The Design of the University

German, American, and “World Class”

Heinz-Dieter Meyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138802506
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317623281
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

What is the reason for the American university's global preeminence? How did the American university succeed where the development of the German university, from which it took so much, stalled? In this closely-argued book, Meyer suggests that the key to the American university's success is its institutional design of self-government. Where other university systems are dependent on the patronage of state, church, or market, the American university is the first to achieve true autonomy, which it attained through an intricate system of engagements with societal actors and institutions that simultaneously act as amplifiers of its impact and as checks on the university's ever-present corrosive tendencies.

Built on a searching analysis of the design thinking of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Adam Smith and closely tracing the learning process by which Americans adapted the German model, The Design of the University dismisses efforts to copy superficial features of the American university in order to achieve world-class rank. Calling attention to the design details of the university and the particulars of its institutional environment, this volume identifies the practices and choices that produced the gold standard for today's world class higher education.

Part I

Glimpses of a New Design

1 Introduction

The “World Class” Discourse and the Perspective of Institutional Design

Suddenly, we are all speaking “world class.” Spurred by global rankings, the emergence of the internet as a global workspace and global textbook of academia, as well as by the decreasing costs of international communication and travel, higher education has, seemingly overnight, become a global domain. Government officials, policy makers, and researchers around the world share the vocabulary of a new discourse—replete with “benchmarking,” “excellence initiatives,” “research assessments,” and the like—all in the service of reaching world class. Only a decade or two ago the boundaries of nations and the diversity of their cultural traditions seemed to represent formidable barriers to the communication of know-how and the comparison of higher education systems. Today, a flattening world seems to irreversibly force nations that not too long ago proudly defended their unique traditions of higher education into efforts to mold their institutions into conformity with what they see as the emerging global standards of “world class” higher education.¹

One reason for the global rush to reform is the perception that education systems in general and the university in particular are becoming main drivers of economic development of knowledge-intensive economies. Another reason is the sudden explosion of global transparency.

But the increased anxiety over having one’s nation represented among the top ranking global institutions is also bringing in its tow increased uncertainty over the university’s institutional structure and governance. Until recently, the dominant model of higher education in many parts of the world was that of the public or “national” university, conceived as a state-governed, state-controlled, and state-funded institution. This model is everywhere in decline, on the way to being replaced by “world class” institutions requiring greater autonomy, resources, and excellence than government-controlled institutions are apt to achieve.

But what is a world class university and how do you build one? According to many observers the answer is readily available in the now ubiquitous global university rankings. By comparing the common features of the globally leading universities, we can presumably distill what it takes to achieve world class. From these studies we learn that to transform existing universities to world class universities requires a shift from input- to output-steering; from policies oriented to the public good to “new public management” as overarching ideology; and from broad to selective funding of a few institutions designated most likely to achieve world class status.

What is striking about this new discourse of higher education reform is not only the remarkable context-independence that is implied in the recipes promising world class achievement. Following a few key prescriptions, “world class” institutions can presumably be built anywhere and by anyone. Despots with vast oil money, governments with questionable human rights records, and bureaucrats in central planning agencies are all busy building world class universities, just as they have built the world’s tallest high rises, introduced man-made lakes into arid landscapes, or air-conditioned large swaths of desert land.

All these trends come together in a new hubris reigning over policy makers, who labor under the assumption that there are clear and simple recipes through which their country can achieve “world class” status in higher education. The ‘excellent’ university is often seen as a one-dimensional copy of the American university, whose essential features are presumed to be market-based competition, autonomy, control over student intake, and tuition payments. The “world class” university somehow mimics these features, and with sufficiently vast amounts of money and talent, one can get there. So the world over, governments and civil servants are engaged in pulling the same two or three policy levers in the hope of inciting competition for excellence to reward the winners and ignore the losers.

As I will argue in this book, the new discourse on the world class university not only underestimates the institutional, social, and political prerequisites that excellence in research and teaching require. It not only overestimates what government planners, backed by vast financial resources though they may be, can achieve in a realm that thrives on academic self-government. It also seems to redefine the university from a home of free research and reflection in which the humanities take pride of place into an engine of economic productivity and re-engineering, a vocationalized higher education whose wagon is increasingly tightly hitched to the project of national economic competitiveness.

The spirit in which these reforms are pursued bears an uncanny resemblance not to the celebrated reforms of a Wilhelm von Humboldt, but to Humboldt’s competitor Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered France’s polytechnical university reforms, designed to harness the power of the intellect to the project of national economic and military strength. Ironically, though, even in the realm of promoting economic and social development, the Napoleonic polytechnics were decidedly less successful than the Humboldtian universities built on the integration of teaching with research, autonomy with community, and moral formation with scientific research.

