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In this contribution to the Special Issue of Studies in Higher Education, I describe developments during the COVID-19 pandemic in Dutch higher education along three lines. First, the context is outlined in chronological order. It concerns the evolution of the pandemic in the Netherlands, complemented by the general situation at my own university -- the University of Twente (UT). The UT has almost 12,000 students, about 30% of whom come from abroad. Many of the foreign students come from neighbouring country Germany (12% of the total number of students). The university is located in the east of the Netherlands, close to the border with Germany, and has a beautiful spacious campus. The nickname of the university is the Entrepreneurial University, which underlines its character. The second part of my contribution gives an overview of a number of measures and issues that were taken during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Dutch higher education sector. The third part contains a number of personal perceptions and gives an impression of my state of mind in recent months.

With regard to the governance structures of European universities, changes have been proposed aimed at their democratic nature, the composition of governing bodies, the degree of centralisation in decision-making and redirecting the balance between collective and individual governing responsibilities. In this article, we address the effects of such governance reforms in public, comprehensive universities in Norway and the Netherlands. Differences across countries, even within a relatively homogeneous region such as Northwestern Europe, can be traced back to differences in underlying political visions towards university governance. After an overview of the main features of university governance structures in the two countries, we argue that a specific regional university governance practice has emerged with different combinations of executive and democratic elements.

Drawing on the model of managerial responses to multiple organisational identities (integration, aggregation, compartmentalisation, deletion and multivocality), this article explores managerial responses in Ukrainian research universities whilst means-ends decoupling takes place at the state level. The latter term implies that practices of state policies are disconnected from the state's core goal of enhancing public welfare. Data is taken from recent interviews with 11 top managers from three Ukrainian research universities. Our findings reveal that the greater the institutional complexity experienced by the university and the more the top managers maintain confidence in practices and organisational identities that deviate from the global model of the research university, the greater the means-ends decoupling at the organisational level. The university that sustains the least degree of means-ends decoupling at the organisational level shows aggregation as the managerial response, while the university with the highest degree of means-ends decoupling is characterised by multivocality with underdeveloped identities of research at the international level and knowledge transfer. As a higher degree of means-ends decoupling at the organisational level implies a larger efficiency gap and significant diversion of both human and financial resources, a managerial response that lacks synergy, in our case multivocality, also leads to the above-mentioned negative consequences.

This article discusses changes with respect to university governance structures in six comprehensive universities in Europe. We present an analytical framework on the basis of which we conduct a comparative analysis of the university governance structures along four different dimensions: (a) the internal democratic nature of the governance structure, (b) the external involvement in university governance, (c) the level of centralisation of decision-making authority in the university and (d) the concentration of authority in an individual leadership position versus authority in a collective body or spread over various collective bodies.

The idea of the research university as a key institution for social and economic development in knowledge-intensive societies has been adopted by the Ukrainian government after the fall of the communist regime. Establishing research universities is a long journey during which many things might happen. To understand this journey better in the case of Ukrainian research universities, we applied an analytical framework derived from the concept of travel and translation of ideas. This concept analyses reform through three types of editing rules: the rules of context, logic and formulation. These editing rules have guided our analysis of data gathered from policy documents complemented by face-to-face interviews. We conclude that the idea as introduced came to little, as the turbulent political context precluded long-term planning and universities were faced with conflicting policies.

There is a widespread recognition across Europe, amongst policy-makers, university managers and scholars, that universities' societal roles (the "third mission") are increasingly important. As universities become increasingly strategically managed, it is perhaps unsurprising that attention has turned towards the strategic management of this third mission. Universities risk becoming "overloaded" with these missions and are forced to choose to dilute their strategic focus or only focus on a limited number of these missions. The third mission risks being regarded as a desirable but not an essential duty and therefore is unlikely to be an institutional focus.In this paper we therefore ask how can the third mission be meaningfully institutionalized given the pressures on university managers to focus on other areas. We explore this with reference to a detailed case study of a provincial Swedish university, Sjöstad University, with a long-standing commitment to creating a societal impact. We explore how Sjöstad University has created an impact, and then the tensions this raises for key university stakeholders, internally and with external partners. We then reflect on the institutionalization of the third mission and call for further consideration of how external stakeholders can provide universities with a strategic space to institutionalize the third mission.

