Steering Change – Negotiations of Autonomy and Accountability in the Self-Owning University

Abstract

This chapter concerns changes to the government’s mechanisms for steering universities. Government and critics alike heralded the 2003 Danish university law as a radical rupture in the history of Danish universities but this chapter questions that view by identifying continuities in government’s steering mechanisms. By employing the concept of articulation, it elucidates the rearrangement of these mechanisms when universities became self-owning institutions. The concept of self-ownership dates back to the abolition of serfdom in Denmark but in recent years it has been developed as an institutional format for the ‘modernisation’ of the Danish education sector through the creation of self-owning institutions steered at a distance from the state. The chapter follows the concept as it came to articulate universities as ‘free’ and self-owning although without actual ownership of any assets. It further explores how the self-owning status of universities became a platform for the negotiation of a largescale amalgamation of institutions in the Danish university and government research sectors; the vehicle for the introduction of company accounting into universities; and finally the basis for new and tighter steering of universities through a new regime of contracts and audit. Based on this, the chapter turns to examining the policy activism of university leaders and ministry officials within this emerging policy assemblage. It suggests that the self-ownership reform did not distance the universities from government decision making, but instead intensified the university leadership-government relationship. The transformation of Danish universities is in this sense was contingent upon positioned and partial interventions of university leaders in new relations with government policy makers. Leaders have, we argue, deployed the institutional capabilities of universities and articulated the elements of the wider university steering assemblage in varied ways that continuously transform and recreate the university, while always solidifying the focal tension between government steering and university self-assertiveness.