate Professor, and Professor. Within each title, five to six “steps”
set salary scales. UC has long had a system of “post-tenure” review.
This meant that a department chair and its dean submit a recommendation
for a faculty member to be reviewed on their research productivity, teachingrecord, and contribution to public service. At each of the three professorial

28

University Devolution

positions, faculty were to provide evidence and gain support via a faculty driven
process of review, with escalating expectations to reach the status of a full
professor title. This is in contrast to a civil service approach to advancement,
primarily determined by time on the job, common among many non-researchintensive universities in the US and in much of the world.
A similar structure of Assistant, Associate, and full Professor, with a period
and process of evaluation of merit required for advancement, can be found inother major public research universities in the US, although very few have sucha detailed step system and such a rigorous post-tenure review process. The
main difference today from earlier eras of university development is that up to1968 all faculty in all disciplines and professional fields had the same salarylevels, with the exception of health sciences. In the growth eras of the 1950s
and 1960s, in which the ranks of faculty grew tremendously fast, the majority
were hired at the level of Assistant Professor Step 1. And while some faculty inthe course of their academic career gained offers from other universities and left,
faculty mobility was relatively low. Most faculty tended to make the campus
they were first hired at their permanent home.
Within the UC system, this created a relatively stable environment forresource allocations for faculty positions and salary levels. It also led to a senseof equity for advancement, and common expectations of required course
workload among faculty – although with some differences between the sciences,and the social sciences and humanities.
But three factors are currently eroding the faculty ladder at UC. First, themarket for faculty has changed significantly depending on field and expertise.
In the UC system, in 1968 law was the first professional field outside of
medicine that sought and gained its own faculty salary scale, with higher salaries.
It’s a familiar argument: to attract talent to the field, law schools needed to offer
salaries similar or at approaching those found in the private sector. Businessand engineering schools soon gained their own faculty ladder. With a very
different stream of income via clinical services, the salary of medical faculty alsobegan to diverge even more significantly from other faculty.
Thus far, large differences in the salary scales of faculty at major research
universities, like UC, have been in professional programs – business,engineering, law, medicine. But there are indicators that other departments andschools, particularly in the sciences, may soon claim the need for special salaryscales. So far, however, the path to higher salaries is linked to the second
factor: decreased public investment in higher education, which has depressedfaculty salaries. Faculty salary increases have not kept up with inflation or with

John Aubrey Douglass29

a group of comparative private institutions in which UC campuses such as
Berkeley must compete. As a result, departments gain approval to hire new
faculty at elevated steps: hence, a young faculty member in a hot field of
research in the social sciences, for example, might be offered an AssistantProfessor position at an off-scale salary at Step 3, or sometimes at Step 5, or
higher.
A third and related factor eroding the concept of a uniform faculty ladder at
UC is the increased demand and costs for academic stars, many of whom
demand low teaching workloads and other special privileges and resources.
“Teaching loads have dropped significantly in engineering and the naturalsciences during my career,” notes Karl Pister (personal communication, January
15, 2012), a long-time faculty member in civil engineering at Berkeley and aformer Chancellor at UC Santa Cruz. In the sciences, faculty hires are also
determined by promises of precious lab space and investments for equipment
and graduate students. In contrast to, for example, 1960, major research
universities are spending resources searching for top faculty talent often at the
mid-career and senior level where faculty mobility is much higher today, andmore international, than in earlier eras.
Business schools going it alone – The Darden Business School
In 2003, the Darden Business School at the University of Virginia (UVa)became a formally “self-sufficient” unit. UVa would still confer degrees, but
the financial and most other aspects of operating Darden were devolved to the
School. In negotiations that included the University’s President and lawmakers,
this unprecedented level of autonomy was granted based on the argument that
Darden could not compete with other major business schools without greater
authority to charge market tuition rates previously regulated by state government,
and to set attractive salary rates for faculty (Kirp, 2003).
As noted, business schools, as well as continuing education programs, havebeen at the forefront in the US and internationally in gaining differential fees andin developing and marketing targeted degree and credential programs –specifically executive MBAs – with high profit margins. This revenue, plus aplan to increase extramural fund raising and development of a much larger
endowment, would create the basis for meeting the escalating costs ofcompetition with perceived peer business schools. At the same time, businessschools across the nation had been striking deals with their university
administrations to also keep more of the rising tuition rates they charged.

30

University Devolution

The model in 1960 was that fees were uniform, they went to a centralized
pool and were redistributed in a fashion that supported – relatively equally – thebreadth of academic programs thought required for a comprehensive university.
In public universities with long histories of serving local and state labor needs,
this often included degree and credential programs that were more expensive
than others, and in which student demand was conditioned by tuition and fee
costs, and yet where the social good was considered high, as in nursing. As
noted, a revenue sharing scheme was intended to support a comprehensive
university.
The new model, largely forged by business schools, was to keep as muchtuition revenue as possible. With the new model at UVa, Darden’s Dean, Ted
Snyder, negotiated what he termed a university “tax” on tuition revenue charged
by the school to a mere 10 per cent. At the time, other major business schools
had cut deals for higher central tax rates: the University of Michigan’s businessschool paid 24 per cent of tuition revenue to the university; at Emory, a private
university, the rate was 40 per cent. Snyder had first considered proposing a
rate of 5 per cent, but he was looking for a number that would help mitigate
expected resistance by other deans at UVa.
Built on the brand-name of UVa, and after decades of investment under therevenue sharing principle, Darden essentially became a separate corporation, andit has since prospered – gaining in reputation, and with a new campus thatreflects the high-end look and feel necessary for charging top dollar for an MBA
and executive programs. Darden also provides an example of decision-making
in which deals are struck, often under circumstances of financial stress of auniversity, which then become precedent. There is no turning back. The
success of the Dean and faculty at Darden also provided a high profile example
for other business schools, along with law schools, further accelerating thedevolution pattern not just in the US, but internationally.
In part influenced by the success of Darden, UVa announced recently that it
is moving toward a decentralized internal finance model that vests responsibility
for revenues and expenses with individual schools and colleges rather than theuniversity as a whole, a move designed to drive deans to find additional revenue
streams and operate their units more efficiently – a management approachsometimes referred to as “every tub on its own bottom” management, with
influential versions at Harvard and the University of Southern California, and an
earlier and failed attempt at UC Los Angeles. It is devolution withsocial-Darwinian effects: individual units such as schools or colleges keep mostof the money they bring in, but must also pay whatever expenses they incur.

John Aubrey Douglass

31

They swim or sink with at least one anticipated result: loss centers may notsurvive.
A law school privatizes and takes on debt
In 2005 Chris Edley, the Dean of UC Berkeley’s famed Boalt Hall Schoolof Law wanted additional revenue to compete for high-profile faculty andupgrade buildings that seemed stuck in the early 1970s or before. Coming from
Harvard’s law school, with its significant wealth, to Berkeley was perhaps a bitof a shock. Edley proposed that Boalt be allowed to match the fees charged at
the University of Michigan, an institution like UVa at the vanguard of the public
university privatization movement – what can be defined as less government
funding, more institutional autonomy, greater authority to raise tuition rates,
charging both in-state and out-of-state/international students the same rate, andgreater freedom on how the income is allocated. State funding had faded from60 per cent of Boalt’s budget in 1994 to 30 per cent in 2005. The decline had
been largely mitigated by higher tuition: offering differential fees since the early
1990s, in 2005 California residents paid just under $22,000 a year to attend thelaw school, about double the rate four years earlier. Annual out-of-state tuition
was nearly $34,000 – creating increased incentives to recruit (Hong, 2005).
The UC system (a network of ten highly ranked research universities) had a
proposal before its Board of Regents for a 5 per cent increase for all professional
schools – an attempt to maintain uniformity in fee levels, with the exception of
the already largely independent business schools. But Edley argued before theRegents that: “We’re not narrowing the gap. The gap will continue to widen
and that seems to be to me fundamentally unacceptable.” It was “a prescription,for in the long run ... a second-rate law school” (Kawaguchi, 2005). A failure
to raise tuition rates would be a huge lost opportunity, Edley explained. To
mitigate the impact on students from lower-economic families, Boalt’s plan
included redistributing a portion of the increased tuition income to financial aid.
The Regents approved the proposal. Edley had also cut a deal with UC
Berkeley’s chancellor whereby Boalt would keep most of the new revenue,
reflecting similar deals at UVa and the University of Michigan. A year earlier,and shortly after arriving from Harvard, Edley announced a campaign to raise$100 million. It was a staggering sum for Boalt; the school’s last capital
campaign wrapped up in 1992 after raising only $14 million.
Adding to Boalt’s story was a subsequent shortfall in the fund raising
campaign along with significantly rising operating expenses deemed necessary32

University Devolution

for maintaining Boalt’s status as a top law school. Edley and Berkeley campus
officials assumed large increases in extramural revenue when it began a building
and renovation plan initially projected to cost $60 million. But shortly before
construction was to begin, it was realized that fund raising in the midst of theGreat Recession was not going to fully cover the rising costs for the project, bythen estimated at $90 million. With no other source of funding available, theDean and Nathan Brostrom, the new Vice Chancellor for Administration and aformer executive at JPMorgan, developed a proposal to gain a large loan fromprivate creditors with the collateral based on future tuition income. Brostrom
drew on his knowledge of corporate financing to help develop what was, up tothen, an unusual proposal.
Returning to the Board of Regents, the Berkeley campus first requested anincrease in Boalt Hall’s tuition by about 19 per cent and then returned again to
the Board with a proposal for a $84.2 million external loan with debt service
paid by fee income, and $5.8 million from Boalt’s fund raising campaign. It
was estimated that some $5.95 million a year of future tuition income would
cover the debt service of the loan (UC Board of Regents, 2008).
The Regents approved the proposal and by the beginning of 2012 thecapital project had been nearly completed, significantly enhancing Boalt’s
facilities and allowing for marginal increases in enrollment. This was the firstsuch deal made at the University of California, although there are perhaps
similar ventures by professional schools in other major universities. It
represents simply an additional wrinkle in the path toward devolution, in which
resources are increasingly localized in profit and prestige units. Such deals arelikely a growing model in US public universities.

