The main point of this book is to argue that French universities experienced a quiet but important change during the last decade, which allowed them to become pertinent and more autonomous actors within the French university system.

Higher education reforms have been on the agenda of Western European countries for 25 years, trying to deal with self governed professional bureaucracies politically weakened by massification when an emerging common understanding enhanced their role as major actors in knowledge based economies. While university systems are deeply embedded in national settings, the ex post rationale of still on-going reforms is surprisingly uniform and “de-nationalized”. They promote (1) the “organizational turn” of universities, to varying extent substituting collegial loosely coupled entities by “integrated, goal-oriented entities deliberately choosing their own actions (and therefore open to differentiation), that can thus be held responsible for what they do” (2) the diversification of stakeholders, supposedly offering solutions to problems as various as the democratisation of universities, the shrinking of State budget resources and the diversification of university missions offering answers to changes in the making and in the use of science. When it comes to accounting for these reforms, two grand narratives of public management share the floor. NPM implies a strengthening of the capacity of the core State to direct public services organizations through management by objectives and results or contractualization, assessment, evaluation and. “Governance” focuses on “network-based” governance systems, where coordinating power and control are collectively shared between the major ‘social actors or partners’ at all levels of the decision-making system. Our results suggest that all higher education systems under study were more or less transformed according to both these narratives. It is therefore needed to understand how they combine or create contradictions. This leads us to test a third neo-weberian model. This model reaffirms the role of the State, of representative democracy, (central, regional and local), of public law (suitably modernized), preserves the idea of a public service with a distinctive status, culture and terms and conditions. It shifts from an internal orientation to bureaucratic rules towards an external orientation in meeting citizens’ needs and wishes by means of standardization of work processes and their products, based on a distinctive public service and a particular legal order survived as the foundations beneath the various packages of modernizing reforms. This book traces the national dynamics of public policies, organizational design and steering tools in seven European higher education and research systems, using these narratives to interpret and test the actual changes and the degree of national specificities and European convergence. This book is not a sum of national chapters like other presumably comparative. It does not intend to tell once again the story of the transformation of the relationships between the state and universities. It tries to use Higher education system to discuss issues on state intervention and steering and more generally the NPM, governance and neo-weberian models in a specific field. Furthermore, this book intends breaking the walls between specialists in higher education and specialist in public management and research policy. This well rooted division of labour is less that ever justified as the university mission in research (fundamental, applied, strategic) is underscored by commentors and reformers themselves. For that reason, we have chosen to observe the consequences of the dynamics of public policies, organizational design and steering tools on two specific issues related to the development of research training and organizing within universities: the transformation of research funding on the one hand and the expansion of graduate studies and doctoral schools on the other.

Black France, White Europe illuminates the deeply entangled history of European integration and African decolonization. Emily Marker maps the horizons of belonging in postwar France as leaders contemplated the inclusion of France's old African empire in the new Europe-in-the-making. European integration intensified longstanding structural contradictions of French colonial rule in Africa: Would Black Africans and Black African Muslims be French? If so, would they then also be European? What would that mean for republican France and united Europe more broadly? Marker examines these questions through the lens of youth, amid a surprising array of youth and education initiatives to stimulate imperial renewal and European integration from the ground up. She explores how education reforms and programs promoting solidarity between French and African youth collided with transnational efforts to make young people in Western Europe feel more European. She connects a particular postwar vision for European unity—which coded Europe as both white and raceless, Christian and secular—to crucial decisions about what should be taught in African classrooms and how many scholarships to provide young Africans to study and train in France. That vision of Europe also informed French responses to African student activism for racial and religious equality, which ultimately turned many young francophone Africans away from France irrevocably. Black France, White Europe shows that the interconnected history of colonial and European youth initiatives is key to explaining why, despite efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s, France became more European during those years.

In a remarkable decade of public investment in higher education, some 200 new university campuses were established worldwide between 1961 and 1970. This volume offers a comparative and connective global history of these institutions, illustrating how their establishment, intellectual output and pedagogical experimentation sheds light on the social and cultural topography of the long 1960s. With an impressive geographic coverage - using case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia - the book explores how these universities have influenced academic disciplines and pioneered new types of teaching, architectural design and student experience. From educational reform in West Germany to the establishment of new institutions with progressive, interdisciplinary curricula in the Commonwealth, the illuminating case studies of this volume demonstrate how these universities shared in a common cause: the embodiment of 'utopian' ideals of living, learning and governance. At a time when the role of higher education is fiercely debated, Utopian Universities is a timely and considered intervention that offers a wide-ranging, historical dimension to contemporary predicaments.

This book provides a central, authoritative source of reference on the most essential topics of higher education. The International Handbook of Higher Education combines a rich diversity of scholarly perspectives with a wide range of internationally derived descriptions and analyses. Chapters in the first volume cover central themes in the study of higher education, while contributors to the second volume focuses on contemporary higher education issues within specific countries or regions. Together, these volumes provide a centralized, easily accessible, yet scholarly source of information.

Governance is becoming increasingly important in universities just as it is in the wider world of commerce and banking. Historically, universities were run by their academic communities but as mass higher education has taken root, as university research has become a critical element in national economies and as the demand for more accountability both financial and in academic performance has grown, pressure has mounted for a ‘modernisation’ of governance structures. One aspect of ‘modernisation’, particularly important in many European systems, and in Japan, has been the decision by governments to give institutions greater autonomy, more control over their budgets and legal responsibility for the employment of their staff. International trends to introduce greater competition between institutions, to encourage greater institutional differentiation and give greater play to market forces has led to an emphasis on leadership, a more systematic involvement of external stakeholders and a more ‘corporate style of governance. At the same time this has often led to a sense of loss of collegiality, a redistribution of authority and a growing gap between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ within universities. This book analyses governance change in nine major higher education systems, Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, the UK and the USA, each account being the result of independent research by a leading authority in the field and describes how a convergence of governance structures has been mediated by the historical, cultural, political and social characteristics of the different systems. Michael Shattock is a leading authority on university governance; this study offers the most up to date account of governance reform in a range of higher education systems, an analysis of the common trends and an assessment of their impact on the idea of a university. It will be essential reading for academics, postgraduates and practitioners in higher education.

This edited volume contributes to the ongoing research and practice on applying performance management to university governance. A comparative approach and international perspective of the issue is provided through extensive use of case studies and empirical findings. A specific focus is also placed on using performance governance applied to higher education institutions' Third Mission, and on enhancing decision makers’ ability to frame dynamic complexity. In this regard, specific attention is devoted to analyzing the cause-and-effect relationships in affecting public outcomes. This also includes managing trade-offs in both time and space, and detecting and counteracting unintended behavioral effects from the use of formal systems focused on quantitative measures for performance assessment.