Review of Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organisational Pathways of Transformation

Abstract

ProQuest-Dokument-Link KURZFASSUNG (ABSTRACT) Twente University of Technology, located in the hinterland, opened its doors in 1964 with three Faculties of Engineering-Mechanical, Electrical and Chemical. Twente encountered difficulties, according to the author, when rectors and small cadres of administrators and faculty had to subordinate their plans to participatory patterns. This situation was "remedied" in 1995, when the Dutch government reversed the University Government Reorganisation Act of 1970 leaving the matter of governance to individual universities. By 1980, partly due to its location, size, limited scope, and partly due to previous political developments, Twente had been left in a vulnerable position susceptible to financial crises generated by government cuts. In fact, the author believes that the cuts helped to smooth the transformation process. A fundamental step was the strengthening of the administrative core by having three individuals exercising central initiatives and by making hegemonic the institutional idea of an entrepreneurial university. Twente stimulated the academic heartland by building from core competencies and by creating new combinations out of existing units, focusing on informatics, computer sciences, and educational technology. It developed a third stream of funding coming from industry, the European Union, and other governmental ministries providing additional and discretionary funds. The method used to generate funds was to create a developmental periphery-a true periphery of outreach units and a semi-periphery of outward-looking and problem-solving research centres. The true periphery linked traditional university units with the industrial and professional community. The university established the office of Transfer, Research, and Development (later transformed in a Liaison Group) to facilitate the transferring of technology from university to small and medium-size enterprises and stimulate graduates and researchers "to start their own knowledge-intensive company" (p. 47). A science park consequently came into being quite informally and developed further through bottom-up networking by interested companies. In the 1990s Twente approved a "privatized" business school that remained operationally part of the university, but was constituted to be outside its rules and regulations. The Twente programmes, created as part of a focused entrepreneurial university, have spread to other European countries and beyond. It provides an example of the development from the traditional professorial university through the participatory university to the managerial university (p. 58). The University of Joensuu, a small, regional comprehensive university, in rural Finland was created in 1969 from a teachers' college. It moved beyond pedagogy to teaching school-related subjects and subsequently non-school subjects. The institutional idea was one of less state and more marketing. Taking on the role of a "pilot institution," it worked with an administrative core and a decentralised budget. The major entrepreneurial units were the Departments of Chemistry, Physics, Forestry, and Education while the others moved toward either social policy issues or offered undergraduate courses that were in demand. The internal decentralisation brought the academic heartland into the picture, but also generated the need to assert the "institutional interest." This was done by means of "dialogue" and "information systems" which also allowed for performance measurement. A second major reform was "flexible work load" which could be negotiated by faculty on an annual basis. The entrepreneurial model led to the creation of a developmental periphery and the diversification of funding. It should be noted that in general fewer faculty members were kept on full time basis. As the author said "temporary money" can only support "temporary people" (p. 115).