Burton R. Clark, Allan M. Cartter
Professor Emeritus of Higher Education,
presents a progress report on innovative
European universities.
Developing and retaining strength as a place of inquiry in the contemporary, fast-changing environment of higher education is clearly no simple matter. More than traditional habits are needed. New forms of inquiry and training are perhaps required. Flexibility and adaptability become more essential, characteristics that seem understated in traditional universities.
Since September, 1994, I have initiated fieldwork at five innovative institutions: the University of Warwick in England; the University of Twente in the Netherlands; Chalmers Technological University in Sweden; Strathclyde University in Scotland (treating Scotland as a different "national" context than England); and the University of Joensuu in Finland. While mid-stream in fieldwork, I have developed four categories of implementing elements found at these universities. First, the construction of an innovative self-defining idea -- an element at the level of belief or culture; and then three features seen as implementing infrastructures: an integrated administrative core; a discretionary funding base; and an innovative developmental periphery.
At the level of ideas, we can speak of deliberately constructing a "climate for change," or of generating "aspirations beyond current capability." But the question still remains of how best to establish a category that pinpoints what innovative universities do in their general culture by way of urging change and setting directions for it. My choice mid-stream in the research is to conceptualize change-oriented purpose as an innovative self-referring idea -- an idea of the institution offering a distinctive self that is change oriented.
Administrative capability to implement a change orientation is very important. Much of the adaptive capacity of the innovative university is found in a strengthened adminstrative core. The core is simultaneously centralized and inclusive of the main operating units. The deans of faculties are brought into it; or where deans are downplayed, a few department chairs or elected senior faculty are regular members. The core goes a long way in bridging the gap between the administrative values of central staff and the professional values of faculty.
The third distinguishing element is a discretionary funding base. Standardized budgeting across a set of universities favors standardized procedures within them. From ministry to university, funds are earmarked for expenditure in specified categories of activity and only for those activities. The status quo is budgetarily supported. In contrast, innovative steps require some funding that is outside the traditional budgetary definitions. "Free monies" are needed, either from new sources or from an enhanced discretion to use old income lines for new purposes. Discretionary resources become especially critical when university income is stagnant or in decline. Innovative universities actively seek competitive advantage. We should expect them to seek more diversified funding and/or more local institutional control over expenditures. Standard core funding, while still important, becomes a reduced share of income.
Chalmers, Twente, Strathclyde, Warwick, Joensuu -- all have a sense of a traditional academic heartland that must be protected. But at the same time all have a sense of what I call a developmental periphery as a place where the action is. The units in it, including core units reaching outward as they do new things, entail risk. But risk is mitigated by having a number of major and minor new starts, some of which will hopefully succeed even as others fail or fail to achieve initial high expectations. Risk-taking is inherent in new activities started by a university itself. But the greater risk is not to do anything at all.
The four essential elements which innovative universities possess are interconnected and interactive. The self-concept provides a justification for the other three elements and urges them onward. The new administrative core works to change the funding base; in turn, a "freer" funding base frees up the administrative core, providing discretionary resources for new ventures. The core is highly instrumental in expanding and changing the nature of the developmental periphery. In turn, steps taken on the periphery widen the funding base and add to the capacity of the core to change the entire institution. Notably, surpluses earned on the periphery can be used by the administrative core in part to subsidize traditional fields in the academic core that cannot earn their own way and find little favor in the governmental wish to tie universities to economic development.
The element of an innovative self-defining idea remains the feature most difficult to identify. But universities can clearly have "enthusiasms for change" that are taken as a way to explore "things that might come to be useful" and are oriented to the long-run and distant instead of the short-run and local. Especially when the university world steadily becomes more international and more competitive, and is a world in which many other universities are on the move, or soon will be, a change-oriented institutional idea is surely a leading element of innovative universities about which we need to know more.
Adapted from a paper presented at the 1995 Annual Forum of the European Association for Institutional Research.
Professor Clark has received grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Spencer Foundation for this three-year study of innovative universities in Europe.
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