Strengthening the Evaluative State: Strategy, Values and Rhetoric

Abstract

Despite the role that France played in pioneering the Evaluative State, it is evident that the French government faced a dilemma not very different from one that the UK had confronted a decade earlier. If higher education was to be ‘freed’ from the heavy hand of the state to benefit from the joys of competition between individual higher education establishments, a rather different approach was needed. It was not enough merely to make encouraging noises and gestures, and very particularly so given the growling hostility of two of the three Estates in the university world — the Academic and the Student Estates — to the notion of ‘market forces’ as the great liberator. However, it is one of the more remarkable paradoxes that neoliberalism, a doctrine wedded to rolling back the frontiers of the state, could advance only by rolling them forward. This bizarre example of policy’s equivalent of cognitive dissonance is sometimes alluded to as ‘Amaral’s Paradox’ (Amaral and Magalhães, 2007; Neave, 2008b). It was as much in evidence with the sharp smack of government in Thatcherist Britain as it was in the higher education policy pursued under the presidencies of Messieurs Chirac and Sarkozy.