University Restructuring Experiences in Asia: Myth and Reality

Abstract

Restructuring Universities for Global Competitiveness In the last decade or so, we have witnessed a higher education restructuring movement running through different parts of Asia. With strong intentions to enhance their national competitiveness in the global marketplace, different Asian governments have started comprehensive reviews of their higher education systems and made attempts to transform the higher education governance and management style. Being unsatisfied with the conventional model along the lines of ‘state-oriented’ and ‘highly centralized’ approaches in higher education, Asian governments have recently tried to ‘incorporate’ or introduce ‘corporatization’ and ‘privatization’ measures to run their state/national universities, believing that the transformations of which could make national universities more flexible and responsive to rapid socio-economic changes (Mok, 2006; Oba, 2006). Instead of being closely directed by the Ministry of Education or equivalent government administrative bodies, state universities in Asia are now required to become more proactive and dynamic in looking for their own financial resources. Similar to their Australian and British counterparts, universities in Asia are now under constant pressures to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ to look for alternative funding sources from the market, strengthening their partnerships with industry and business (Marginson & Considine, 2000; Olsen & Gornitzka, 2006). Adhering more towards the market and corporate principles and practices, universities in Hong Kong are now run on a market-oriented and business corporation model. Universities of the citystate have experienced corporatization and privatization processes, whereby higher education institutions in Hong Kong have proactively engaged in fostering entrepreneurship to search for additional revenue sources from the market (Mok, 2005a; Lee & Gopinathan, 2005; Chan & Lo, 2007). In order to enhance the efficiency of university governance, the University Grant Committee (UGC), the organization which shapes the direction of higher education development in Hong Kong, has recently subscribed to the notion of ‘deep collaboration’ among universities, believing that synergy could be achieved if universities in the city-state could better integrate. The UGC even supports university merging or other forms of restructuring to further establish Hong Kong as a regional hub for excellence in research and scholarship (Lee, 2005; Chan, 2007). Similarly, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan has decided to change the statutory position of state universities into independent judicial entities by adopting principles and practices of corporatization. In order to reduce the state burden in higher education financing, all state universities in Taiwan have to generate additional funds from non-state sectors such as the market and enterprise. In order to generate sufficient funds to finance their institutions, various kinds of market-driven strategies have been adopted. More recently, the Taiwan government has attempted to restructure its state universities by passing a new University Act to make state universities independent legal entities. Influenced by the Japan model, state universities in Taiwan have to establish new governance structures; while they are under immense pressure to search for additional financial support from non-state channels, especially when the Taiwan government has reduced significantly its funding to them (Lo & Weng, 2005; Tien, 2006). In facing a new market economy context, the Chinese government has only found the old way of ‘centralized governance’ in education inappropriate (Yang, 2002). Acknowledging that overcentralization and stringent rules would kill the initiatives and enthusiasm of local educational institutions, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) called for resolute steps to streamline administration, and devolve powers to units at lower levels so as to allow them more flexibility to run education. In the last decade or so, higher education in the post-Mao era has experienced structural reforms ranging from curriculum design, financing, promotion of the private/minban sectors in higher education provision, to adopting strategies to develop ‘world-class’ universities. In order to promote the competitiveness of its higher education in the global marketplace, the Chinese government has introduced various kinds of restructuring exercises to merge universities or to streamline the stubbornly sustained bureaucratic university systems. With strong intentions to identify and develop a few Chinese universities into ‘world-class’ universities, the government has implemented various reform measures, such as the ‘211 project’ and the ‘985 project’, to concentrate state resources on a few selected top-tier national universities in order to boost them to become leading universities in the world (Min, 2004; Mok 2005b; Lo & Chan, 2006; Chou, 2006; Ngok, in this issue). Like societies in greater China, Japan is not immune from the impact of neo-liberalism, managerialism and economic rationalism, three major ideologies underlying the tidal wave of public sector reforms and reinventing government projects across the world. With the intention to make its state university system more responsive and flexible in coping with intensified pressures generated from the growing impacts of globalization, the Japanese government has incorporated all state universities since 2004. Central to the transformation of the existing national universities into ‘National University Corporations’ are three major reform aspects: increased competitiveness in research and education; enhanced accountability together with the introduction of competition; and strategic and functional management of national universities (Oba, 2006). Higher education restructuring is popular not only among East Asian states but also among South-East Asian societies. Having reflected upon the changing university governance models and evaluated the recent experiences of Singapore Management University (SMU), the Ministry of Education in Singapore has decided to change the governance models of the existing state universities, namely, the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, by making them independent legal entities through the process of ‘corporatization’ (Mok, 2005c; 2006a). By corporatizing these state universities, the Singapore government hopes that universities on the island state could become more entrepreneurial. Similarly, public universities in Malaysia have started a similar project of ‘incorporation’ and ‘corporatization’ of national universities since 1998. In the last few years, the private universities have grown in number, while the public universities are run like corporations in Malaysia. According to Lee (2004), ‘the structural changes in the corporatized universities show that collegial forms of governance have been sidelined, entrepreneurial activities have increased, and corporate managerial practices have been institutionalized’ (Lee, 2004, p. 15). Similar developments could be easily found in other countries in South-East Asia. In his recent work, Welch (2007) examines how the higher education systems in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam have been under great pressure for transformation because of the tremendous demographic changes. Similar to other more developed economies in East Asia, these South Asian economies have to reform their higher education systems in order to cope with the challenges of globalization. In view of the intensified pressures to assert themselves in the global university league, universities in these South East Asian countries have only found themselves at far more disadvantaged positions. In particular, when comparing the performance of these South-East Asian countries in the areas of having patents, papers by citations, and R&D performance with the developed economies in the West, they are certainly far behind the ‘threshold’. It is against such a wider context that these South Asian countries have begun to rely far more on private or market forces to create additional learning opportunities for higher education. However, the growing prominence of the privateness in higher education has also Ka Ho Mok 530 raised concerns of quality assurance among the countries in South-East Asia (World Bank, 2000; South East Asian Ministers of Education Organization, 2002). About the Issue This special issue sets out against the wider policy context briefly outlined above to examine how selected countries in Asia have responded to the growing pressures for higher education restructuring in order to maintain national competitiveness in the global marketplace. Two major themes run through the whole issue; first, management and governance change in universities and, second, the quest for world-class status among the selected Asian countries. John Hawkins gives an overview of the recent trends in higher education transformations not only in Asia but also in California, USA. Like its Asian counterparts, state universities are becoming far more private in terms of financing in California, the development of which has raised debates on the public good or private good of public/state universities in the USA (Neubauer, 2006). Similar to the experiences in California, a few articles in this issue have attempted to address the same issue of higher education restructuring in Asia by closely examining how the higher education institutions have gone through or have been experiencing the processes of the corporatization and incorporation of universities. The cases of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong discussed in this issue will clearly demonstrate how universities are incorporated and how the incorporation has affected academic freedom and academic lifestyle in Asia (Lee & Gopinathan, Tien, Kim, and Petersen & Currie, in this issue). Questing