Quality assurance and the shift towards private governance in higher education: Europeanisation through the back door?

ABSTRACT

This contribution focuses on quality assurance (QA) agencies in the sphere of higher education. It develops a theoretical framework that interrelates systems theory with Gramsci's theory of hegemony with a view to situating this new control of universities in the broader context of a further differentiation of society and emerging heterarchical modes of governance. A closer study of the emerging European market of QA agencies highlights the European dimension of this differentiation and the role of the market in advancing a variable geometry in the context of the European Higher Education Area.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• quality assurance
• Europe
• Luhmann
• transnationalisation of the state
• private governance

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Poul F. Kjaer, Janja Komljenovic and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this chapter. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Eva Hartmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7591-2341

Notes

1 How contested this institutional change still is was indicated by a recent ruling in one of the German states. Almost 20 years after the institutional autonomy started to take shape, the court found that the strengthening of the rectorate’s competences undermines the freedom of research. This ruling calls for the re-establishment of the professors’ autonomy, as it used to exist before the major reform; see Constitutional Court of the State Baden-Wuerttemberg, 1 VB 16/15 https://verfgh.baden-wuerttemberg.de/fileadmin/redaktion/m-stgh/dateien/161114_1VB16-15_Urteil.pdf [01/02/2017].

2 For a good overview on different types of agencies, see the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education at www.eqar.eu.

3 The participation of the UK is remarkable, since it was at that time no longer a member of UNESCO after its withdrawal from the organisation in 1985 following the Reagan-governed USA. It was only to return a couple of months after the Convention was signed in Lisbon. The UK then signed the Convention immediately, and managed to ratify it even before Germany which took 10 years to do so.

4 The National Academic Recognition Information Centres.

5 The European Network of Information Centres.

6 Fourth Act Amending the Framework Act for Higher Education, adopted on 20 August 1998 (BGBI.I S.2190).

7 On the complex relationship between ENQA and EQAR, see Walsh (2016, 238).

8 See www.eqar.eu/fileadmin/documents/eqar/official/EQAR_Statutes_v2_0_EN.pdf

9 Compilation of data provided by EQAR. See https://www.eqar.eu/register/map.html.

10 See www.asiin.de [01/02/2017].

11 How precarious this consent still is was shown by a recent ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court. The court challenged a too far-reaching delegation of setting the procedure for the accreditation of study programmes (Order of 17 February 2016, 1 BvL 8/10). It found that the essential decisions have to be taken by the legislative branch, in order not to compromise the fundamental freedom of research and teaching guaranteed by the German constitution. See www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2016/bvg16-015.html [01/02/2017].

Additional information

Funding

This paper was developed with the financial support of the H2020 European Research Council within the project ‘Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy – A Socio-Legal Approach,’ ITEPE-312331 – www.itepe.eu.