Search

The political, social, and institutional environments in which contemporary universities operate have changed rather dramatically over the past two decades in ways that threaten the resilience of the academic core, both in its ability to map knowledge comprehensively and also to maintain a balance between the branches of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This paper traces historical changes (2003-2019) in the academic core of two "flagship" research-intensive universities located in Northern Europe. The results show that some branches of the academic core are undergoing dynamic processes of program churn that make them resilient. Furthermore, the data show that this resilience is enabled in large part by bridging different branches of knowledge by establishing what we term interbranch programs. In addition to the abovementioned findings, the paper links ongoing discussions regarding change in HE systems and institutions to the literature on organizational resilience, and it advances insights for a possible future theory of how adaptation plays out in the academic core over time.

Neoliberal theories--whether the new public management, principal-agent theory, or performance management--have provided the rationale for sweeping reforms in the governance and operation of higher education. This paper expands our understanding of neoliberal theory and practice by examining a leading neoliberal reform: performance-based funding (PBF) for higher education in the USA, Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Our analysis of PBF examines not only its impacts but also its origins and implementation. Neoliberal theory has been used not only "prospectively" to design and argue for certain public policies but also "retrospectively" to analyse the origins and implementation of neoliberal policy. Hence, this paper examines this retrospective neoliberal analysis in order to determine how well neoliberal theory helps us understand the origins and implementation of neoliberal policy: in this case, the socio-political forces that gave rise to PBF; and the political and organizational features of the processes by which PBF was implemented.

Over the past three decades, governments have recurrently intervened in higher education. Over time, significant changes have occurred in inherited national governance modes. These reforms have been assessed in different ways, such as by emphasising the shift to the more supervisory role of the State, or the increasing privatisation and marketisation following the neoliberal paradigm, or the overall process of re-regulation. This paper sheds light on these different judgements by addressing the governance shift by focusing on the sequences of policy instrument mixes adopted over time in 16 European countries. By analysing 25 years of policy developments, it is shown how the content of national governance reforms consistently varied over time and that no common template has been followed.