Paradoxes of the self: self-owning universities in a society of control
Jakob Williams Ørberg and Susan Wrighti
Introduction
Of all self-governing institutions, universities, with their ideologies of academic autonomy, offer
one of the best sites for critically examining what is meant by self-governance: what kind of a ‘self’
does a university as an institution create or project? What relations does the governance of this
organisational ‘self’ entail with government and the ‘surrounding society’? The OECD and the
Trends Reports of the Bologna process both call for reducing state control and increasing university
autonomy. The Danish government responded by passing a law in 2003 which, it said would be
‘setting universities free’. Danish universities were taken out of the state bureaucracy and given the
legal status of ‘self-owning institutions’. That is, by becoming ‘self owning’ universities were to be
made into coherent organisations that would govern themselves in an accountable fashion (hence,
selvejende institutioner is translated as self-governing institutions in the English translation of the
law). Partly, as we have argued elsewhere (Wright and Ørberg 2008), universities were subject to
the same reform as had already been implemented for most other education institutions, and indeed
most other ‘service providers’ in the modernised Danish welfare state. Through government setting
the ‘aim and frame’ for steering a sector, by converting parts of the bureaucracy into ‘self-owning’
service providers and entering into contracts with them, and by only paying if the service provider
met the outputs and performance indicators specified in the contract, the aim was to give politicians
much stricter and stronger control over service delivery and the machinery to ensure that, when
politicians changed their aims, contractors responded quickly. By these means, contractors would
be held to account to the public and especially to parliament for the spending of public funds.
Following this ‘modernizing state’ discourse about reform, which originated in the Ministry of
Finance, the new status of universities turned them into just another service deliverer contracted to
the Danish state: the reforms removed rather than increased any special legal status associated with
‘university autonomy’ and although the law states that ‘the university’ must protect research
freedom, it put the conditions for exercising such freedom in question. Another strand in the
discourse of university reform, emanating from the Ministry of Research, highlighted that the
purpose was very specifically to set universities free, or at least give them ‘degrees of freedom’ to
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organize themselves to meet the challenges of the globalizing knowledge economy as imagined by
organizations such as the OECD (OECD 1998, 1999, 2004). The subsequent Globalisation Strategy
gave universities a very special role of not just providing a service to the state or the economy, but
of driving the initiatives and the knowledge transfer that, it is assumed, will ‘maintain Denmark’s
position as one of the wealthiest countries’ in the world (Danish Government 2006: 4). In sum, the
2003 University Law contained a two-way movement: it both reorganized the universities with a
stronger and more unified management capable of strategic planning and increased independence
from direct ministerial control; and it used other steering instruments to tie the universities’
activities more closely to government and ministerial policies. The Danish university reform can be
seen as a case of empowering universities to govern themselves according to government ambitions.
The 2003 University Law brought a range of developments and experiments that had been set up
during the previous 20 years into a new assemblage: output based funding for teaching (the
taximeter system), development contracts between the university and the state, changes to degree
programmes associated with the Bologna process; systematic evaluations of teaching quality;
knowledge transfer as a major third leg of university activities; and the first examples of self
owning universities (the Danish University of Education in 2000, and the Danish Technical
University in 2001). These developments happened at different moments over the 1990s, each
informed by a different political logic, and some resting on quite contrary rationalities of
governance to others. As the concept of the self-owning institution, the centre piece of this
assemblage of governing technologies, was gradually formed through the 1990s, it meant quite
different things at different moments. This paper focuses on three moments – the introduction of
development contracts in 1999, the passage of the University Law in 2003, and the subsequent
definition of accountability procedures in 2007 - to analyse changes in the meaning of selfgovernance.