A global trend?
Boalt Hall, the Darden Business School, and the unraveling of facultysalary ladder or scales at the UC are a sampling of various behaviors rooted infinancial challenges and the changing market for degree programs and for faculty.
While beyond the scope of this brief study, there are other behaviors that would
also be informative to explore. These include a relatively new “re-charge”
culture, or what is sometimes call Responsibility Centered Management, inwhich goods and services previously offered by the university at no direct cost
are now being itemized and charged, supposedly at cost, but one might surmisesometimes inflated as units strive to create surpluses. Another is the effect of a
growing regulatory regime linked not only to federal and state mandates, but also

John Aubrey Douglass33

to internal auditing and growing bureaucracies. And yet another variable
involves the organizational behaviors shaped by America’s litigious society and
by increased rights granted to employees of universities. Although difficult tomeasure, these are growing influences on the university environment – somegood, some bad.
Is the process of Devolution a particularly American phenomenon?
Perhaps the strong sense of community once prevalent in campuses, reinforcedby budget allocations and by the sense of collective effort in expanding academic
programs and growing enrollment, was a relatively unique American
phenomenon (Douglass, 2007). The sense of loss, or regression into a more
fragmented academic milieu, may therefore be more pronounced; perhaps it
never really existed in many other nations, where the primacy of the department
or faculties in various fields has been more significant, reinforced to somedegree by the lack of general education requirements which spread course
workload, and funding, among the academic fields. In Japan, for instance, thesupremacy of faculty and their departments and schools, has long ruled,seemingly impervious to campus wide coordination or even government policy
initiatives.
Under a plan to expand the authority of the presidents of the elite national
universities, Japan’s Ministry of Education changed the status of these
institutions as corporate entities using a familiar formula: give the university andits academic leader more autonomy but with the burden of a greater
accountability regime. But all evidence is that there has been no major shift inauthority or power internally – thus far. One sees similar ministerial efforts toempower the academic heads of French and German universities. As Georg
Kruecken has observed, “The university as an organization is transforming into
an organizational actor, i.e. an integrated, goal-oriented, and competitive entity
in which management and leadership play an ever more important role.”(Kruecken, 2011, p.X). This seems to point to greater centralization of
authority and perhaps the promise of greater cohesion within university
communities, even if one result is the infiltration of private sector acumen about
budgets and operations that some may not find completely admirable.
There is a significant and growing literature beyond the initial studies byJencks and Riesman (1968), and Becher (1989) that focused on the American
scene, and which now includes international comparative perspectives(Kruecken & Meier, 2006; Musselin, 2009; Olsen, 2007; Scott, 2010). There
are distinct experiences and viewpoint between the Americana and European
experience in building mass higher education. In Europe, the power and34

University Devolution

influence of central governments have shaped organizational behavior.
Historically, they have not had the same sense of their role as agents of economic
development and socio-economic mobility. In the viewpoint of European
critiques, for example, an “academic oligarchy” of faculty narrowly concerned
about their research ruled the day and only recently has succumbed to a numbing
series of edicts from government to drag it closer to the “market” (Clark, 1998;
Ritzen, 2010). This is a story line that simply does not apply to America’s
public universities, that have always had ‘in their DNA’ the idea of promoting
socio-economic mobility and economic development as part of their public
mission and portfolio.
At the same time, however, some of the elements of the Devolution story
are common, found throughout the world. There is convergence. US research
universities are perhaps a bit ahead of the curve in some aspects – likedifferential fees, different salaries for different faculty, entrepreneurial funding
schemes for capital outlays etc. – but it does seem to be a curve and one sees
their relevancy or emergence in most parts of the world.
There is, I suspect, much more commonality and convergence than growing
differences in organizational behavior. But one might speculate that the causes
are somewhat different. One cause globally is the quest of ministries to create
so-called “world class universities”, focused largely on ranking systems that relyon citation indices, patents and licenses, and reputational surveys. The push for
improved rankings by ministries, along with their desire for greater
differentiation of institutional missions of their network on national universities,
are changing behaviors of faculty and academic leaders. The establishment ofquality assurance offices and staff, and matrices to judge the performance of
faculty and departments, within universities throughout the globe attest to suchchanging behaviors.
Finally, if we view the process of privatization and increased fragmentationof resources as the result of a rational response of the academy, and specificallyof research universities, to a more market oriented environment, then arguably
what I describe as Devolution is in fact some sort of evolutionary process.
Either way, one must assume it is not a process yet completed. It might mean,for example, that despite the tricky problems posed by tenure, some sub-set ofacademic programs may appear increasingly as expendable; that faculty salaries
will become increasingly differentiated; that the profit and loss centers, andprestige faculty and departments, will become more pronounced. It means thatthe idea of the comprehensive university, with a broad array of disciplines, andwith quality across the board, will be an increasingly rare or at least difficult toJohn Aubrey Douglass

35

achieve commodity. But that is only speculation. Universities have been
extremely robust institutions over time, adapting to societal pressures andfunding changes. Devolution may be simply another phase that alters but does
not fundamentally change core practices and missions. That is speculation as
well.

References
Baldridge, J.V. (1971). Power and Conflict in the University: Research in the Sociology ofComplex Organizations. New York: J. Wiley.
Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: intellectual enquiry and the culture of
disciplines. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.
Birmbaum, R. (1989). How Colleges Work: The Cybernetics of Academic Organization andLeadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Boyer, E.L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton:
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Brint, S., Cantwell, A., & Hannerman, R.A. (2008). Two Cultures: Undergraduate Academic
Engagement (Research and Occasional Paper Series). Center for Studies in Higher
Education, CSHE.4.08 (March).
Clark, B. (1998). Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways forTransformation. Paris: International Association of Universities.
Douglass, J.A., & Sobotka, R. (2009). The Big Curve: Trends in University Fees andFinancing in the E.U. and U.S. In J. Douglass, C.J. King, & I. Feller (Eds.),
Globalization’s Muse: Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World.
Berkeley: Public Policy Press.
Douglass, J.A. (2007). The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960
Master Plan (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press.
Finkelstein, M.J., & Schuster, J. (2008). The American Faculty: The Restructuring Academic
Work and Careers. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hong, P.Y. (2005, January 3). UC Law School Needs to Privatize, Dean Says Financial
autonomy will help Berkeley’s Boalt Hall weather state cuts, educator insists. Los
Angeles Times.
Jencks, C., & Riesman, D. (1968). The Academic Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubeday.
Kawaguchi, T. (2005). To Play Catch-Up, Law Dean Wants Fee Hike. The Daily Californian.
Retrieved November 10, 2011 from http://archive.dailycal.org/printable.php?id=20368
Kerr, C. (2001). The Uses of the University (5th ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. (First published 1963)

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University Devolution

Kirp, D. (2003). Shakespear, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher
Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kruecken, G. (2011). A European Perspective on New Modes of Univrersity Governance andActorhood. Research and Occasional Paper Series, Center for Studies in Higher
Education, CSHE.17.11 (December).
Kruecken, G., & Meier, F. (2006). Turning the Universtity into an Organizational Actor. In
G.S. Drori, J.W. Meyer, & I. Hokyu (Eds.), Globalization and Organization: World
Society and Organizational Change. Oxford University Press.
Marchese, T.J. (1991). TQM reaches the academy. AAHE Bulletin, 44, 3-9.
Massy, W.F., & Zemsky, R. (1992). Faculty discretionary times: Departments and theacademic ratchet. Policy Perspectives, 4, 3b-4b.
Musselin, C. (2009). The Market for Acdemics. Routledge.
Olsen, J.P. (2007). The institutional dynamics of the European university. In J.P. Olsen, & P.
Maassen (Eds.), University Dynamics and European Integration. Springer.
Ritzen, J. (2010). A Chance for European Universities. Amsterdam University Press.
Rosovsky, H. (1992). Annual report of the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, 1990-1991.
Policy Perspectives, 4, la-7a.
Scott, R.W. (2010). Higher Education in America: An Institutional Field Approach (Working
Paper). Center for Education Policy Analysis, Stanford University.
Smelser, N. (2012, January 24). The Dynamics of American Universities. A lecture given at the
Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society, University of California,
Berkeley.
UC Board of Regents. (2008). Committee on Grounds and Buildings. Amendment of the
Budget for Capital Improvements and the Capital Improvement Program and Approval ofExternal Financing for Building Infill, Berkeley Campus, March 18: Action Item GB7.
Retrieved from http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/mar08/gb7.pdf

RIHE International Seminar Reports, No.18, 201237

University Management in a Europeanised andGlobalised World: Influences of Bologna andranking on strategy development in higher education
institutions

Don F. Westerheijden∗

Introduction
Can a university1 be managed at all, was a question posed a few decadesago. Higher education institutions, in the view of the doubters, were mostly
public institutions, controlled by governments and parliaments that decided
about the mission of the institution, set the rules for its teaching and researchstaff, for its student admission as well as the curricula, and that defined theinstitution’s budget in a very detailed manner. There was not much to be
decided or managed in the institution. If this brief caricature was ever a true
picture of a widespread practice, remains beyond me to assess. However, itcertainly is not anymore. In this paper the problem situation for university
management is sketched at the beginning of the 21st century, with a focus on
European higher education institutions, which are influenced for instance by the
Bologna Process.
That managing a university is a daunting task will be acknowledged by
identifying some major barriers for quality enhancement inside and outside theinstitution. Finally, attention will be given to some new information tools foruniversity management that have been developed in a European context.

∗

Senior Research Associate, Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS), Universityof Twente, The Netherlands, e-mail: d.f.westerheijden@utwente.nl
1
In this paper, I use ‘university’ and ‘higher education institution’ as synonyms.

38

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World

Problem situation for university management
Higher education institutions exist in a turbulent environment. Turbulent
environments were posited first for businesses and similar organisations in theprivate sector since the 1960s (Emery & Trist, 1965). Higher education
institutions, especially in the European countries, were in large majority of apublic nature and although government policies might change, most of thechanges at the time went into the direction of expansion under continued
national public guidance.
Higher education became ‘massified’ in an
increasing number of countries (Trow, 1974). By the end of the 1970s, though,the limits of public expansion became visible, both in terms of the span ofcontrol over the expanded higher education systems and in financial terms.
National governments under the ideological guidance of the Reagan
administration in the USA and the Thatcher government in the UK started toretract from direct control of higher education institutions and instigated various
forms of New Public Management (Paradeise et al., 2009; Pollitt & Bouckaert,
2004). In my home country, the Netherlands, the 1985 core policy paper that
influenced higher education policy for at least a quarter of a century, carried thetitle ‘Higher Education: Autonomy and Quality’, signalling that government
control switched from ex ante regulation to ex post evaluation of produced
quality as a condition for higher education institutions obtaining more autonomy
to achieve that quality (Ministerie van Onderwijs & Wetenschappen, 1985).
Old certainties for public higher education institutions were crumbling.
At the same time, other trends in the environment changed and began to
impact on higher education institutions in a more direct sense than hitherto –which is part of the definition of a turbulent environment. One is that thedemography changed: growth of student numbers slowed down, stopped or evenreversed in many developed countries (Vlasceanu & Grünberg, Eds., 2008),
including some of the ‘rising stars’ in the world economy, including some of the
BRIC countries. This statement comes with a few notable exceptions, such as
India (bound to become the most populous country in the world) and the USA.
In developing countries, rapidly expanding higher education systems have tocontend with even more rapidly expanding numbers of young inhabitants.
In many of the OECD countries, then, at least half a century of expansion isabout to come to an end, or has already reversed – the latter being the case in, forexample, Japan, where private higher education institutions in particular are
struggling to fill their available capacity. University leaders will have tocompete more fiercely with other institutions for the shrinking pool of traditional

Don F. Westerheijden

39

students, think about widening access (even more) to non-traditional groups oflearners, or they will have to change gears from expansion to contraction
strategies, perhaps consider expanding the field of activity beyond higher
education, or even going out of business (Poole & Chen, Eds., 2009). “In theearly 21st century, higher education has become a competitive enterprise”(Altbach, Reisberg & Rumbley, 2009, p.ii). They add to this factual statement
that: “While competition has always been a force in academe and can help
produce excellence, it can also contribute to a decline in a sense of academic
community, mission and traditional values.”
Adding to the turbulence are the new demands that are placed on higher
education institutions in the transition from modernist industrial and later
service-based economies to the knowledge economies and knowledge societies.
In an almost ironical turn of phrase, Santiago et al. introduce the changing roleof higher education as follows. (Santiago, Tremblay, Basri & Arnal, 2008, p.13):
The scope and importance of tertiary education have changed
significantly. Over 40 years ago tertiary education, which was morecommonly referred to as higher education, was what happened inuniversities.

