Reforming European Universities: The Welfare State as a Missing Context

Abstract

Abstract. This paper argues that welfare state reforms and higher education reforms are closely linked to increasing intergenerational conflicts over public resources in aging societies, and reforms pressures are linked to the shrinking tax base, the power of neoliberal ideology, and changing social attitudes across Europe. The indirect impact of aging societies on all public sector services will lead to growing pressures on all public expenditures and to increased competition for public funding. A new context of university reforms in Europe is therefore defined in this paper as welfare state reforms. The paper discusses global agenda-setting and global diffusion of ideas; the impact of aging societies on intergenerational conflicts over public priorities (and public resources); globalization and pressures on welfare states; "university attitudes," parallel to "welfare attitudes;" post-industrial societies; the role of supportive discourses in the survival of public institutions; and the role financial and ideological pressures, as well as of changing social beliefs in reforming European welfare states and higher education.

Competing for Public Resources: Higher Education and Academic Research in Europe — A Cross-Sectoral Perspective

“…Carlo Salerno (2007, p. 121) argues that the 'marketization' of higher education recasts the problem of priority-setting in public spending in terms of the resources avail able to achieve them: 'Society values what the University produces relative to how those resources could be used elsewhere' (Salerno, 2007, p. 121, emphasis added). The present chapter focuses on the idea of the current ever-increasing competition for public resources between the three major claimants to the public purse in Europe, higher edu cation, old-age pensions and healthcare services, and the increasing instability combined with growing conditionality of all public-sector funding (in much more detail, see Kwiek, 2015).…”

The Globalization of Science: The Increasing Power of Individual Scientists

“…The emergent picture of global science differs substantially from the traditional perspectives of how science works and which basic layers it consists of; specifically, the global networked science that challenges the traditional accounts of relationships between science and nation-states (Kwiek 2005) and welfare states (see Mattei 2009). We have studied the changing relationships between the university and the state under globalization pressures: however, our main focus was on the impact of globalization on public sector services, welfare state architectures and funding, viewing higher education as an important claimant to public financing and analyzing higher education as directly competing with other segments of the welfare state (Kwiek 2005;Kwiek 2015), rather than on the globalization of science itself.…”