The literature on self-governance tends to focus on the shaping of the self of individuals in new
strategies for governing society (e.g. Dean 2007), whereas we focus on the subjectivity of an
organization. Where the literature does consider the self-governance of social institutions, this is
often quite abstract (Kooiman 2003: 79-95). In contrast, we focus ethnographically on the precise
ways that a government’s methods of steering require an institution, such as a university, to develop
and perform a particular kind of self. The kind of institutional ‘self’ and its form of ‘self-
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governance’ will also be specific to a particular country or a different moment in time. As this book
makes clear (chapter 1), there are substantial differences in the emergence, causes and
consequences of the politics of using self-governing institutions in different regimes, for example,
in a market-state like the UK as against a social-democratic state like Denmark. We contribute to
teasing out those differences. But our central purpose is to explore the changing meanings of the
two separate terms ‘self’ and ‘governance’ and their hyphenated relationship. What is the kind of
self that an institution is meant to produce and stage at different historical moments? What is the
role of that institutional self in processes of institutional management and in relations of power and
systems of national governance? These questions are central to an understanding of the new forms
of rule discussed in this book, but they have not been sufficiently explored. There is a tendency to
treat the ‘self’, both of organisations and of individuals, as self-evident, unitary and consistent,
uncontested, and stable through time. Yet feminist scholarship (Moore 1994, Hollway 1984) has
long identified that people juggle with multiple selves, which are in multiple power relations with
different family members and surrounding people and institutions. Making these diverse selves into
a coherent whole and staging a performance as a single actor is at best a stupendous effort, and may
be unrealistically over-ambitious. Is the ‘self’ of self-owning institutions similarly multiple and
located in diverse power relations with the institutions of government and the surrounding society?
Does it take a similarly stupendous effort to stage this self as a coherent unity? How are the internal
forms of institutional governance mobilised to create an image of a competent actor? And how is
that projection of a coherent and competent institutional self deployed in the politics of governance
in the modernised Danish state?
Moments and transformations
We address these questions through a contextualized reading of a number of policy documents
pertaining to different moments in the transformation of Danish universities. We use the word
transformation here to mark the difference between reform, which we see as the implementation of
a defined political agenda for universities, and the actual process of change, which this agenda
affects or plays into. The first moment, the introduction of development contracts between
universities and government in 1999, challenged universities to project themselves as a new kind of
‘self’. We argue that the language and method of the first generation of these development contracts
was one of self improvement on the side of universities. Universities were supposed to become
better at defining overall objectives and priorities and at organizing themselves in a coherent and
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effective manner. Successful projection of a coordinated ‘self’, it was argued, would enable them to
take on a strategic role hitherto played by central government.
The second moment is the passing of the 2003 University Act, which set universities up as selfowning institutions and brought together a number of existing measures, including development
contracts, into a new assemblage of steering technologies. This moment was argued through and
celebrated as the final emergence of the university subject, as a strategically-led and coherent actor
in the Danish economy and society. To use Saskia Sassen’s language (2006: 9-10), we argue that
this moment was a “tipping point”, when universities stood on the cusp of switching from one form
of governance to another. We share Sassen’s view that an epochal transformation cannot be pinned
down to ‘before’ and ‘after’ but can best be studied by focussing on the process of change, by
seeing how a major state institution, like a university, becomes the site of its own partial
disassembly and re-ordering according to a new organising logic. The ‘tipping point’ is when such a
process takes on an air of irreversibility and points to a future model for the institution. The 2003
University Law set up the university as a coherent organization, no longer under direct state control
but now able to govern itself according to national policies. After that, the government no longer
directed its efforts towards the construction of the university as a coherent, self-managed and
accountable organisation. The university as a subject is henceforth assumed to already have a solid
existence. From now on, government’s attention is turned towards developing ways to secure state
influence over the university’s self-governance, especially through measuring and rewarding
universities’ outputs and performance. The law set up stringent conditions within which the
university is to perform: the purpose of universities was expanded and defined more precisely and a
new internal system for governing and managing universities was established, with responsibility
for prioritising and performance. Universities were also obliged to change the way they reported
their activities; and the subsequent state-wide introduction of accrual budgeting meant that
universities had to calculate the capital cost of their activities and calculate their profitability.
Further reforms meant that universities now rented instead of owned their buildings and began the
process of relating outputs and performance to payments. These last two reforms in particular
placed universities in a very clearly indebted position in relation to the state, which we shall argue is
a key to understanding the power relations in which universities are located.
