The university in Europe – as a central institution of society – is presently met with many new expectations challenging established practices and self-understandings of academics across Europe. In the European Union, the higher education and research system has become a foremost tool of change. Current reforms across national higher education systems are seen as a potential for creating a European Higher Education Area, as well as an opportunity to introduce EU policies and ideas addressing how reforms can contribute to promote this as an EU dimension. An argument that only reforms of the higher education institution – in particular the research university, as a European institution – can make Europe regain its competitive force and economic growth-potential has gained currency in the last decade with reference to the US. The university system of the US, particularly its highly regarded elite universities, is also held forth as a model for the developments in the EU, and thus for the reforms of the different countries of EU.
In this book, however, it is demonstrated that much of the political rhetoric about the construction of the future knowledge economy of Europe and the promotion of a European Higher Education Area may contradict basic values that give Europe its identity as a cultural region. Promoting the US university as an ideal model does not do justice to the kind of problems the US is facing in their own reform efforts, nor does it reflect properly the social costs of copying such an elite system. The book raises a number of issues relating to elitism and democracy, internationalisation and regionalisation, and new forms of governance in higher education and research which current EU policies seem to neglect.
