TARGETS, INCENTIVES AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

Most modern European universities are funded almost entirely from public
sources or, more recently in some countries, from a mix of student fees,
research grants and public funding of the teaching function. Efforts to expand
university systems, under conditions of diminishing ability or willingness by
governments to pay the full costs of such expansion, have led to demands for
greater accountability of these institutions to their paymasters. The result has
been an increasing trend towards target-setting in universities, combined with
diverse efforts to assess and improve the quality of both teaching and research.
In some respects, this makes our universities one of the last bastions of oldstyle central planning, with all its attendant inefficiencies and distortions, a
curious irony in view of the rapid shift towards a market-type economy in central and eastern Europe since 1989. Moreover, the same tendencies are also
apparent in the widespread shift from academic autonomy towards a more
managerial type of university. In this paper I review these trends in the
European university system, assess their impact on both academics and the
institutions where they work, and examine the extent to which European and
wider networking across universities can provide a valuable counter-weight
to protect institutions from excessive pressures of accountability