Rankings and Mindless Copying

Ironically, too, the “world class” discourse is promoted first and foremost not by academics but by government officials and media pundits. As Richard Muench has pointed out, policy needs votes, not truth. It needs success within the time frames of election cycles, not slowly emerging consensus around new paradigms. It needs compromise, not original ideas ahead of their time. Policy is beholden to the media, which craves problems with presumed ready-made solutions.² Rankings fit these needs precisely, suggesting objectivity and precision, while allowing for bite-sized consumption and the display of strong opinions.³ The result is often superficial emulation of what is still essentially an Anglo-American model of higher education. Most emulation focuses on surface features of American universities like choice, cost-covering tuition fees, institutional differentiation, and market responsiveness, while ignoring more profound and less overt characteristics.

But with all this emulation come as many frustrations, as the protagonists realize that some of the desired institutional features do not readily articulate with the local context, or, at any rate, do not seem to produce the desired effects. In several countries, plans for cost-covering tuition had to be scaled back dramatically or suspended altogether. Similarly, in Chile and the United Kingdom, we have seen massive protests of students against the increasing inequality and unfairness of access to higher education.⁴

While the “world class” discourse constructs the crisis largely as a crisis of insufficient resources, lack of market choices, and misguided policy, from an institutional point of view, the crisis is one of obsolescence and futility. The national, state-run university—the main institutional model of the 20th century—no longer meets the challenges of the new environment. And education policy as traditionally conceived is incapable of bringing about a new model. The national university’s obsolescence resembles that of the medieval university some 400 years ago. The medieval university had come to dominance during the ascendency of the Holy Roman Empire, focused on the formation of priests, doctors, and lawyers, and pillars of the Roman church’s secular and religious authority. That university had been rendered an anachronism by the Enlightenment’s replacement of theology with philosophy and the scientific revolution’s replacement of speculation with empirical research.

Today, government-controlled universities face a similarly stark challenge. The modern university, no longer confined to elite production, is a ‘universal’ institution (open to all secondary school graduates), to use Martin Trow’s term. It is an innovation-oriented (‘entrepreneurial’) institution, not amenable to be steered by civil servants from afar. And it is dyed in the wool global and international, not national. That kind of university cannot be governed from one central command post—be it a ministry of education or a central administrative office. It requires complex institutional underpinnings and a diverse institutional environment—best provided in the context of a civil society that prizes free speech, academic freedom, and the advancement of knowledge—and is willing to dedicate many of its resources, small and large, to support it. While governments can play an important role in defining frameworks of institutional learning, conventional education policy seems incapable of stirring up and capturing emerging effects.

Institutional Learning and Institutional Design

This book shows that true excellence in higher education is more likely to emerge from institutional learning than centralized policy making. Where education policy making is top-down, short-term oriented, and draws on a narrow fund of expert insight, institutional learning is bottom-up, experimental, long-term oriented, and draws on a broad basis of diverse institutional experience. Where education policy seeks certainty and instant change, institutional learning is meandering and forever self-correcting.⁵ Where education policy often suffers from “one-best-way” thinking and epistemic arrogance, institutional learning benefits from the power of pluralism and diversity. The emphasis on institutional learning is supported by recent design theory, which emphasizes that good designs mature over time. In a complex world, designers are unlikely to have enough knowledge to ‘get it right’ at first try. That means that good designs must leave room for institutions to ‘learn’ or self-improve over time. For Axelrod and Cohen, a key question for learning systems is “how [they] can be designed to become more effective over time.”⁶

The American university, I argue, derives its innovative design from such a sustained, open-ended (and yet unfinished) process of institutional learning spanning decades, not years. It is the product of a learning process that began with the colonial colleges built on the English model and kicked into high gear when thousands of enthusiastic returnees brought the experience of the German research university back to America. Institutional learning, although less centrally directed and less micro-managing, is ultimately more ‘rational’ than education policy. It produces outcomes more in harmony with the multi-facetted, multi-layered, and contradictory nature of the university. Like love, sleep, happiness, and other good things in life, its excellence is a by-product of locally adaptive acts that cannot easily be brought about by an act of deliberate will.⁷ Even (or especially) policies as muscular as the British government’s “Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)” or the German government’s Exzellenzinitiative eas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Glimpses of a New Design
• Part II Institutional Learning: Events, Actors, and Beliefs
• Part III Achieving Self-Government: Six American Design Shifts
• Part IV Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author