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The third and last moment started in autumn 2007 and is still underway. A report sets out how the
audit system for universities is being reconfigured. In parallel, the Ministry is developing a system
for making all of a university’s activities count towards performance-based funding. Our argument
is that these activities signal completion of the shift in the government’s steering system towards
measuring the university’s activities rather than being concerned with the configuration of the
university as a subject. The ability of the university, especially in the person of the rector, to stage a
coherent self is now taken for granted. But just at this moment, the university as a coherent self
becomes hard to hold together because the proliferation of different government funding and
accountability systems makes it extremely difficult for universities to plan their finances and
establish strategies and priorities. As the funding systems move towards output payments, this also
means that universities will be in a debt relationship with government: they receive a cash advance
at the beginning of the year, and pay back at the end of the year if their outputs are less than
expected. We end our chapter by analyzing the performance of the Rector of Copenhagen
University at the 2006 annual celebration.ii As if he embodied the current dilemma of the Danish
state-funded, self-owning, indebted university, in his speech he promised to defend the classic
university values, while creating an efficient organization and delivering on all the outputs and
indicators contracted with the government. Fulfilling this ambitious institutional performance he
described as a feat on a par with the invention of ‘the flop’ that transformed Olympic high jumping.
This is a powerful image of the effort required to produce and project a coherent self, the
prerequisite for effective performance in the politics of self government.
The Rector’s performance points to a paradox: the university for which he stands as the figurehead
is assumed by government to be a coherent organisation, at the same time as the government’s
performance criteria, on whose fulfilment much university funding depends, demand that the
university splits its efforts in several directions at once. This is similar to Deleuze’s (1992: 3-7)
image of the control society where the indebted person is split up like a divid (as opposed to an
individual), by the diverse systems that constantly monitor the different kinds of activities in which
he or she engages. The need for the university, as represented by its Rector, to keep performing in
one context after another, each according to different criteria, also requires that it presents itself as
different kinds of self in each instance. This reminds us of the people described by Emily Martin’s
(2007: 275-280) who, with or with-out diagnosis of mental disorder, use pharmaceutical products to
adjust moods so as to perform optimally in each of the diverse situations that make up their life. The
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Danish university, rather than being the coherent and strategically planned organization the
government now presumes it to be, has become a manager of diverse performance-enhancing
projects and is constantly stressed to live up to ever-increasing demands imposed from the outside.
Governing through body and a soul
The first moment in the process of transformation we are describing, the introduction by the Danish
Ministry of Research in 1999 of a development contract with each university, is marked by an
attempt, in Rose’s terms, to govern ‘through the soul’ (Rose 1989). To do this, the Ministry had first
to persuade those who worked at universities to think of themselves as forming a ‘body’. Only if
they thought of a university as having some kind of collective presence could it have a soul, a will
or desire to achieve something. This collective presence was to be personified by the rector. A
reform in 1993 had tried to establish clearer and more hierarchical university management, but the
Ministry was concerned that the reform had not yet worked as intended. The reform had not brought
about a more strategic leadership, nor had it increased the responsiveness of universities to ‘the
surrounding society’ and especially industry. The Ministry now hoped to induce these kinds of
changes by offering each university the voluntary possibility of entering into a development
contract. The idea was that, in order to enter into a development contract with the Ministry, a
university would have to coordinate its efforts and set up aims for future activities. In short,
universities would turn themselves into more coherent and strategically-acting organizations. The
then Minister of Research, social democrat Jan Trøjborg, outlined the concept of development
contracts in the report Universitets- og forskningspolitisk redegørelse 1998 (Forskningsministeriet
1998). As the development contracts were supposed to be a voluntary tool for the enhancement of
the university-ministry relationship they were not intended to be connected in any systematic way to
the funding of universities. Rather they were presented as a technology the universities could use to
organize themselves in order to become strategic actors within the new Danish research policy.
Universities were supposed to be active players in the national knowledge system, so instead of
simply carrying out teaching and research, universities were to become suitably outward-oriented
partners for knowledge-producing research institutes and private sector innovators. Universities
were expected to enter more actively into partnerships with such elements in ‘the surrounding
society’ and to respond to increased government funding by reflecting concern for the needs of
society in their planning and prioritizing of research. The development contracts were thus meant to
enhance the ambition at universities and develop their efforts to organize themselves in such a way
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that they could begin to deliver on the diverse demands of society (Andersen 2006). In the so-called
‘modern welfare society’ universities would in this way take on responsibility for increased wealth
creation.
