Race to the bottom

The Education Ministry is at work drafting a new higher-education law that should appear before Parliament this year. This law would turn Czech higher education into a state industry managed rather than self-governed. The managerial model of higher education originated in the United Kingdom. I worked for three years at such a managed university, Queens University Belfast. The results of these experiments, many of them unintended, cast serious doubt over this model.

One thing over which there is no doubt is that Czech higher education requires radical reform. During the communist era, the regime limited admissions, especially in the humanities, the social sciences and law. Appointments and admissions were influenced by political considerations and corruption. Isolated from the world and lacking access to Western academic literature, Czech academics who were not involved with weapons production were by definition backward. Education consisted of dictations and exams, mostly oral, with little or no creative research or even writing. After 1989, the government sought to depoliticize the universities by granting them democratic self-governance and expand opportunities for higher education by increasing the size of existing universities, founding new regional ones and, after 1998, allowing accredited private higher education.

However, without radical personnel change, academic self-government has resulted in the protection of the interests of the academics who were there in 1989. Pedagogy is still based on lectures and exams, the level of instruction is in many cases backward and world-class research and international publications are rare, in part because the nearest world-class research library is in Berlin. To protect these practices, departments have closed themselves from the world, developed a xenophobic culture and reproduced by hiring their own students.  

The government's proposed solution is to abolish self-government. Unelected managers with extensive powers and measurable set targets should whip the system into shape. The introduction of explicitly nonresearch institutions and renting applied research to private industry should achieve this reform at a low cost to the taxpayer. At least that was the idea in the United Kingdom.

However, in private industry, managers are formally accountable to a board elected by shareholders. As state industries, universities have no shareholders. The board is composed usually of old businessmen, politicians, local leaders, etc. They have neither the time nor the financial incentives to monitor or control academic managers. Most significantly, they do not understand higher education or high culture. They leave all decisions to practically unaccountable managers. Managers are in charge of monitoring each other's decisions in various committees. But, as in commercial companies, their mutual interest is to back each other's bad decisions. Managed universities have become feudal-like baronial systems.

Government bureaucrats set quantifiable macro-targets for the managers. But, in many cases, they are counter-productive: From the perspective of the government, a student who does not complete a degree is a lost investment. Therefore, the UK government measures managers according to the percentage of students who graduate. Managers can improve results by radically dumbing-down the level of education. When I taught at Queens University Belfast, the management was concerned that students who did not feel like coming to lectures may fail exams. Therefore, it demanded that professors publish on the university intranet "bullet points" a few sentences that students could memorize for the exam and pass. Since the managers felt that lectures and exams were less demanding than seminars and research papers, they outlawed the latter in the first two years of instruction. When too many students failed particularly difficult courses, managers skewed the true grades so that everybody passed, thus creating situations, for example, where the best students received 180 out of 100 possible points. Another method for improving statistical results is to admit students exclusively based on their high-school results. Creative and imaginative students can often be much more successful at university than in high school. Nonetheless, risk-averse managers keep them out of university, if only to protect their own jobs.

The UK government wants doctoral students to graduate in four years so that it does not have to subsidize them indefinitely. If it takes longer, universities are punished financially. So managers in universities with bad students have an open graduation policy: Everybody passes! When I was at Queens University Belfast, I was asked to evaluate such a dissertation. Since I would not lie, I was removed and a more pliant professor put in charge. The general policy is that if a student fails, it is always the fault of the teacher, so he had better pass.

The quality of research at UK universities is assessed by government-appointed academic committees every seven years. Each academic must submit four pieces of original research, and receives a mark. Departments then receive a corresponding mark that affects their prestige and level of state funding. This system is indeed useful in giving incentives to managers to prevent academics who do not do research from working at universities and hire researchers once in seven years, just before the deadline. But it has the unintended consequence of giving an incentive to managers to prevent academics who already have four articles from doing more research, instead taking on other duties to achieve other targets that managers are evaluated on.

The government pushes for the homogenization of education. As production managers at McDonald's should make sure that all hamburgers are the same, the UK government expects managers to make sure that all university courses are "the same." The methods of instruction and evaluation must be the same irrespective of the subject matter. This leads everywhere to incredible over-regulation of academic work, instituted by an incredible number of committees. UK academics often spend more time on such administrative chores - regulating and being regulated - than on teaching or research. At Queens University Belfast, this meant that the quality of instruction and evaluation was reduced to the lowest common denominator; all courses had to be evaluated by an exam consisting of six questions, from which the students had to choose two.

Since otherwise unaccountable managers have broad authorities, their identity is significant. MBAs would rather run their own companies or work for a commercial company for more money. Academics with an active research program who are interested in writing and publishing are too constrained for time to become managers. At least at Queens University Belfast, two groups of people go into management: failed academics and clerical and secretarial university staff. They are no longer required to do research and can dominate and bully the "intellectuals" who do. Consequently, in Belfast, the managers I dealt with managed to bully and drive out research-active academics and foreigners, the English (of course), the Jews and the Germans (xenophobia makes strange bedfellows).

When people who do not do research or read books are put in charge of planning university education, they eliminate what they do not understand: the theoretical sciences and high culture, classics, history of science, philosophy, languages and so on. They do not understand their value for society or how philosophy graduates like Barack Obama and George Soros can earn a living. They attempt then to turn universities into vocational schools. In the long term, this policy actually hurts the employability of students because specialized education becomes outdated while liberal education that teaches students how to analyze, think critically and creatively, argue well in writing and orally, lasts a lifetime. Since Czech university graduates still have no problem finding a job, such policies are redundant for this country in the first place. Its only direct effect is the further vulgarization of culture.

Without democratic legitimacy or intellectual achievements that command respect, managers resort to blunt power to establish authority. Almost every issue of the UK weekly for the academic community, Times Higher Education, tells of conflicts between managers who cannot tolerate criticism and demand obedience, and members of faculty who are used to a culture of open critical discussion. In the United Kingdom, I have not encountered any cases of managerial personal financial corruption. But, if a class of omnipotent managers is created in the context of Czech society, it is likely that it will display the standards of personal integrity and honesty of Czech managers in general, leading to even more corruption in admission and graduation.  

As the period of communism proved, state industries overproduce shoddy goods for which there is no demand. Universities are no different.

- The writer is the author of The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence: From Patočka to Havel and is completing a book titled The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Political Theory of Post-Totalitarianism. He formally taught at Palacký University in Olomouc and has held research fellowships at Central European University, Columbia University, New York University and Australian National University.

Aviezer Tucker can be reached at
features@praguepost.com