EUROPE

Autumn 2007

by Lykke Friis

Europe’s universities are suffering from “Wimbledon syndrome” writes Copenhagen University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor Lykke Friis; like Britain, they invented the game but nowadays stand no chance of being champions. She looks at ways to change this and revive their fortunes

Writing at home to the captivating but distracting sounds of Wimbledon on TV − “first service”, “quiet please, ladies and gentlemen” − I hit upon the idea that promoting research and higher education in Europe suffers from a Wimbledon syndrome. Just as Britain hosts the world’s top tennis tournament but never wins it, so are we Europeans in a similar situation on education. The world’s first university was Plato’s Academy in Athens, and of course venerable old universities are scattered across Europe from Coimbra to Cambridge to Copenhagen. The principle of the modern university that unites research and education was born at Wilhelm von Humboldt’s university in Berlin, yet today Europe is easily outperformed by the US.

Less than 2% of the EU’s GDP is devoted to research, compared to 2.5% in the US and 3% in Japan. In France, the spending per student on tertiary education is just over $9,000 in Germany it is a shade under $11,000 and in the UK it is almost $12,000. Some EU countries − including Denmark − do better, but the figure for the United States is more than $25,000.

More often than not it is the size of research and education budgets that shapes the quality of the output. Measuring the quality of university output is difficult, although The Times Higher Education Supplement attempts to do so every year. Only three European universities, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College in London, made it into the Top Ten in the most recent list, and the rest were all American. Only ten universities from the entire EU of 27 member states have ever made it into the Top Fifty. By this ranking, Germany’s No. 1 university, Heidelberg, comes in at 58th.

The costs of this neglect can be measured in a variety of ways, beginning with the brain-drain. At present some 400,000 European scholars reside in the US, and almost 60% of the European citizens who received doctorates in the US from 1998-2001 chose to stay there. There are, incidentally, twice as many European students in the US as there are Americans studying in Europe.

Europe’s “education gap” doesn’t stop just at the Atlantic. China and India represent much more of a threat than mushrooming factories and low-cost semi-skilled labour. Their skyrocketing economic growth rates are of course enabling millions to leave the ranks of the poor and get a blue collar job, but just as was the case in Europe, the industrial revolution in “Chindia“ is also creating an ambitious new middle class that is willing and able to send its children to university.

In today’s world, students and researchers pick and choose a university much as consumers shop in the international marketplace. The message has to be that we Europeans now urgently need to take action. Europe’s path to regaining cutting edge university competitiveness won’t be straightforward or easy, but the aim of this article is to set out three tracks for introducing change.

If an alien from outer space were to land his spaceship on planet Earth, and for some strange reason decided to skip the pyramids and go straight to the Berlaymont building in Brussels to find out how the EU spends its money, he would be astonished. Nearly half the Union’s budget is devoted to agricultural subsidies and rural development, with roughly only 5% spent on research and education.

Some modest efforts have been made to correct this anachronism. In March 2000, when EU leaders met in Lisbon to set the goal of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010, they laid the foundations for an agreement two years later in Barcelona that investment in European R&D must reach 3% of GDP by 2010. In 2005, the UK’s EU Presidency actually managed to secure for the “knowledge society” a bigger slice of the EU pie.

But frankly, the likelihood is greater that Kristian Pless, Denmark’s best tennis player who is ranked 80 in the world, will win at Wimbledon than that the EU will achieve its Lisbon goals by 2010. Having said that, the setting of ambitious goals can definitely have a disciplining effect on those who have signed up to them, and certainly is impelling some EU countries to increase their spending. The EU, too, has launched a number of promising schemes. The seventh Framework Programme is perhaps the most prominent financial tool through which the European Union supports research and development activities covering almost all scientific disciplines. This programme covers the next seven years and is worth some €50bn – a notable 40% increase over the EU’s sixth programme. It may still be too little, but not too late. The following three suggestions are also worth considering.

In the first place, EU and European governments programmes are still dwarfed by US federal research and development spending, which will total $137bn for the fiscal year 2007. that means European leaders must measure up to their responsibilities when the EU budget is next due for revision in 2008 and 2009 by substantially increasing funding on research. The Lisbon goals should be no more than a stop-over in Europe’s quest to attain American levels of research expenditure. Although the core financial burden will be on the member states, the EU level can also make an important contribution.

Second, although we all recognise that it is the European Commission’s duty to prevent mismanagement and even outright fraud, the procedures governing EU funding are extremely onerous. Researchers habitually grumble at the paperwork that accompanies every application to the EU. For its part, the Commission has now pledged to do something about its own red tape and turn it into a more tolerable nuance. Diluting it so that the Seventh Framework Programme is at elast wrapped only in pink tape would be a substantial gift to European researchers.