In contrast, presently the functions of what in this paper I shall continue tocall higher education, have broadened from formation, building and maintenanceof knowledge to include also dissemination and use of knowledge – or to theextent that the latter functions already existed (Santiago, et al., 2008), they havebecome much more prominent, leading to positing that new modes of research
had arisen (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schartzman, Scott & Trow, 1984) inwhich policy, industry and education engaged in a ‘triple helix’ dance(Leydesdorff & Meyer, 2006). Innovation instead of ‘blue skies research’ has
become the catchword in the shift in the character of knowledge creation and use(‘valorisation’).
Regarding education, i.e. the formation of human capital and disseminationof knowledge, specialised institutions have arisen, so that the higher education
landscape is now populated with many institutional forms variously called
polytechnics, colleges, etc. In all these old and new roles, higher education
institutions must engage more directly with their partners than before.
Conscious strategies have to be developed to maintain contacts with partners
around the world (internationalisation) as well as in the institution’s own
geographical area (regional engagement). The latter is even demanded byhigher education authorities in perhaps unexpected places such as the United

40

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World

Arab Emirates: “higher education institutions are now obligated to develop clear
strategies and designate responsibilities for community engagement” (Gulfnews,
2011-10-09).2 All of this implies that higher education institution leaders mustenter into asymmetrical mutual dependence relationships with more, andinternally more differentiated, groups of partners or stakeholders.
Interdependence implies power relationships (Kogan, 2005; van Vught &Westerheijden, 1991; Wright, 1985).
In the previous paragraph I already hinted at the final source of turbulence
that I want to mention: globalisation, which requires higher education
institutions to develop strategies for their internationalisation. Economic,
political and ideological developments around the world have increasing andincreasingly immediate impact on higher education institutions. The catchword
in this respect is transnational higher education. On the one hand this meansincreasing numbers of students who are willing to travel to gain credits or whole
degrees abroad. On the other hand it means institutions offering education
abroad, mainly through physical presence (off-shore campuses), partnerships
with local higher education institutions, or through online courses. National
higher education authorities are reacting in different ways to this development in
its different forms. Concerning students, they might stimulate students to study
abroad, rather than invest in costly specialized postgraduate degree capacity.
Concerning institutions, national polices might range from stimulating higher
education institutions to engage in cross-border higher education, to strictly
controlling access to the national market of higher education (Cheung, 2006;
Cremonini, Epping, Westerheijden & Vogelsang, 2012; French, 1999; Harman,
2004; Huang, 2007; Martin, Ed., 2007; Mok, 2003; Sugimoto, 2006).

Challenges and boundary conditions, illustrated by the Bologna
Process
With the statements in the final paragraph of the previous section, my focus
shifted from listing challenges for higher education institutions’ management topointing out that globalisation (and other new trends) implied new boundary
conditions for setting institutional strategies, especially as a result of regulation2

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/education/community-engagement-compulsory-forvarsities-1.887976
The background to this requirement is that in the Gulf region, many international universities
have off-shore campuses, for which regional engagement is not self-evident as being
international belongs to their ‘selling points’.

Don F. Westerheijden

41

and other policies by national higher education authorities. At the same time,in a combined impact of globalisation and the rise of neo-liberal but also
neo-conservative ideologies, governments reconsidered their role vis-à-vis
higher education: how much could and should they regulate, and how much
could and should they finance higher education? Concerning regulation,
neo-liberalism pointed to leaving more to the responsibility of the higher
education institution’s management, while governments reduced their role tocreating a ‘level playing field’. Concerning funding, the balance between
public provision and private contributions was changed: students were supposed
to contribute more to their education than previously.
Curbing neo-liberalist marketization ‘threats’ perceived in the GATS
discussions in the first year of the 21st century, European governments
proclaimed that for them higher education remains a public good, implying amajor role for public financial provision (Vlk, Westerheijden & van der Wende,2008). Partly from the same concern, partly also from the consideration that inglobalised higher education conditions Europe’s competition with other world
regions would be more effective if undertaken through a European cooperation
strategy, the EU’s Lisbon strategy and the pan-European Bologna Process ensued(Marginson & van der Wende, 2007; van Vught, van der Wende & Westerheijden,
2002).
The Bologna Process is the most encompassing reform process in European
higher education, covering 29 countries at the original signing of the Bologna
Declaration in 1999 (European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education,1999) and expanding to 47 countries by 2010. The Bologna Process has two
strategic aims: creating a single space for higher education among all 47
signatory states, and making European higher education more attractive
worldwide (Westerheijden et al., 2010). Both aims are intended to contribute to
making Europe’s higher education fit for the globalised competition and for theknowledge society. Increasing employability of graduates in these newconditions is therefore a major underlying value of the Bologna Process.
Increased mobility of students (and academics, but that is less in the focus of
public attention) should be a major impact of the process. The participating
ministers of higher education set a target of 20 per cent of all students gettingsome foreign study experience by 2020. Halfway between the Bologna
Declaration from 1999 and the target year 2020, mobility of students within
Europe was largely unknown due to hardly compatible data collection across thedifferent countries, but seemed to be far below 20 per cent (Westerheijden et al.,2010).

42

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised WorldThe Bologna Process, in my analysis, is unrolling as a governmental project.
Most attention in its implementation goes to top-down policy making:frameworks, guidelines, standards etc. are developed at the level of the Bologna
Process as a whole. Sovereign states, through their higher education authorities,
are then expected to turn these intergovernmental agreements into binding
regulations and policies, each for their own jurisdiction.
The major change in the first years of the Bologna Process – and aconsiderable achievement for the signatory countries – has been degree reform.
All countries that did not have a two-cycle structure of undergraduate(‘bachelor’) and postgraduate (‘master’) degrees before 1999 introduced one;some overhauled their existing two-cycle structure to make it more compatible
with others. Nevertheless, the interpretation of what is ‘Bologna-compatible’
differed among countries. The only numerical value originally agreed upon
was that the first cycle should last at least three years. Later the consensus was
expressed more precisely and included the second cycle as well. In 2005,
degree lengths were speciﬁed in terms of credits in the European Credit Transfer
and Accumulation System (ECTS) to ‘typically include 180 to 240’ credits forthe ﬁrst and ‘typically 90 to 120’ credits with a minimum of 60 credits’ for thesecond degree. No further standardisation of these aspects of degrees wasaimed at. Degree titles were not speciﬁed either, although the term ‘master’does appear in the Bologna Declaration (but not ‘bachelor’).3 One credit under
ECTS is defined as 25 to 30 hours of workload for a typical student, be it inattending lectures, seminars, labs or self-study.4 As a result, although the ‘3+2’
model (180+120 ECTS credits) is the most common one, there are many
variations in degree structures across the countries in the European Higher
Education Area, and sometimes also within countries, e.g. with different models
for universities and non-university higher education sectors (Eurydice, 2010;
Westerheijden et al., 2010).
The way the policy process around ‘Bologna’ unrolls implies that from theperspective of the higher education institutions the Bologna Process looks like
additional regulation, setting new boundaries to the autonomy of the institutions.
The degree reform is a case in point: in most of the participating countries,
national legislators proclaimed new rules for the length of degrees, anduniversities had to implement them. Responding to these demands, applying
national frameworks, rules and reforms then takes precedence over3
4

For simplicity, the third cycle, the doctoral phase, is left out of discussion in this paper.
More on ECTS: http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong-learning-policy/doc48_en.htm.

Don F. Westerheijden

43

autonomously considering how a certain higher education institution could best
respond to the spirit of the Bologna Process. For instance, in the majority ofhigher education institutions in Europe, degree reforms, introduction of ECTS,
etc. largely were following the letter of the law, while the ultimate considerationsof how the new degrees would contribute to attractiveness, competitiveness andemployability of the graduates of all levels remained in the background.

Increased autonomy of higher education institutions
We may safely assume that over the last two to three decades, institutional
autonomy has increased, at least in some respects. The European University
Association (www.eua.be), for instance, has always been lobbying for increasing
institutional autonomy and it has also expanded its support for institutions on
how to act in a situation requiring more autonomous decision-making.
At the risk of belabouring the obvious, let me distinguish institutional
autonomy from academic freedom. Academic freedom concerns the freedom
to research, to teach, and freedom to learn. That is to say that it is an individual
right of teaching and research staff as well as of students. Institutional
autonomy concerns decisions made by or for the institution as a whole. It may
concern, amongst other things, decisions regarding (Estermann & Nokkala,2009):• Organisation and structures (e.g. opening and closing faculties; defining
membership and authority of governing bodies)• Finances (e.g. sources, tuition fee levels, internal reallocation; ownershipof assets, reserves, borrowing; cross subsidy of academically valuable but
impoverished departments by taxing the wealthier ones (Shattock, 2010))• Staffing (e.g. recruitment/promotion/tenure/dismissal; salaries)• Academic (e.g. institutional profile, degree programmes, student
admission; research)5
In many cases, institutional autonomy is not absolute; the list above canonly enumerate possibilities. Decisions in the area of institutional autonomy
require institutional leadership and management. This may run counter to
5

The EUA project quoted here led to the development of a national level autonomy scorecard.
Such a scorecard is intended to serve multiple purposes such as benchmarking of national
policies, awareness-raising among universities, but also as a reference which can be used infurther studies as a robust conceptual and operational tool.
(http://www.eua.be/News/09-10-29/Moving_towards_a_Europe-wide_ranking_of_university_
autonomy_University_sector_ to_publish_European_autonomy_scorecard.aspx)

44

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World

academic freedom, not only in the academic area of teaching and research, butalso when managerial decisions have consequences for academic matters, e.g.
staff appointments or closing programmes.
Especially in ‘bottom-heavy’ systems such as higher education institutions,where much power to make a success or otherwise of the primary ‘production’processes of education and research are in the hands of professionals (Mintzberg,1983), the balance between institutional autonomy and academic freedom may
become a power struggle in itself.
The increase of autonomy may not have been the same in all respects. For
instance, in the Bologna Process emphasis was given to renewing regulation, but
not reducing it. In contrast, in many countries governments reduced their rolein funding public institutions, or they stimulated establishment of privately
funded higher education institutions.
From the point of view of higher education institution management, thismeans reduced dependence on a single source of financial resources, giving thefreedom (or rather: the need) to search for alternative sources. In this, higher
education institutions have increased autonomy in the sense that they can target
different types of funding sources, associated with different functions of theinstitution, and they can opt to specialise in, for example:• education (e.g. fees from students, contracts with companies);• innovation (e.g. contracts for R&D with companies); and/or• research (e.g. practice-oriented but not with direct application aims forcompanies, or more fundamental to target research council’scompetitions).
Another strategic choice that has to be made is where to look for funding
sources: locally, nationally or internationally? Thinking of higher education
institutions in the EU, their geographic spread of options is even more complex,
since the supranational level of the EU is of increasing importance. Not somuch on the education side of the institution (Socrates projects and similar often
bring more prestige than funds), but especially with regard to the research side
has the supranational level gained importance, both for more programmatic
research in the Framework Programmes (now called ‘Horizon 2020’) and in
more fundamental research with the emergence of the European ResearchCouncil (ERC: http://erc.europa.eu/).
Moreover, the institution need not apply the same strategy all over: different
schools, faculties or laboratories may find their comparative advantages indifferent mixes of the three options, at a mix of the geographic levels.

