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European Universities: The Unfinished Revolution

The thesis of this paper is that the traditional European university is now extinct; that the conditions in higher education which have succeeded it are highly unstable and therefore transitory; and that its eventual replacement is now dimly perceptible on the horizon. Accordingly, the first section attempts to describe what it is that has passed away, the middle sections analyze the processes involved in both death and transformation, and the final section assesses the prospects for the future. The subject of these speculations, the European university, is of course an abstraction. It is meant to approximate the essential attributes of higher education in the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. The systems of higher education in each of these countries are largely financed and controlled by public authorities. In the not too distant past these institutions of higher learning were Ordinarienuniversitiiten, or professors' universities, with respect to their internal affairs, and "elite" in their relationship to society. These institutions also, it will be argued, passed through fundamentally similar transformations since World War II. The purpose of this endeavor is not to describe these events, but to identify the processes at work behind them. The ultimate end, then, is a conceptual scheme for interpreting the recent past and immediate future of European universities. This scheme will undoubtedly not fit any country perfectly, but it should be adaptable to the unique institutional situation and pace of events in each country. Because the aim is thus general, no attempt has been made to amass relevant statistics, even though many of the arguments are numerical in nature. The basic data on growth and social composition of enrollments are well known and widely available, chiefly from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development.