Third, we need more emphasis in Europe on pure research. Of course our scientists should be poised to respond to current problems in society, ranging from health and sustainability threats to devising money-spinning solutions to meet industry challenges, but if basic research is neglected any attempts to produce quick innovations through applied research will be futile. Basic research is the primary organism in the food chain of scientific endeavour. The European Research Council (ERC), which is to reward research grants on the basis of peer-reviewed excellence, will therefore be an important step forward, and in years to come the EU should further increase the ERC’s funding.

Comparing different EU countries’ programmes to improve competitiveness isn’t easy, yet Denmark offers a handy case history because it has emerged as something of a teacher’s pet in the “Lisbon class”. Some say that its labour market reform policies have been crucial, in particular the “flexicurity” model which makes it easy for employers to hire and fire. Some Danes even claim that they are particularly well endowed with the sort of creative skills needed if companies are to adjust to today’s fast-changing global economy. Danish officials tend to argue that it has been the government’s Globalisation Council, which last year launched a new globalisation strategy that has prompted much-needed investments in education and research. Certainly Denmark appears to have grasped the long-term correlation between higher education, research expenditure levels and global competitiveness.

But just throwing money at universities isn’t enough. As the Financial Times former Editor Richard Lambert, together with Nick Butler commented not long ago in a report entitled “The future of European universities: Renaissance or decay?” published by London’s Centre for European Reform, EU governments are stuck in a vicious circle: “The universities will get no more money unless they reform, and they cannot reform without more money”.

The Danish government has, set out to break free from this vicious circle by first introducing reforms before pledging to increase budgets. In 2003 it legislated to reform the university governance structure which had previously been characterised by the separate, and therefore often antagonistic, constituencies of the vice chancellor and the individual deans. Denmark’s universities were thus turned into self-governing institutions run by governing boards the majority of whose members are external representatives. These boards have the power to employ the vice chancellor, who in turn appoints deans and operates as the top tier in a clear chain of command. Last year, a cross-party majority in the Danish parliament reached an agreement whereby government spending on research is by 2010 to be increased by nearly 50%. Last year the government carried out a wave of mergers which reduced 12 universities to eight with the aim of achieving substantial economies of scale.

Sounds good, but it’s important to add that in reality the Danish government has found it hard to let go and leave it to the universities to run their own affairs. The 2003 law has been amended five times, each time giving more powers to the ministry of science, technology and innovation, and on top of that there are a further 40 or more “Executive Orders” that reflect the government’s wishes. A case in point is the law requiring any students unable to finish their Master’s thesis within a six-month deadline to adjust their subject. The advice we universities gave the government was simple. Like the lyrics in Sting’s hit song, we said: “If you love them, set them free.” Ensuring universities live up to higher quality standards requires self-discipline at a political level, and that means that government must resist any temptation to dictate rules and instead await the results of the fruitful process of discovery that will result from self-regulation and freer competition.

These teething troubles aside, there seems little doubt that the Danish case underlines the pivotal role of governance reform if Europe is ever to meet its Lisbon goals. The lessons to be learnt from Denmark’s experience are further confirmed at university level. At the University of Copenhagen we have been able to move forward in two vital areas. First, our mergers with the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University and the Danish University of Pharmaceutical Sciences, has made the University of Copenhagen the largest in Scandinavia. The driving force behind the mergers was not so much the quantity of our future output but rather the prospect of enhancing its quality through joint ventures in research and education. We now aspire to becoming the most significant health and life science research centre in Europe as we’re able to build on a remarkable cluster of knowledge thanks to 5,000 life science researchers, an excellent medical school, 11 university hospitals and a thriving bio-tech business environment that already includes market leaders in diabetes and neuroscience.

Second, we have drawn up the university’s first comprehensive strategy to provide direction in such key areas as the importance of basic research; rewarding excellence in research and teaching; interdisciplinary approaches to curricula development and new ways of co-operating with the business community. Until we had embarked on governance reform, and in the days we lacked a clear chain of command, an ambitious endeavour of this sort would probably have been quite impossible.

Much the same can be said of our new programme of excellence in research, which captures the central thrust of our strategic thinking. The programme aims to attract research talent by offering some 20 research grants worth up to €675,000 a year for as long as five years. Its selection process is to be handled by an international panel of independent peers, and on the basis of the programme it will be possible to redistribute money between the various faculties.

If we were to single out just one lesson learned from our experience so far, it would be this. University managers should not accommodate rising student populations by inflating their core business. However fierce the global competition, they should concentrate on safeguarding quality and on achieving excellence in research and education.