Don F. Westerheijden

45

Institutional leadership
The burden and power of increased institutional autonomy in many
countries has been given to institutional leaders who were selected in traditional
ways. The selection rules had been developed in days when academic freedom
could afford to be the paramount value and the top positions in higher education
institutions were representative more than substantial. The rule in this respect
was election of a president, vice-principal or rector from among the institution’s
academic oligarchy, the professors, for one or two (short) terms. In many
countries these traditions have not changed in recent decades and even if new
regulations went in the direction of appointed presidents and deans, traditions
often were not adapting to make the persons who acquired such positions
educated for the job (de Boer, 2003).
Shattock (2010) summarised the institutional autonomy challenge asfollows:
If you can imagine a university which balances a direct relationship withthe state, mediated through powerful state officials, an elected rector and a
representative – and therefore conservative – senate constitutionally inclined
to protect the departmental status quo, you can appreciate the force [needed
to get this university moving].

Reference was already made to higher education institutions being‘bottom-heavy’ systems (Waltz, 1979).
Accordingly, change in higher
education institutions is ‘bottom-up’ (Clark, 1983): “change in colleges anduniversities comes when it happens in the trenches; what faculty and students do
is what the institution becomes. It does not happen because a committee or apresident asserts a new idea” (Leslie, 1996, p.110). Similarly, Mintzberg
coined the phrase of the ‘emergent strategy’ as what organisations actually do,rather than what is asserted as a new idea (Mintzberg, 1978). Standard
management ‘cookbooks’ that proceed from the assumption that managers
determine what will actually be done will not work in higher education
institutions.
The major action principle for leaders of higher education institutions
seems to be that they must guard against doing too much, as Birnbaum explainedwith his ‘cybernetic institution’ (Birnbaum, 1988), because the professionals, i.e.
the research and reaching staff, to a large extent themselves know best what todo. In combination with the realisation that universities are ‘loosely coupled’organisations (Weick, 1976), i.e. organisations in which what one sub-unit does46

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World

hardly affects what other sub-units do, we arrive at an image of the university as
an organisation in which professionals largely go their own way, without muchinfluence from colleagues in other sub-units or from institutional leadership.
Attempts to actively manage such an institution most often encounter a highdegree of resistance to change – not necessarily because academics are
traditional and conservative, but because the structure of the organisation and theway in which the work processes run make them to a large degree impervious tochange attempts.
Strategic decision-making and benchmarks
Change management is not easy, but before getting bogged down in the
trenches that were just mentioned, analytically the question ought to be asked:
what should change, and in which direction should the university go? In otherwords, analytically setting a strategy ought to come before the technical andtactical questions of how to achieve it. I use here on purpose the words ‘ought’and ‘analytical’: these are not empirical statements but normative statements.
They are and will be empirically falsified: all kinds of daily decisions that cannot
be postponed prevent systematic strategy development – in fact this is one of thereasons why strategies in higher education institutions often are ‘emergent’.
Yet reasonably rational decision-making in a learning organisation (Dill, 1999;
Senge, 1990) is an ideal that would have advantages over ‘muddling through’(Lindblom, 1959).
A first step in setting strategy is an assessment of the institution’s current
situation: where are we, compared with others? This question is the question offinding a benchmark. Finding an external benchmark, identifying who is ‘bestin class’ (Laise, 2004; Stella & Woodhouse, 2007) is only one element in abenchmarking process. While this is not the place to give a full handbook on
benchmarking (handbooks include: Alstete, 1996; Bender & Schuh, Eds., 2002;
ESMU, 2008, 2010), the process involves learning how to emulate the best inclass and in that way to become more like them with regard to the institution’s
processes, assuming that with the same processes, the same best-in-classperformances will also be achieved.
It has to be stressed that strategically important processes in higher
education institutions involve selected processes, not the institution as a whole atthe same time. Examples might include introducing a new education method(e.g. problem-based learning, or blended education delivery), restructuring thelibrary to a multimedia knowledge support centre, making research management

Don F. Westerheijden

47

efficient, or integrating student services. The point of this remark is thatcomprehensive information on ‘the best university’ is not very helpful in finding
the best in class institutions looking from the perspective of enhancing thequality of specific institutional processes. Yet the influence of currently
available global university rankings on higher education institutions’management and on national policy makers is large. Ministers of higher
education start policies to create ‘world-class universities’ while university
presidents reorganise to gain a better position in the rankings (Hazelkorn, 2011;
Rauhvargers, 2011).
I have participated in teams that tried to act on the insight that current
transparency instruments in higher education are mostly compound rankings that
express in a single rank order number which institutions are ‘the best’, but
besides all the other methodological and axiological problems surrounding
higher education rankings and global university rankings in particular (Dill &Soo, 2005; Saisana, d’Hombres & Saltelli, 2010; Usher & Savino, 2006; vanDyke, 2005), from our current perspective it is most relevant that they do notdeliver the detailed information that is needed to identify benchmark institutions
for any strategically important process. Those teams have come up with newtransparency instruments, which intend to give more detailed, useful information
to different groups of stakeholders. In the final part of this paper I will analyse
to what extent these new instruments can be helpful in benchmarking.

U-Multirank and finding best in class institutions
To find best in class, a tool showing the performance of higher education
institutions seems appropriate. Global university rankings would be the mostobvious candidates. In contrast to my using the terms as synonyms in the restof the paper, here the difference between ‘higher education institutions’ and‘university rankings’ is relevant: current global rankings as the Shanghai one(ARWU) and the one in the Times Higher limit their rankings to what amounts
to a selection of the top-1% of all higher education institutions worldwide: the200 or 400 universities that produce most of the journal papers collected ininternational databases are preselected. That number is indeed only a small
fraction of all higher education institutions; there are around 3,000 to 4,000
higher education institutions in the USA and in the EU each, (much) more than
2,000 in China, over 700 in Japan. The selectivity of current global rankings isonly one of the many methodological issues associated with them (van Vught &Ziegele, 2011; Westerheijden, 2012).

48

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World

Figure 1. Sun
nburst diagramm of a university
y in U-Multirannkponding to a nu
umber of them, U-Multirank was
w launched ass a feasibility
Respproject tot ascertain whetherw
a ‘3600 degrees ran
nking’ of higher education
institution
ns would be po
ossible, targetin
ng not only the research outpu
ut and impact(the mostt heavily-weighhted dimension
n in current global university rankings)
rbut
five dimmensions of peerformance, fo
or which indicators were developeddincooperatiion with possib
ble target groups of such a rank
king (see also FigureF1):ning, with emph
hasis on studentts’ graduating anda finding• Teeaching & learnjobbs• Reesearch, stressinng amongst oth
her things publication impact (citations),(coompetitively-wo
on earnings, andd art-related ou
utputs• Kn
nowledge transfer, focusing on
n patents and pu
ublications join
ntly authoredwiith industry, staart-up firms, conntinuing professsional educatioon offered, etc.
• Intternational orieentation, lookin
ng at for examplle internationall students andintternational Ph.D
D.s graduated, oro joint research publications withintternational co-aauthors• Reegional engagem
ment, which inccludes graduatees working in th
he region,
ressearch contractts with regionall firms, regional joint researchh publicationsannd the like.

Don F. Westerheijden

49

A field test in 2010-2011 has shown that although it is not simple to collectthe necessary data in a manner that is internationally comparable, such a muchbroader ranking is feasible. In the coming years, it will be further developed
and rolled out in Europe (www.u-mulitrank.eu).6
The target groups involved in the development of U-Multirank included
representatives of (European) higher education institutions. The usability ofthis ranking tool for benchmarking among higher education institutions was oneof its explicit goals. Whether it will actually fulfil this role will have to be seen
once it contains information on a large number of institutions.
At the moment, Webometrics is the ranking with most higher education
institutions in its data at the number of 19,000. Webometrics is, however, aranking of one specific aspect: “The original aim of the Ranking was to promote
web publication. Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access toscientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets”(http://www.webometrics.info/about_rank.html).
For some benchmarking
purposes, this is an advantage rather than a drawback: Webometrics shows whichhigher education institutions perform successfully when it comes to creating agood web presence. In other words, it shows best in class in a certain area, andif that is the area in which a university leader has set a strategic goal, this ranking
is probably a good place to start from. For benchmarking processes involving
other areas, other rankings might be better.
In summary, my claim in this section is that benchmarking processes,
targeted as they must be to changing one or a few elements in a higher education
institution at a time, need to find best in class institutions in that particularelement. Current global rankings on the whole inform about best in classinstitutions in traditional (‘Mode 1’) research. U-Multirank holds the promise
to become an omnibus ranking that allows finding best in class institutions in the
major areas of performance of higher education institutions. However it is notoperative as yet and will become operative only in Europe in the foreseeable
future. For specific purposes, e.g. an institution’s web presence, more specifictransparency tools such as Webometrics may be the source for finding best inclass institutions.

6

U-Multirank also includes field-based rankings, focusing especially on the educational
performance and student satisfaction with the teaching in e.g. business studies or engineeringin a university. As this information is primarily meant for the target group of (potential)
students rather than for institutional benchmarking, I shall disregard the field-based rankings inthis paper.

50

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised World

U-Map and finding institutions making an effort in benchmarking areas
Once best in class institutions have been identified, the actual
benchmarking process may begin by finding out how those institutions haveachieved their high performance in certain aspects. The usual way to tackle
this problem is to form networks or clubs of higher education institutions in amutual benchmarking agreement: staff members from the partner institutions
learn from each other’s experiences (Alstete, 1996; ESMU, 2008, 2010). For
the much-needed mutual trust to give others insight into internal processes thatmight be sensitive in case of becoming public, such clubs of mutual
benchmarking are an excellent means. They proceed from an assumption,
however, of what might be called symmetrical asymmetry: asymmetry in thesense that in each of the processes or areas chosen for benchmarking one ormore higher education institutions are (close to) best in class so that they havesome good practices to share, symmetrical in the sense that each of the clubmember institutions is expected to have something to share in at least one of theareas or processes.
A problem in establishing a benchmarking network that has the needed
symmetry of each member being able to contribute something is that publicly
available information on institutions’ internal processes is very scant. Anothertransparency tool might assist in alleviating that problem to some extent.
U-Map (www.u-map.eu) is one of the tools that lies at the basis of U-Multirank,
but in the framework of benchmarking may play a role on its own. Like
U-Multirank, U-Map is meant as a tool to give 360 degrees insight into higher
education institutions, but about the actual activities that the institutions
undertake, not about the performance achieved with those activities. The
indicators in U-Map are thus grouped in the same areas (adding the compositionof the student body), but instead of on results, U-Map’s indicators focus onefforts, as follows:• Teaching and learning profile, with indicators such as orientation ofdegrees, levels offered and expenditure on education in percentage of total
budget• Research involvement, including different types of publications andproducts,7 but also expenditure on research in percentage of total budget
7Here, and in some other indicators, U-Map includes information that might be seen as
performance rather than process or activity, leading to some overlap with U-Multirank. At
this stage of development, better indicators have not yet come available.