The concepts of differentiation and profiling are cornerstones in discussions about the organisation of contemporary higher education systems, following the trends of massification and global competition. This contribution provides a system-level description and comparison of the German and Dutch higher education systems regarding these topics, and points to possible interactions and development concepts connecting differentiation, strategic profiling of universities and excellence. Though both higher education systems started from very different positions and with differing policies towards differentiation, the global trends and national aspirations for the systems, as well as individual universities in Germany and the Netherlands, are comparable. A look into the resulting ranking positions of German and Dutch universities generally shows a more successful development for the Dutch higher education institutions in the last few years--which could possibly indicate a crucial time lag in the effects of differentiation policies in higher education as the German excellence and differentiation efforts fundamentally took hold more than 10 years after the Dutch initiatives in this field.

Using the theory of reasoned action in combination with the Competing Values Framework of organizational leadership, our study examines how deans at Indonesian universities lead and manage their faculties. Based on a large-scale survey with responses from more than 200 Indonesian deans, the study empirically identifies a number of deanship styles: the Master, the Competitive Consultant, the Focused Team Captain, the Consensual Goal-Setter and the Informed Trust-Builder style. Further, the study investigates determinants of deans' leadership styles, pointing at the important role of their attitudes towards leadership, while their perceived behavioural control only explains some of the styles. The study also suggests that faculty culture is important to take into consideration if we want to gain further understanding of the deanship, since culture turned out to effect the deans' attitudes and hence their leadership style.

A Delphi study has been carried out, soliciting views from higher education experts on likely and desirable developments in English higher education until 2025. The paper reports the most salient findings of the Delphi questionnaire and presents two scenarios that focus largely on the institutional fabric of the system. The first scenario follows the general agreement emerging from the two rounds of the Delphi study and suggests a smaller higher education system and the return of a binary divide between about 25 research-intensive universities and about 70 other higher education institutions. The second scenario is a counter-scenario that intends to present an alternative picture of English higher education in 2025. That scenario suggests a compact system of six research-intensive universities, about 40 comprehensive institutions and five private providers. With respect to the steering of the system, a key difference between the two scenarios is that the former assumes a continuing role of market forces, whereas the latter is based on a much stronger role of the government.

In the light of the Bologna process, traditional degree programmes of research-led universities in the Netherlands have been transformed into 3 year bachelors programmes and 1 or 2 year masters programmes. The Dutch universities of applied sciences (UAS) mainly offer 4 year bachelors programmes. In principle, this UAS bachelors degree qualifies UAS graduates to continue their higher education at university masters level. The bachelor-master structure introduced in 2002/2003 created new opportunities for UAS graduates to enrol in university masters programmes. For research-led universities this is an interesting new student market. The main question in this article concerns the magnitude of this new market and the motivations of UAS graduates to continue their higher education at the research-led university level.

One element of the recent reforms of higher education sectors across Europe is the formation of new governance structures in universities. Supervisory boards are part of these reform processes. However, despite the importance of these boards, surprisingly little is known about their actual work. This article discusses the situation of boards in three European countries: the Netherlands, Austria and the UK. It compares the boards' constitutions with respect to composition, independence, accountability and transparency. Several problems and dilemmas come to the fore. The article concludes by indicating potential areas for improvement in the current board structure and working practice.

The expectations and demands with respect to teaching and research have been changing for universities due to changes in their institutional environments. Born out of changing national research policies and modern governance arrangements, efficiency, effectiveness and output-oriented cultures have become increasingly important. In this article we ask the question of what the consequences of these changing institutional environments are for the teaching-research nexus as experienced by academics at universities. We explore the changing practices of teaching and research in eight research units in research-led universities in England and The Netherlands. The sources of our empirical investigation are documentary evidence as well as interview data from 48 academics in biotechnology and medieval history. Our findings suggest that teaching and research are increasingly falling apart as two distinct activities. Success or failure in research acquisition and performance assessments has serious implications for the work portfolios in terms of teaching and research load of the research units.

The Dutch higher education and research system has incrementally changed during the last decade. Several reforms, initiated by the government, have hinted towards influencing the basic processes within universities, such as research programming. However, it is largely unknown how these reforms have been implemented at the university shop floor level. Are the core activities of academics influenced by the reforms? Do academics still enjoy the academic freedom as they used to do? In this paper, we address the responses of four research units to changed institutional environments (two units in biotechnology and two in medieval history). Based on 33 interviews, we mapped their views on present-day research programming and problem choice in their units. The results show that the research units preserve their own research agenda to a large extent: the academic credibility process is paramount.

As one of the first countries in Europe to do so, The Netherlands moved towards a new relationship between the state and the higher education institutions in the mid-1980s. Autonomy, quality and accountability were key considerations in this move. In 2006 the Dutch government proposed another radical innovation in its approach to higher education governance, based on the concepts of duties of care and codes of conduct. In this article the new approach is critically discussed and its potential and drawbacks highlighted. (Contains 4 notes.)