Living in laws which provide autonomy

Imagine yourselves the year 2030. It is not easy to predict the situation of the stock market in this year. It is easier to predict that the top 1-2% of German students will be studying in East Asia by then. This development will be the result of easier access to a wide range of information leading to a more competitive and globalized university market, leading to even more student mobility in the future. And my prediction is that Asia will attract significant numbers of good European students in 2030. Students opt for the best universities, located in the most vibrant areas of the world. A significant number of our best Maastricht University students now are German. The talented students choose their place of study based on quality. And to achieve high quality good governance is essential. Besides good governance, money is important: for example there are poorly governed universities, but which have so much money and therefore can still be good. Another component of creating a good university is leadership. Leadership, indeed, makes a difference in quality.

Now let me advance some personal experiences. In 1989 I became Minister of Education, a position I took up directly from the university where I was a professor. The Dutch Government had accepted in 1987 a memorandum which was “Higher Education Autonomy”, and I started to work on it. The idea in this memorandum was subsequently from higher education to all levels of education, of making all schools more autonomous. In the case of universities they should be allowed to differ in their collective bargaining agreements, for instance about hiring and firing staff. The recruitment of staff was to be done by the universities themselves. It is the university itself that sets the rules, except in appointing the executive board: the executive board is appointed by people from outside the university. The next step in creating more autonomous universities was that the universities should become owner of the buildings, and should be allowed to have an independent financial account. More specifically, they can borrow money and they can also be active on the financial market. In the most extreme case, universities have the freedom to go the stock market and try to make capital gains there. At the educational and research level the universities could teach what they thought would fit best, and do research how and what they want. That is indeed what has happened, with the reservation that only limitations were imposed in macro efficiency and in the accreditation of degree courses. Subsequently, a supervisory board for each university was set up, personally handpicked by the minister. A supervisory board consists of 5 persons. To cite a typical example, the board of the Technical University of Eindhoven is almost by definition chaired by the CEO of Philips, plus one more member from the industrial community and three members from the world of the arts, culture, law or health. It should be noted that active politicians are not allowed on boards, and while active academicians from other Dutch universities are not allowed on the supervisory board, academicians from other countries are allowed. The advisory board, then appoints the executive board which is headed by the president. In principle, all appointments of deans, and individual professors are made by the executive board. In the past eight years at Maastricht we have done that very stringently. We are driven by problem-based learning, and to set an extreme case, if a Nobel Prize winner wished to work in Maastricht, and didn’t want to contribute to the problem-based learning environment, which means more teaching hours than without PBL, he would not be hired. The law was changed step by step  and became fully operative in 1994; it was an extremely difficult process. I should add to this that I always discussed it with my prime minister, because I knew that our political party ratings would drop, because of these measures. Eventually, I became the most unpopular minister, and I knew it beforehand because this was all very controversial. If you want to be in office for popularity, don’t change the law to create more autonomy! At the same time a few of my colleagues in Europe were following me. They found it a great initiative, but let’s not go into what they did. The Dutch situation, in a way, is one in which controversial elements drew a lot of attention, for example with demonstrations, but in the end it was introduced very smoothly.

In connection with my book I try to take stock of where different countries are in terms of numbers of universities rated among the top 200, whether you use Jiao Tong or any other ranking. Actually there is a very consistent view because it is always the same group of countries. You have to find a measure which gives you the information to compare countries. Problems, for instance, are population size and student numbers. That’s why I used a per capita or a per student basis. Five countries come out consistently in all of the rankings. Those five countries have a profile in terms of high autonomy. The U.K., of course, first on the list, the Netherlands, second, then Finland. Sweden and Denmark. For me it is questionable whether Switzerland belongs to that group. Actually it takes some five to ten years before you rise in the ratings, that is before you see improvements. For example, Denmark made these changes five years ago. Of course, these rankings are correlational; it is not rigorous mathematical analysis, but I think that analysis can be done in many respects when you take the right indicators.

What then happened was that I became a university president and I started to live under the laws I had introduced. Let me give you a few examples which would not have happened in the old university, and which we can now do. First, we are embarking on a 50-million euro project for two machines, a 7 Tesla and a 9.4 Tesla imaging machine (MRI). This means a tremendous reorientation of research within the university that will affect every department because we simply have to concentrate; we can’t do everything. This kind of concentration is something which could not have happened without university autonomy. Second, we are imposing discipline on ourselves. We are saying, we should not grow beyond what we can presumably handle in terms of the number of students to be admitted to bachelor degrees. Third, we have closed down two degree courses because we said we should not engage in degree courses which are not among the top in Europe. We used both the CHE and the Dutch rankings. If our degree courses are not among the top, then we just stop them, and we have done it twice. This gives credibility. We would have never been allowed to and been able to go into matching without our autonomy. The Netherlands is among those countries where you are not permitted to select students according to the ministry, but you can of course match. You can thus have a quasi selection. We do that almost throughout the education. It would previously not have been possible to consider the introduction of additional fees, which we are now considering. All of these measures, indeed, have contributed tremendously to the quality in terms of our ranking, which is very high compared to the input of money. In that analysis of money per student compared to ranking, we really are an exception. By the way, for those among you, when in 2030 you see your grandchildren studying in Asia, I see the consolation of Asian students still coming to Germany, assuming that Germany will make the changes towards more university autonomy and if it merges the Max-Planck-Institutes with the universities.