Don F. Westerheijden

51• Regional engagement, which looks at the importance of local/regional
income sources, graduates working in the region, and the input of firstyear bachelor students from the region• Involvement in knowledge exchange, through patent applications, income
from knowledge exchange activities, cultural activities and start-up firms• International orientation, stressing international students (incoming andoutgoing), international teaching and research staff, and the importance ofinternational sources of income• Student profile, with focus on size of student body, and its composition interms of non-traditional students (mature, distance, part-time)
The information on the indicators is stored and presented in such a way thatusers of the database can select certain values on each of the indicators, thus
enabling search for institutions that put a significant effort into areas that may
have been selected for benchmarking. That may be a way to find higher
education institutions where good practices have been developed in those areas.
In combination with information from U-Multirank, it would then be possible tofind sets of complementary institutions, for instance all of them actively
interested in knowledge exchange (through U-Map), while some of them haveachieved high performance on some aspects of knowledge exchange (fromU-Multirank) so that the ones with many professional education offerings mightteach the ones who are stronger in setting up spin-off companies and vice versa.
Having been developed some years ahead of U-Multirank, the current stateof affairs with U-Map is that information on higher education institutions fromseveral small European countries is being collected at the time of writing. For
participating institutions within these countries, it is now becoming possible tofind similar or complementary institutions within their own country.
The limitation to a single country is for the moment a hindrance for
U-Map’s use for benchmarking purposes. Another, lasting, limitation is that
U-Map does not include purely internal processes, e.g. student admission, libraryand informatics provision, or real estate management, but remains focused onprocesses fairly directly connected with the institution’s performances in themain mission areas as defined in U-Multirank.

In Conclusion
In this paper I have made the case that challenges for higher education
institutions have increased in recent decade(s), which led to a situation ofincreased (need for) institutional autonomy. The role of institutional leadership

52

University Management in a Europeanised and Globalised Worldto steer the ship of the institution through the sea of autonomy was highlighted.
I focused on benchmarking as the main method to set the institution’s course(what do the best in class do, where could our ship go?) and to learn from others(how did the best in class get where they are?). Finally, I presented
U-Multirank and U-Map and analysed to what extent these new,multidimensional tools could aid to start a benchmarking exercise.
My conclusion from this analysis was that the two instruments have muchpotentiality, once they are implemented at a sufficiently large scale to offer
publicly accessible information on a large number of higher education
institutions.

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RIHE International Seminar Reports, No.18, 201257

Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, andtheir Responses

Masao Homma∗

Major challenges facing Japanese universities
A. Shrinking higher education market: Increased competition for students
Japan’s higher education market peaked in 1991 when 2 million children of
the “baby boom” generation became 18 years old. Today, it has shrunk toapproximately 1.2 million. During the intervening twenty years, due largely to
the Government’s deregulation policy vis-à-vis university accreditation,
approximately 250 new universities came into being, increasing the total number
to 778. The advancement ratio of students in HEIs has continued to rise,reaching an all-time high of 56.8 per cent in 2010, but the number of new
entrants remained static during this period at the level of about 600,000. Unlike
other OECD countries where mature students, those over 25 year of age, accountfor 26 per cent on average, the figure for Japan is a mere 2.7 per cent. On theother hand, foreign students account for 3 per cent of the total student body. So,
mature students and foreign students cannot compensate for the inevitable loss ofyoung Japanese students.
Thus, the competition for new entrants, which is a major source of income
for private universities, has become more intense each year.
Privateuniversities enrol about 80 per cent of total students, while national and local
government universities 16 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. The Promotionand Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools of Japan has reported thatapproximately 40 per cent of private universities fail to fulfil the statutory quota∗

Professor and Vice-President, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU), Japan, e-mail:hommam@apu.ac.jp

58

Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responsesof admission places, thus facing financial crisis and possible bankruptcy.
B. Diversification of students
As a result of a sharp increase in the number of universities and a rise inadvancement ratio during the past two decades, the proportion of the students
admitted through non-competitive procedures, which might be based on arecommendation letter from high school or based on non-academic achievements
such as volunteer activities or good sport performances, has exceeded theGovernment’s level of 50 per cent of applicants.
A decline in academic competence and motivation to study is an inevitable
result of de-facto free admission in an increasing number of faculties anduniversities. This imposes a serious problem on university learning andteaching. Moreover, in such an affluent and mature society as Japan, apowerful ethic to study hard, get a good university credential, join a well-known
company, work hard and succeed in professional life – once dominant among
young people – is lost for most of today’s young Japanese.
In order to make university learning more effective, many universities are
introducing supplementary measures such as first year, or even pre-entrance,
supplementary or “remedial” courses and lessons in academic writing, foreign
languages or mathematics. More and more universities are employing retired
high school teachers to help those students with difficulties in adapting touniversity study.
Despite these measures, the drop-out rate has continued to rise in recent
years to a current level of 12 per cent. A considerable number of drop-outs are
citing difficulties in catching up with academic courses and a lack of sense of
belonging in university as reasons for not continuing. In any case, such a highrate of drop-out suggests failure as an educational institution, and a loss ofimportant financial resources. In Japan, 80 per cent of operating costs ofprivate universities are derived from student tuition fees.
C. Bankruptcy of universities: Reality or nightmare?
Government forecast of the number of 18 year olds in 2030 is one-third lessthan the current level, or approximately 900,000. This demographic change
will inevitably affect universities, particularly university finance.
Asmentioned earlier, currently about 40 per cent of private universities fail to reachthe Government-authorized number of places for new entrants. This change indemographics has ramifications for private universities. If the prediction holds,

Masao Homma

59

as many as 100 out of a total of 590 private universities could experiencefinancial difficulties resulting from a lack of students, and eventually gobankrupt, even though to date only a small number of universities (4-5) haveclosed or merged with another university. Government is currently preparing
an emergency “rescue” plan for students of bankrupt universities, i.e., moving
them to neighbouring universities.
The Government proposed 10 per cent annual cuts in the subsidies to bothnational and private universities for the three years beginning with the fiscal year
2011 budget. Although these proposed cuts were withdrawn in the face ofvehement oppositions from university presidents and Nobel Laureates voicing
their fear of damaging already poverty-stricken universities, it seems inevitablethat this level of financial cuts will take place sooner or later in the light of thevery serious level of Government debts which is estimated to have reached thisyear two years’ equivalent of GDP, i.e., ¥200 trillion. The Government is now
preparing legislation to cut the salaries of civil servants by 7.8 per cent, starting
the next fiscal year for three years, in order to contribute to the costs deemednecessary for reconstruction in the aftermath of the earthquake and subsequenttsunami in Tohoku Region.
If the cuts become a reality, as it seems very likely, they will have very
serious negative effects on all universities, and the effects will be unevenbetween national and private universities. National universities are much more
dependent on government money than private institutions, with 50 per cent ofoperating costs coming from national treasury. Private universities, on theother hand, only receive 10 per cent of operating costs.
The cuts are likely to be devastating for a substantial number of national
universities, in particular, small- and medium-sized local universities where there
is little room for further cuts or economization of various costs in teaching andresearch activities, nor for seeking donations from local industries. Also, with afew exceptions, alumni organizations are very weak in Japan. In private
universities raising tuition fees to compensate is not a viable option, particularly
when they are competing for students, while average income of the householdhas been constantly declining since the collapse of the “bubble economy” in theearly 1990’s. To raise funds from industries and individuals, particularly
alumni is not very easy in view of the dragging economic stagnation on the one
hand and increased sense of accountability on the part of firms for stock-holders
on the other. It seems to me that unless universities, including those infinancially more advantageous positions, adopt a policy of “prioritization” interms of resource allocation, they are likely to bring about serious damages to60

Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses

the level of education and research – sooner rather than later.
D. Effective and efficient management and more accountability
In any case, universities, whether national or private, cannot afford tocontinue largely inefficient and ineffective ways of management led mostly byamateur faculty members.
Experienced professionals in finance andmanagement have to be brought in from outside university. A so-called
selection and concentration of resources policy should be introduced andenhanced. Cuts in staff costs, maintenance costs of buildings and facilities,
renewal costs for equipment and computers, and even closures of some
out-of-date departments and affiliated primary and secondary schools, will haveto be considered and implemented swiftly.
While subsidies to universities have been shrinking, demands for moreaccountability for the money spent has been intensifying in the past twenty years.
University performance in education, research, and contribution to society andindustries is now open to public scrutiny. Industries, which remained
indifferent and silent about what and how universities produce and achieve for along time, are now becoming more and more concerned with universities’
achievements and performances in teaching and research. They are becoming
more anxious about the swift transfer of new knowledge and skills generated in
the university to industries, while voicing their concerns about the contents andquality of teaching and learning, particularly in the undergraduate programs inhumanities and social sciences. They are now beginning to ask universities toprovide clear evidence that university graduates are equipped with skills,
competencies and abilities necessary to survive and lead in a globalized world ofwork.
E. Quality of education
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), voicing theirconcerns about the quality of university graduates, has since 2006 proposed that
universities nurture the “Basic Social Skills and Competencies” as an essential
mission of the university. The Ministry of Education followed suit, proposing“Basic Skills and Competencies as requirements for a Bachelor degree”. Theseskills and competencies consist largely of problem-setting capabilities,
independent and critical thinking, logical reasoning, communication skills,
leadership and team-work quality in addition to skills and knowledge in their
specialized field of study.

