The State and Higher Education

In this chapter, we take up the implications of those aspects of policy that can be interpreted as theories of the state and of the university and their role in society.

The starting point for our three national projects was the evident changes in the role of the state promoted by national governments. As major public institutions, universities can be considered either as sub-systems of the state or as independent institutions that nevertheless are strongly affected by the nature of the state. A primary task is therefore to locate universities among the range of public institutions, and to assess how they can be related, if sometimes uncertainly, to a continuum of views about the appropriate role of the state. Therefore, much of our analysis in this book considers whether, if the discretion allowed to universities and the academics who constitute their working base has been increasingly circumscribed, the central tasks of universities (i.e. research and teaching-learning) remain the domain of the prime practitioners, rather than the governing structures.