On Scholars, Hippopotami and von Humboldt: Higher Education in Europe in Transition
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Editorial On Scholars, Hippopotami and von Humboldt: Higher Education in Europe in Transition
One of the more endearing characteristics of the scholar — and for that matter, the hippopotamus — is in both cases, their delicate territorial sense. This instinct emerges in the setting of boundaries and marking of territory, intellectual in the case of the former species, interestingly physical in the case of the latter. The techniques each employs differ, of course. Such differences attract, in their turn, the attentions of scholars in other fields — the anthropologist of donnish dominion and disciplines for the first and the students of the late Konrad Lorenz and ethology in the case of the second. Still, such territoriality is a sure pointer to the dynamism of a particular field or, at very least, the wish of individuals working it to assert a special identity, and like the Pharisee, to bolster the claim to be ‘not as other men (or hippopotami) are’. In economic policy and by extension — although whether that extension is backwards or forwards may be subject to disagreement — in higher education policy, a new term has lit up the landscape. This is the study of ‘Transition Economies’ by which is usually meant those societies and systems of higher education in East and Central Europe, they being in transition from the Ancien Regime and the attendant obscurity of command economies to the blessedly breathable air of the market economy and all that follows therefrom. It is a widely accepted convention. Yet, for all that, it is a strangely unsatisfactory term for it takes as its principal feature the notion that the phenomenon of transition is unique to Central and Eastern Europe. To claim exclusivity is always a risky business. It could be argued, with no little weight, that the past two decades for Europe as a whole have been a saga of a vast and never-ending transition — to a market economy, to strategic management, to new managerialism, towards the Evaluative State, towards agency control; a veritable procession, a decade or more long, singing songs of expectation, accountability and diversification, variously applied to such areas as funding, students and types of establishment now gathered under the general rubric of ‘higher education’.
Editorial
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Differences Conceptual and Adverbial There is, of course, the small matter of difference in chronology. With hindsight, we may now see that transition in Western Europe had its roots in the economic crisis of the late 1970s and the break up of what some see as the Social Democrat consensus. The components of dissolution as well as the exact chronology involved in this watershed are discussed by Amaral and Magalhaes in terms of the triple crisis of the university. Dissolved or not, that earlier consensus had a number of solid achievements to its credit, not least that it set higher education in Western Europe on the path towards mass status. Transition, viewed from this angle, is taken up with the move towards, and the subsequent triumph of, various forms of Neo Libera
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