Masao Homma

61

A recent study shows that the average weekly reading and studying time of auniversity student in humanities and social science subjects is less than one hour.
In an attempt to improve university education, beginning in the 1990s, theGovernment has introduced a wide variety of measures such as promotion offaculty development (training of teaching skills of teachers), provision of special
subsidies for good practice in education, promotion of syllabus and course
evaluation by students, etc. These efforts, however, have produced only limited
results so far. For example, companies are expressing more and morediscontent with university graduates, citing the lack of knowledge in liberal arts
subjects as well as communication skills in both Japanese and foreign languages.
Logical and critical thinking is another set of skills identified as lacking in new
graduates.
After all, unless and until university teachers are convinced of theimportance of their ultimate mission, i.e., developing competent graduates, thesituation will not improve. University teachers are employed and promoted
largely by their performances in research, while results of assessment of classes
and teachers by students are mainly for the teachers concerned to reflect andimprove, and rarely used for promotion or the acquisition of tenure status.
Another problem is the lack of a system or mechanism which guarantees
consistency of each course taught in a given programme. It is a norm rather
than an exception that duplications, disparaties in level, and inconsistency of
educational content between courses occur, because what and how to teach isentirely in the hands of individual teachers and rarely goes under scrutiny byfaculty or outside stakeholders such as employers.
University evaluation, which could be a powerful tool to enhance thequality of teaching and learning, is not functioning well. University evaluation
was first introduced as self-evaluation and as an encouragement measure in theearly 1990s. University evaluation by an outside accredited body, madecompulsory in 2004, seems to have had only limited impacts on the quality ofeducation because it primarily assesses the conditions for good-quality education,
not the results or outcomes of actual education. Ultimately, university
evaluation has led to more bureaucratic work and little substantial improvementin the quality of teaching.
The Government’s attempt a few years ago to collect a wide variety of
performance indicators data met severe criticism for “creating a hierarchy” basedon false or irrelevant data from universities, and eventually failed. When the
AHELO project by the OECD comes to the stage for implementation in the near
future, universities will almost certainly react negatively saying that unlike PISA,

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Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses

learning outcomes of university education cannot be measured by two to threehour examination.
F. Internationalization of universities: A false dream?
Government and industry are not satisfied with the degree and speed ofinternationalization of university education. There is a perception that
university graduates, even from well-known universities, lack communication
skills in foreign languages, understanding of foreign cultures and religions, andmore importantly, overseas experiences. The Government introduced a“Global 30” program in 2009 in its attempt to triple the number of foreign
students by 2020 and initially selected thirteen universities, seven national andsix private1, as a base for internationalization, to which it would provide ¥4-500
million for five years. These universities are expected to start at least two
entirely English taught courses, one undergraduate and one graduate, and havecommitted to accept at least 3,000 foreign students by 2020. The goal set by
the Government is to triple the number of foreign students from the current levelof 120,000 to 300,000 by the year 2020. The new government of the
Democratic Party, which came to power in autumn 2009, however, cut thebudget for Global 30 to about half, claiming that internationalization ofuniversity is their inherent mission, and as such, is something which has to berealized without Government subsidy.
University professors, even those in Global 30 universities, are notenthusiastic about internationalization. In fact, some are even hostile to theidea. For example, at Ritsumeikan there were heated discussions as to whether
the university should apply for the Global 30 program in the first place. It was
felt that the financial support from the Government is far below the actual costs
needed for increasing foreign students, necessary for the construction ofdormitories, the provision of scholarships, and employment of English speaking
academic and non-academic staff. And, more importantly, the faculty is afraidthat the inflow of a substantial number of foreign students might affect thetraditional one-way teaching style prevalent in undergraduate programmes inhumanities and social sciences. Currently there are only 1,500 foreign students
at Ritsumeikan, or approximately 4 per cent of the total student population, but
once that figure reaches the target of 4,000 foreign students or 11 per cent of the1

13 universities are: Tohoku, Tsukuba, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, Kyushu (national),
Waseda, Keio, Sophia, Meiji, Doshisha and Ritsumeikan (private).

Masao Homma

63

student body, they will no longer be able to ignore them.
Yet, Ritsumeikan is doing well in the sense that it has eventually agreed toapply for Global 30 and whether it is selected for the program or not, it will gowith its original plan for enhancing international programs both inbound andoutbound. It contrasts with a number of national universities that are
half-hearted and even skeptical when they apply for Global 30 and it is fearedthat once government money stops, so will the programs of internationalization.
Sending Japanese students abroad is perhaps more important forinternationalization of Japanese universities. Nevertheless, the number ofJapanese students studying abroad has been steadily decreasing since the peakyear of 2006, when about 80,000 students were enrolled in HEI’s abroad, down
to the current level of 60,000. President Junichi Hamada of the University ofTokyo professed that only 0.4 per cent of undergraduates go abroad throughofficial exchange programmes every year. The figures are around 40-50 for
Kyoto and Osaka University. The Government is introducing a plan to send
7,000 students for study abroad periods of more than 3 months by providing a
special subsidy, but it would be a drop in an ocean.

How are Japanese universities reacting to challenges?
A. Management by academics: Amateurism doomed to failure
One of the main challenges facing universities in Japan today is the efficientand effective management of the institutions of higher education. Modern
universities can no longer afford to be an “Ivory Tower” or an “Intellectual
Community” where a distinguished scholar is expected to reign rather thangovern or manage. They are becoming more and more complex entities, with agrowing number of multi-dimensional problems and challenges, and increased
levels of accountability demanded of them.
Nevertheless, universities in Japan have long been managed by academics
with little or no professional training in administration and management. It is
often the case that university presidents or vice-presidents lack even the basic
knowledge about what modern universities should stand for in this rapidlychanging world. It is not a common practice for successful business leaders orexperienced government administrators to be brought in to assume the university
leadership or take up the posts of finance or personnel directors, and in those few
cases where this has been attempted, success is the exception rather than thenorm. It is often regarded that the amateurish way of managing the university

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Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses

by academics is “Gakushi (Bachelor)’s business” citing Meiji Period’s “Samurai(Bushi)’s business”.2
This has resulted in inefficient and ineffective management of universities.
The situation is, generally speaking, much worse in national and local
government-universities where, even after corporatization in 2004 and onward,
the sense of “crisis” is still lacking among academic and non-academic staff
alike. There are only half-hearted efforts towards efficient management since
tax-payers’ money flows in abundantly regardless of actual performances inteaching, research and management. It is true that an evaluation by anindependent committee is implemented every six years on each university’sachievements in light of its self-set plan, but the difference between the “bestperforming” university and the “worst” one is a mere 600,000 yen (US$ 70,000)
in government subsidy for the first 6-year mid-term plan (2004-09); it is a kindof a nightmare joke. Despite the fact that half of the annual revenue of national
universities is through subsidy from the Government, most of the importantsenior management posts are filled by ex-officials of the MEXT, which gives
national universities a sure sense of security, thus leading to a lack of any senseof crisis.
University management staff recruited from among faculty members
generally lack the skills, knowledge and experience necessary for effectively
managing an organization. A more serious problem is that they lack the will to
become professional managers by acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge
as they regard their jobs as part-time and temporary, and a forced deviation fromtheir primary area of academic research.
They usually try to keep their obligation (or privilege) of supervising
graduate students or teaching undergraduates even after they are appointed
vice-president or governing board member with a portfolio. Keeping teaching
and research activities after their appointment to responsible managerial posts isperhaps the only way to prove that they still remain academics.3
Between 2006 and 2009, I was a part-time member of the governing board
2

After Meiji Revolution in 1868, Samurai clan, having lost their privileges and salaries, often
started various businesses but in most cases failed because they always reigned and neverengaged in serious businesses.
3
An example of this is a former Vice-President of a very prestigious national university, who
kept two secretaries to look after his research links even after he was appointed Vice-President
responsible for finance and research. After he was selected now President of the university,
he in turn appointed a famous anatomist as Vice-President responsible for Finance and then for
Administration. He is a fine scholar, but has demonstrated little capability to be a competent
financial manager or a tough negotiator with trade union leaders.

Masao Homma

65

of a well-established engineering university in Tokyo. The chairman and two
members of the governing board, responsible for personnel and administration,and for finance, were professors of the university. I once asked them why they,trained as engineers and scientists, had to shoulder such cumbersome
administrative responsibilities. Their answer was that “there could be no otherway”. Then, I told them, “Yes there is another way. That is to appoint
well-qualified and experienced administrative staff as governing board members.
There are such administrators ready and willing to do your jobs.” They becamesilent for a while. I took the silence as their disagreement, if not distrust, of thissuggestion, and perhaps a feeling of uneasiness toward administrative staff
managing a university. They said eventually, “After all, it should be us,
academics, who have to shoulder the responsibilities.”
It is true that various training programmes intended for university
executives and managers have been implemented by university associations andother professional organizations in recent years. Indeed, I myself have devised
a 10-day intensive training programme for vice-presidents and middle level
managers of national universities, as chairman of the training committee of the
Association of National Universities (KOKUDAIKYO) after corporatization.
But, such programmes are far from sufficient in content or in length. It is myview that university executives should undergo a more case-based style oftraining, and for at least four weeks.
B. Ascent of administrators to decision making positions
Historically, administrative staff have been regarded as incompetent,
third-class citizens of the university community, who may be good at routine
work but lacked the professional knowledge and skills necessary for managing
an increasingly complex university. Administrative staff have never been
expected to have a say in academic affairs, as this was regarded as an area
belonging exclusively to faculty. In sum, university administration has long
been regarded as a boring, non-professional job.
But the situation is changing rapidly. Today, the university finds itself
faced with a wide variety of tasks such as developing a “branding” strategy, risk
management, organization and retention of alumni, fund-raising, information
security, application of ICT to education, promotion of intellectual property
rights, university evaluation and accreditation, institutional research, mid-termand long-term planning, on-site hospital management, faculty and staff
development, diversification of student selection procedures, curriculum reform,

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Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses

and the list goes on. It is now realized that not only matters related touniversity management but also to academic affairs are relying more and moreheavily on the professional skills and experiences of administrative staff than in
the past.
To cope with the situation, universities are adopting three approaches:
recruiting and training of capable administrative staff; head-hunting
professionals from outside, i.e., industries, banks, central- and localadministrations and professional organizations; and to lesser degree, training
academics as professional managers.
As the numerous challenges of a university administrator’s work become
known, more competent and more motivated people are applying to become
university administrators. For example, since corporatization, about one-thirdof new recruits at Tokyo and Kyoto universities have been their own graduates, aphenomenon which was totally unthinkable before 2004. These universities
attracted applications from 20-30 qualified university graduates for eachadministrative post.
As for staff development, universities now invest more resources in trainingof administrators: not a small number of universities have introduced fullscholarship schemes to send promising young administrators to goodmanagement and business schools in Japan, and even abroad. An increasing
number of ambitious administrators study at part-time graduate courses ofmanagement, with or without assistance from university.
Japan University Administrators Association (JUAM) was founded in 1998
to promote staff development, while the Association for Innovative University
Management (AIUM) started its activities in 2005 to promote innovations andreforms in management and university teaching.4 The two associations havealtogether about 2,000 university administrators as their members. Japan
Management Association (JMA), which has a long history in training business
managers of various levels, is now organizing a variety of training courses foruniversity staff.
Graduate courses intended for university administrators have been set up bysuch universities as Oberlin, Tokyo, Nagoya and Meijo.
Ritsumeikan
Education Trust developed a one-year part-time training program foradministrators in 2005. The program consisted of graduate-level courses on
statistics and social research methods, thirty lectures on higher education policies,
4

The author is the founder, president and editor-in-chief of a monthly magazine entitled The
University and College Management since its inception.