With the first development contracts in place in 1999 two things became evident. First, as predicted,
universities were called upon to transform themselves as organizations, and, second, their ability to
centralize their executive powers and develop strategies covering the entire organization was put in
question. Universities decided for themselves how ambitious to be in the activities and aims to be
included in the development contracts. Many of the development contracts, especially those of the
larger multi-faculty universities, were clearly attempts by the universities’ central governing bodies
to establish cross-faculty initiatives or develop existing ones. Yet most of the universities’ activities
still fell outside the development contracts as they were under the control of faculties. The
development contracts provided evidence of both the university leaderships’ lack of strategic
influence and their attempts to establish such a strategizing power. As stated in the 1999 report,
Udviklingskontrakter. Stærkere selvstyre, stærkere universiteter (Forskningsministeriet og
Undervisningsministeriet 1999), the development contracts were a means for universities to clarify
and enhance their internal organization both for their own benefit and as a means of communicating
their presence and activities to the surrounding world. It was expected that development contracts
would increase the ambition of universities and that universities, if given the freedom to do so,
would ‘consolidate, progress and innovate’ (ibid.: 4).
It is clear that the introduction of development contracts into the university system was intended to
be more a tool for a university’s leadership to gain control of its organization than for the Ministry
to control the universities. The new technology was a pedagogical instrument to enhance a certain
organizational formation – or self formation - at universities. The development contracts were
voluntary, not tied to funding, and built around universities’ own ambitions. If there was a wish by
the Ministry to control universities, this came only second to the prime aim of encouraging
universities’ self organization. The latter was an aim shared by the Ministry and many of the
Rectors. Indeed, a centrally located official at the Ministry of Education told us in one interview
that it was then a common practice for rectors to tell deans and other members of the university’s
governing committees that ‘the Ministry’ wanted or intended certain developments, as a ploy, to get
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their own policies accepted. The development contracts in this sense were merely a formalization
and continuation of this kind of politics.
Top-steered, self-owning universities
If the creation of a self for universities was an intention behind introducing development contracts,
then the second moment in the process of transformation, the reforms of 2000 and 2003, seriously
changed the way this self was enacted. The management reforms included in the 2003 University
Law established Danish universities as legal persons. They were no longer administered through
the state bureaucracy and instead became ‘self owning’, but in most cases without really owning
anything (Wright and Ørberg 2008). As explained below, the ownership of university property had
been transferred to an agency under the Ministry. Therefore universities did not control their own
building assets, nor did they have funds or savings to provide a net equity. They had hitherto
functioned as state bodies with responsibility to spend their funds within the budget year rather than
save them up, and with no real guarantee that unspent money would stay in their budgets.
Since 1970, university management at all three levels of the central administration, faculty and
department had been elected by academics, administrative staff and students. The direction of the
flows of power and accountability in this system were reversed with the 2003 university law. Now a
university board – a new construction made up of university representatives and a majority of
members from other private and public organizations – appoints the rector who in turn hires the
deans, who then hire the heads of department. Whereas the leadership in the old system had been
accountable to the community that elected it, the new system’s leaders are accountable upwards to
the level of management that has hired them. This was Parliament’s very bold way of establishing
the ‘self’ for universities that the development contracts had attempted to engender through a
voluntary and bottom-up process. All that remained to be done was to secure the subjection of this
new self to the power of the government. If we study the make-up this new university self, the ways
it can be steered become clearer.
The first university to be established on the self-ownership model was the Danish University of
Education, which had been set up in 2000 as a way to secure a strong position for education
research and development in Denmark. The same year, the Social Democratic Finance Minister,
Mogens Lykketoft, reformed the administration of the real estate of all public institutions, so that
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state property occupied by universities was transferred to a government agency under the Ministry.
Universities now had to pay a market-level rent for the use of their premises for which they were
compensated through a government subsidy, which was calculated on a standard payment for each
student who passed exams each year. Since the rents were commercial but the government subsidy
was a standardized output payment, this system favoured universities located in areas with low
property prices and a high ratio of students per square meter of buildings. One university in
particular did not meet these criteria, the Danish University of Technology (DTU).