Masao Homma

67

analysis of competing universities’ strategies, various aspects of Ritsumeikan
University management, and analysis and writing a thesis to propose realistic
solutions to the perennial problems of their office.
Participants visit
universities in Japan, the UK, and the US as part of the program, looking for new
ideas.
Some universities today, including Ritsumeikan, are advocating for
Academic and Non-Academic Co-operation on an Equal Footing. The
missions and competencies of the two groups are different, but they could
complement each other in the same way that actors and actresses complement
the work of the producer in an artistic venture.
C. Limitations inherent to academics
Co-operation of academics and non-academics is particularly important andmeaningful since the latter can possibly compensate for serious limitations
inherent to senior management staff drawn from the ranks of academics, i.e.,they almost always give priority in decision-making to protecting the faculty’s
vested interests over those of students or taxpayers or society at large. This can
be clearly illustrated when they are faced with the difficult question of
restructuring educational programs and courses in response to changing social
and industrial needs or advancement of scholarship. Restructuring often means
downsizing of existing courses, or even the elimination of courses or the closureof departments. Faculty naturally are not happy with this kind of restructuring,
and work to prevent it, even though they fully understand the need for
restructuring. Academics cannot tolerate any loss of teaching posts. Teachingposts are their raison d’etre and protecting them is their unquestionable mission.
Strong opposition is also voiced when such reforms as requiring the faculty toadapt to changes like globalization (i.e., more foreign students and faculty, andmore English taught courses) or to show better performances in student learning
outcomes, are proposed.
When top management is faced with strong opposition from faculty, theirusual response is to “postpone” the inevitable decision. By doing this they aredeceiving themselves. They cannot close their eyes to the reality, and pretendthat the problem did not exist in the first place, or convince themselves that the
problem is not so serious as to require any immediate action. Appropriate
decisions, although unpopular, must be made for the sake of the institution.
Medical education programs in Japan have not undergone any majorchanges in the past 100 years, even though there have been a number of68

Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses

important scientific discoveries in medical science over the past 50 years, andthe need to introduce ethical education in medical training programs has long
been emphasized. In light of the changes related to progress, an overall review
and subsequent restructuring of medical education programs would seem
inevitable. Any attempt, however, to change the basic structure of the programshas met resistance and sabotage from faculty members, who are afraid of a
possible decrease or cancellation of the courses they teach, which would
inevitably lead to the cancellation of their teaching posts.
As a result of this situation, the chairman of a committee for new medical
education curriculum, appointed by the Japan Medical Education Society, had todemand, at the outset of committee deliberations, that members put aside theirloyalty to their discipline and place the interests of the mission of medical
science, which is to serve the patients and contribute to the best interests of thesociety, before their professional parochial interests.
This is the kind of problem the government is faced with every time it
reviews the contents and overall composition of national curricula in schools inorder to make them relevant and up-to-date with social needs, including foreign
language instruction and environmental education. Since teaching hours are
fixed at forty hours per week, new courses or programs can only be introduced at
the expenses of existing ones. For example, to introduce additional classes inphysical education or music, other classes must be cut. The teachers of thecourses likely to be cut will lodge very strong arguments against such cuts. If
the government succumbs to these pressures and allows the resistance to win out,
the nation as a whole will suffer.
The provost or vice-president in charge of academic affairs is supposed tosee to it that education programs meet the needs of society and industry, but they
have no power to force the faculty to review and eventually change curricula.
Deans or vice deans responsible for curricula, for their part, are not interested in,or are not aware of the need for, systematic and regular curriculum review. In
any case, they are only appointed for a period of two to three years and only on apart time basis.
The key to improving the current situation in Japan is the development ofstronger leadership supported by more experienced and well-trained
management staff equipped with solid data and facts. Introduction of astrategic plan and PDCA cycle for institutions of higher education, combinedwith research and publication of changes in universities to the outside world willaid in enacting policies and procedures for effective higher education in a time of
rapid change.

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69

Suggestions for a more viable and competitive higher education
systemIn order to make Japanese universities more viable and internationallycompetitive, a set of bold policies on the part of the Government and universities
are necessary.
In view of large government debts, it is unthinkable that there will be a
substantial increase in the level of public funding into higher education in theforeseeable future. The vital question will be how to allocate the Government’s
limited funds in a more efficient and effective manner. It is inevitable for theGovernment and universities alike to realign the present resource allocation
scheme as follows:
Downsize and enhance national universities
1) Cut the size of the national university sector, including the number ofuniversities, students, teachers and eventually budget, in proportion withthe decrease of 18-year age population, i.e., by 40 per cent, thus creatingnecessary funds for enhancing teaching and research for both national andprivate universities.
2) The seven old Imperial Universities (“Teidai”) including Tokyo and Kyoto
could be converted into research intensive universities by dramaticallydownsizing or abolishing outright the undergraduate courses. They
should concentrate on research and training of future researchers andprofessionals. As elite institutions, they have already become too big.
3) New departments and graduate schools created after the closing down of“liberal arts college” (“Kyoyo-bu”) of national universities in 1990’s, inorder to save the posts for existing faculty posts rather than to respond to
emerging social and industrial needs, should be closed down. (Those new
departments and graduate schools can be easily discerned as their names
almost always carry “international”, ”comprehensive”, “human”, “cultural”
or “local” so that all the otherwise redundant teachers could find suitableposts in newly created departments or schools.)
4) Teacher training colleges of national universities, where only one third of
their graduates became teachers, have created various inter-disciplinary
programmes in the past two decades. Here again, new courses weredevised not to cater for emerging social needs, but to help redundantteachers to settle comfortably.

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Major Challenges Facing Japanese Universities, and their Responses

5) Moreover, some national universities should be reorganized in the light ofchanging industrial and social structures since the restructuring in theimmediate post-war years. Kyoto Institute of Technology, which was
created in 1899 to cater for local, traditional industry’s needs of crafting,textiles, silk yarning, ceramics and dyeing, or Muroran Institute ofTechnology, set up on the basis of strong local industries such as steel andship building, have largely lost their raison d’etre even though they havebeen trying to adapt themselves to the new situation and with some success.
Hitotsubashi University, specialized in social sciences, can be easily
replaced by private universities that excel in social sciences. Whether
these universities should be maintained as national institutions isquestionable at a time of serious financial difficulties and declining 18-year
age population.
Enhance the quality of university education
6) The government should make it obligatory for all universities to disclose all
the data and information related to quality of education and research. It
should also introduce a national qualification for university teachers,
similar to the PGCHE in the UK, while publication of students’ assessment
results should be made obligatory.
7) Assessment of university education by accredited bodies should be madeoutcome-based rather than input-based.
8) Responsibilities of deans of colleges to guarantee a consistent and highquality education should be clearly defined and stated in School Education
Law. The position of Dean, as head of academic affairs, should be
strengthened, financially or otherwise.
Improve management capabilities
9) Bring in professionals to university senior management posts form various
walks of life. A mix of university academic and non-academic staff withoutside professionals is a key to an efficient and effective management of auniversity.
10) Restrict MEXT officials from taking up national university managerial
posts. Only when they pledge their loyalty to the national university
concerned, and prove their will and capability to plan and implement
reform plans, should they be allowed to assume managerial posts. So far,their loyalty is always towards the MEXT which guarantees higher posts

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71

every 2-3 years. MEXT officials are, generally speaking, quite capable
and with broad perspectives: the problem is that they lack the will toaddress perennial problems of inefficient and out-of date administrative andpersonnel systems. I met strong resistance when I introduced a wholesale
restructuring of finance and accounting offices at Kyoto University and thereform was completely annulled after six years of implementation.
11) Establish an “Institutional Research” office to monitor financial andeducational conditions so that problems can be detected at an early stage.
University will not change unless challenges and problems facing theuniversity are shown in visible forms and as objective figures. As any
reform plan will fail once the debate goes “philosophical”, a solid basis forfruitful and sound discussion should be created.
12) Strengthen the capabilities and qualifications of university administratorsby providing a variety of development programmes. Future university
presidents should be trained properly before they assume presidency byparticipating in intensive and comprehensive management programmes.

Conclusion
Japanese universities are lagging far behind the “global standards” ofeducation. As has been argued in this paper, this is the result of complex andhistorical elements. Management remains obsolete and inefficient. The
combination, however, of various measures based on strong political will canlead to structural changes and more effective universities.

Conclusion

RIHE International Seminar Reports, No.18, 201273

What Kinds of Governance and Management
Arrangements should be made in Universities in the
Future?

Futao Huang∗

The Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) of Hiroshima
University hosted its fourth international workshop (November 16-17, 2011),
focusing on the issue concerning university governance and management, as partof the Strategic Research Project on University Reform. At the workshop, Dr.
Mary-Louise Kearney (Special Adviser for Global Higher Education, Project
IHERD, OECD), Dr. John A. Douglass (Senior Research Fellow at University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, USA), Dr. Don F. Westerheijden, Senior Research
Associate at University of Twente, the Netherlands), and Dr. Masao Homma(Professor and Vice-President of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan)
were each invited to make presentations. With participants from different partsof Japan, there were approximately 70 people in attendance.
In two half-day presentations and discussions, the four speakers touched on
issues concerning university governance and management from various
perspectives and at diverse dimensions. To illustrate, Dr. Kearney from theOECD provided a global overview of the enormous challenges for multiple
aspects of tertiary education arising from the knowledge economy andknowledge society. These challenges have been affecting the tertiary education
sectors of not only advanced countries, but also of emerging and transition
countries, although there exist considerable differences in degree and form. By
outlining the broad context and global trends, she clarified issues concerning thetertiary education sector generally, and also distinguished the various strategies
and policy options developed within individual countries. With respect to∗Professor, RIHE, Hiroshima University, e-mail: futao@hiroshima-u.ac.jp

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What Kinds of Governance and Management Arrangements should be made in Universities in the Future?

challenges for governance and institutional leadership at a tertiary educationlevel, she provided a summary as follows:࡮New profiles for tertiary education institutional leadership
࡮Managing autonomous tertiary education institutions
࡮Wider social/economic participation in governance࡮Tertiary education serving socio-economic growth
Dr. Kearney concluded her presentation by arguing that efforts andimprovement are expected in a wide range of dimensions of tertiary education inorder to take up the challenges from the knowledge economy and knowledge
society. Among which, she stressed that special attention ought to be placed onfour major areas: governance; teaching and learning activities; training; andresearch activities. In relation to the key challenges on governance, greatly
impacted by the new management philosophy, there are three objectives, namely:reconnecting with academic leadership; institutional leadership as a vocation;and collaborative management.
Relatedly, Dr. Kearney mentioned theprospective leading characteristics of the tertiary education sector in 2020, which
would be mainly formed by effects of the new management theory.
Dr. Douglass’ speech mainly dealt with changing patterns of governanceand management in US research universities since the 1950s, from a historicalperspective. In comparison with the “Golden Age” of US higher education
prior to the 1970s, since the 1980s, affected by the combination of a continuous
and rapid decrease in the amount of public funding for higher education
institutions, market forces, a rapid massification of higher education, and anincreased internationalization of research activities by the academy in particular,
there has emerged a tendency of fragmentation of US research universities. By
presenting both national tables on budgetary changes in relation to higher
education and a case study of his affiliated university (University of California –Berkeley), he provided an in-depth analysis of the process in which and reasons
why US research universities have become increasingly tribal. Dr. Douglass
confirmed that typical effects caused by these changes include: a funding andallocation model that is not terribly coherent; decreasing flexibility and increased
internal costs. All these have obviously brought about numerous challenges tothe traditional arrangements of governance and management in US research
universities. With respect to his question, ‘Is it a US story?’, it seems that suchchanges are not only occurring in US research universities, but very similareffects can be found in other countries, especially in those countries where
market mechanisms have been introduced to higher education systems, such as

Futao Huang75

the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and even China.
Dr. Don F. Westerheijden’s presentation began by examining theincreasingly complicated situation confronting European higher education.
These are strikingly concerned with ideological and demographic changes,
accompanied by a new demand from the knowledge economy and knowledge
society. In particular, the impact from Europeanization or the Bologna Process
and globalization upon changes in European higher education is profound andapparent. According to his analysis, although essentially differing from the US
context, in many European countries similar changes have taken place: e.g. thereduced role of national government in funding higher education; a growth innumbers of privately funded higher education institutions; and so on. Dr.
Westerheijden stated that while there has been an increase in institutional
autonomy, each institution is required to develop its own strategy and to create
an efficient and effective governance and management system in order to be
more responsive to the turbulent environment. Considering the important roleof exercising assessment and developing benchmarking in restructuring
university governance and management patterns, Dr. Westerheijden devoted amuch of his presentation to the illustration of newly-developed ranking systems(U-Multirank and U-Map) to be implemented in individual European countries.
Particularly impressive in his presentation, however, was his statement thatgovernance and management are vital elements in the conceptualization, steeringand successful implementation of all regional, national or institutional reforms
and projects.
Dr. Homma identified numerous major challenges facing Japanese higher
education. In the international and comparative perspectives, similar to the US
and European contexts, a call for an effective and efficient governancemanagement has also become one of the drivers in Japan’s higher education
reform. However, as there has been a steady drop in the 18-year age population
over recent decades, Japan’s higher education market is shrinking, giving rise toincreased competition for new entrants and a number of bankruptcies among thesmaller private institutions. Additionally, Dr. Homma pointed out that, forvarious reasons, Japanese universities are lagging far behind the “global
standards” of education. Their institutional management arrangements remain
obsolete and inefficient. In order to achieve a structural change in Japan’shigher education system, and especially to achieve a more efficient andaccountable governance and management at an institutional level, he stressed theimportance of maintaining a strong political leadership and implementing
integrated strategies and measures at a national level. According to him,

76

What Kinds of Governance and Management Arrangements should be made in Universities in the Future?

especially significant and urgent are: the need to carry out national policies on
downsizing national universities; the improvement of the quality of university
education; and the enhancement of management capabilities.
Though a great deal of research on how to create more efficient andeffective governance and management systems in each context is still to be made,a much clearer portrait describing the challenges facing university governanceand management patterns, and a variety of responses from individual
backgrounds, has been provided. In this sense, the four presentations cansurely contribute to the study of the issue of how to create effective and efficient,
as well as accountable, institutional governance and management systems.

Appendices77

Appendix 1:

Conference Program∗International Workshop on University Reform
Date: November 16-17, 2011
Venue: Hiroshima University

Wednesday, November 16
12:30 -

Registration*** Opening Addresses ***13:00 - 13:15
Toshimasa Asahara, President, Hiroshima University, Japan
Shinichi Yamamoto, Director & Professor, Research Institute forHigher Education (RIHE), Hiroshima University, Japan*** Presentations ***MC: Futao Huang, Professor, RIHE, Hiroshima University, Japan
13:15 - 14:00
Presentation 1“Challenges for Tertiary Education Governance and Managementin the Knowledge Economy”
Mary-Louise Kearney, Special Adviser for Global Higher
Education, Project IHERD (Innovation, Higher Education andResearch for Development), OECD, Paris, France
14:00 - 14:45
Presentation 2“University Devolution: How and Why American Research
Universities are Becoming Even More Tribal”
John A. Douglass, Senior Research㧔 Fellow,
㧕Center for Studies inHigher Education, University of California, Berkeley, USA
14:45 - 15:00

Coffee Break

15:00 - 15:45

Presentation 3“University Management in an Europeanised and Globalised
World: influences of Bologna, classification and ranking on
strategy development in higher education institutions”
Don F. Westerheijden, Senior Research Associate, Center forHigher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS), University of Twente,
The Netherlands∗

As of November, 2011

78

Conference Program

15:45 - 16:30

Presentation 4“University Management in Japan: Challenges and Barriers”
Masao Homma, Vice-President, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific
University, Japan

16:30 - 17:30

Q &A

Thursday, November 17*** Panel Discussion ***MC: Shinichi Yamamoto
9:30 - 12:00
Panelists:
Mary-Louise Kearney
John A. Douglass
Don F. Westerheijden
Masao Homma
Commentator:
Motohisa Kaneko, Professor, Center for National University
Finance and Management, Japan

79

Appendix 2:

List of Participants∗

OVERSEAS PARTICIPANTS
Invited Experts
Mary-Louise Kearney

John A. Douglass
Don F. Westerheijden

Special Adviser for Global Higher Education, Project
IHERD (Innovation, Higher Education and Research forDevelopment), OECD, Paris, France
Senior Research Fellow, Center for Studies in Higher
Education, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Senior Research Associate, Center for Higher Education
Policy Studies (CHEPS), University of Twente, The
Netherlands
and another 10 overseas participantsJAPANESE PARTICIPANTS
President
Toshimasa Asahara

President, Hiroshima University

Invited Experts
Masao Homma
Motohisa Kaneko

Vice-President, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
Professor, Center for National University Finance andManagement

Research Institute for Higher Education㧔RIHE㧕
Shinichi Yamamoto
Ikuo Kitagaki
Tsukasa Daizen
Masashi Fujimura
Futao Huang
Jun Oba
Yumiko Hada
Hideto Fukudome
Masataka Murasawa

Director and Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Associate Professor
Associate Professor
Associate Professor
Associate Professor
and another 50 Japanese Participants∗

As of November, 2011

R.I.H.E. PUBLICATION IN ENGLISH
RIHE International Publication SeriesNo. 1: Kaneko, M. (1987). Enrollment Expansion in Postwar Japan.
No. 2: Guocai, Z. (1989). Higher Education Research in China: An Annotated Bibliography.
No. 3: Abe, Y. (1989). Non-University Sector Higher Education in Japan.
No. 4: Kaneko, M. (1989). Financing Higher Education in Japan: Trends and Issues.
No. 5: Kaneko, M. (1992). Higher Education and Employment in Japan: Trends and Issues.
No. 6: Morgan, J. Keith (1999). Universities and the Community: Use of Time in Universities
in Japan.
No. 7: Arimoto, A. (ed.) (2001). University Reforms and Academic Governance: Reports ofthe 2000 Three-Nation Workshop on Academic Governance.
No. 8: Arimoto, A. (ed.) (2002). University Reforms and Academic Governance
Reconsidered: Report of the Six-Nation Higher Education Research Project.
No. 9: Arimoto, A., Huang, F., and Yokoyama, K. (eds.) (2005). Globalization and Higher
Education.
No.10: Huang, F. (ed.) (2006). Transnational Higher education in Asia and the PacificRegion.

Higher Education Forum
Higher Education Forum Vol. 1 (2003).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 2 (2005).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 3 (2006).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 4 (2007).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 5 (2008).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 6 (2009).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 7 (2010).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 8 (2011).
Higher Education Forum Vol. 9 (2012).

Higher Education Research in Japan
Higher Education Research in Japan Vol. 1 (2003).
Higher Education Research in Japan Vol. 2 (2005).
Higher Education Research in Japan Vol. 3 (2006).
Higher Education Research in Japan Vol. 4 (2007).
Higher Education Research in Japan Vol. 5 (2008).

COE Publication Series
No. 6: Construction and Quality Assurance of 21st Century Higher Education (Reports of the2003 COE International Symposium) (2003).
No. 7: Mergers and Cooperation among Higher Education Institutions: Australia, Japan andEurope (Reports of the 2003 COE International Seminar on Mergers and Cooperation)(2004).
No.11: Organization Reforms and University Governance: Autonomy and Accountability(Reports of COE International Seminar) (2004).
No.12: Enhancing Quality and Building the 21st Century Higher Education System (Reports
of COE International Seminar/Eight-Nation Conference) (2004).
No.20: Quality, Relevance, and Governance in the Changing Academia: International
Perspectives (Reports of Changing Academic Profession Project Workshop) (2006).
No.21: A Cross-National Analysis of Undergraduate Curriculum Models: Focusing on
Research-Intensive Universities (2006).
No.22: Gender Inequity in Academic Profession and Higher Education Access: Japan, theUnited Kingdom, and the United States (2006).
No.23: Constructing University Visions and the Mission of Academic Profession in AsianCountries: A Comparative Perspective (Reports of COE International Seminar) (2007).
No.29: Changing Governance in Higher Education: Incorporation, marketisation, and otherreforms − A Comparative study − (2007).

RIHE International Seminar Reports
No. 1: Perspectives for the Future System of Higher Education (Report of the Hiroshima
International Seminar on Higher Education) (1977).
No. 2: Higher Education for the 1980s: Challenges and Responses (Report of the Second
Hiroshima International Seminar on Higher Education) (1980).
No. 3: Innovations in Higher Education: Exchange of Experiences and Ideas in International
Perspective (Reports of the Hiroshima/OECD Meeting of Experts on Higher Educationand the Seminar on Innovations in Higher Education) (1981).
No. 4: Comparative Approach to Higher Education: Curriculum, Teaching and Innovations in
an Age of Financial Difficulties (Reports of the Hiroshima/OECD Meetings ofExperts) (1983).
No. 5: The Changing Functions of Higher Education: Implications for Innovation (Reports
from the 1984 OECD/JAPAN Seminar on Higher Education), (1985).
No. 6: Higher Education Expansion in Asia (Reports from the 1985 International Seminar on
Asian Higher Education) (1985).
No. 7: Public and Private in Asian Higher Education Systems: Issues and Prospects (Reports
from the Third International Seminar on Higher Education in Asia) (1987).

No. 8: The Role of Government in Asian Higher Education Systems: Issues and Prospects(Report from the Fourth International Seminar on Higher Education in Asia) (1988).
No. 9: Foreign Students and Internationalizaion of Higher Education (Proceedings of
OECD/JAPAN Seminar on Higher Education and the Flow of Foreign Students)(1989).
No.10: Academic Reforms in the World: Situation and Perspective in the Massification Stageof Higher Education (Reports of the 1997 Six-Nation Higher Education Project
Seminar) (1997).
No.11: Higher Education Reform for Quality Higher Education Management in the 21stCentury: Economic, Technological, Social and Political Forces Affecting Higher
Education (Proceedings of the 1999 Six-Nation Presidents’ Summit in Hiroshima)(2000).
No.12: The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative and Quantitative
Perspectives (Report of the International Conference on the Changing Academic
Profession Project, 2008) (2008).
No.13: The Changing Academic Profession over 1992-2007: International, Comparative, andQuantitative Perspectives (Report of the International Conference on the Changing
Academic Profession Project, 2009) (2009).
No.14: Producing Qualified Graduates and Assuring Education Quality in the
Knowledge-Based Society: Roles and Issues of Graduate Education (Report of theInternational Workshop on Graduate Education, 2009) (2010).
No.15: The Changing Academic Profession in International and Quantitative Perspectives: A
Focus on Teaching & Research Activities (Report of the International Conference on
the Changing Academic Profession Project, 2010) (2010).
No.16: Diversifying Higher Education Systems in the International and Comparative
Perspectives (Report of the International Workshop on University Reform, 2010)(2011).
No.17: The Changing Academic Profession in Asia: Contexts, Realities and Trends (Report of
the International Conference on the Changing Academic Profession Project, 2011)(2011).

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