DTU had large research facilities but few students and was for this reason pressed to find an
alternative solution in negotiations with the Ministry. DTU asked the Ministry to re-establish it as
the country’s second self-owning university. DTU agreed to buy its own buildings with state money
borrowed against their assessed value. In addition, DTU expected to raise a private sector mortgage
on its buildings to pay for their modernization and to mark the birth of a new, bold DTU. However,
the arrangements immediately hit financial problems since the valuation, which the agreement was
based on, turned out to be highly exaggerated. By 2002 DTU was in severe financial difficulty
again, and nobody would lend to the university. This experience sent shock waves through the
sector, and other universities were reluctant to take on these risks of self ownership.
In 2001 a new Minister of Research, Helge Sander, had taken office with a mandate to expand the
self-ownership model to all universities. In light of the DTU crisis, however, he proposed self
ownership without ownership of buildings or ‘institutional self ownership’ as the model to be
followed. Universities could continue to own whatever assets were already indisputably theirs but
the ownership of the state buildings they occupied would not be transferred to them.
Apart from these property issues, self ownership meant setting universities up as a kind of public
corporation within the public sector, funded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and
Innovation. The universities’ new governing boards were to have a majority of external members all
appointed in their own personal capacity and not representing specific sectors or interest groups.
The chairman of the board was elected from among the external majority. This board, which also
included representatives of university staff and students, was to appoint the university top
management, the rector and pro-rectors. As mentioned above, the rector then hired the
administrative management and appointed deans to lead faculties. Deans appointed heads of
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departments, who are given the right of management over both non-academic and academic staff.
The old representational influence survived in the study boards. A remnant of the previous Senate,
now called the Academic Council, is meant to make comments on cases presented to it by the
management. Only the Workers’ Council (samarbejdsudvalg), established in all Danish work places
under employment law, is able to raise some issues (those relevant to working conditions) and to
require answers from the university management and leadership. Otherwise it is now solely a
question of management style whether and how academics can be involved in the planning and
running of the university.
One important reason for reversing the line of accountability at universities was, it was argued, to
ensure that universities were accountable to government for their use of public money especially in
light of the increased financial freedoms resulting from self ownership. Whereas previously
universities, as part of the government hierarchy, had had a right to draw on an account in the
National Bank, now self ownership meant they were given their own income. Technically this was a
shift from drawing rights to subsidy, which was accompanied by a different kind of monitoring and
auditing (tilsyn). Whereas universities before had been audited by the state auditors as a part of the
state hierarchy, now they had to develop a dual auditing regime with a private auditing company to
do their company audits and the state auditors to control their activities for the correct use of public
money. As we shall see later this was to become much more than a check on the legality of
spending and turned into a whole new way of steering the self-owning institutions.
The 2003 law brought the development contracts into the centre of the Ministry’s assemblage of
steering technologies. If the contracts had hitherto functioned as a tool for reform and
experimentation, with the new law, they became the Ministry’s prime tool for directly influencing
university agendas. The new law stated that the Governing Boards and the Minister were to enter
into three-yearly contracts. In practice, the commitments made in a university’s development
contract are delegated to faculties and then to departments in a chain of contracts between the rector
and deans, and between the deans and department heads. At department level some department
heads organize their department’s effort to fulfil the contracts through constructing formal
agreements (aftale) or binding work plans for their academic employees. The hierarchy of hired
leaders (departmental head, dean and rector) is thereby made responsible upwards to the governing
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board, and thence to the ministry, for fulfilling the performance aims and indicators in the
development contract.
This process of setting universities ‘free’ as accountable self-owning contractual partners for the
Ministry happened in parallel with other reforms that were part of the Ministry of Finance’s
‘modernization programme’, which set up ‘frame and aim’ steering in the public sector. The
principles in frame and aim steering would ideally turn the education sector into a service provider
for parliament. Parliament allots a budget for a whole service area, such as education or research,
and has the ministry decide how to fund the required outputs and activities in the individual
institutions. These principles have influenced Danish state organizations since the early 1980s, and
here we will briefly dwell on two aspects that have been important in the assemblage of
mechanisms to steer universities brought about by the 2003 reform. The first is the gradual shift to
performance or output funding and the second is the state-wide accounting reform, which
introduced accrual accounting and budgeting into all state institutions starting in 2005 and was
completely implemented from the fiscal year 2007.
As mentioned above, university teaching and a subsidy for the rent of buildings is already funded
by the Ministry entirely through output payments. Introduced in 1994, a standard sum is allocated
each time a student passes an exam for a module in a degree programme – and thereby clicks up
one more payment on the so-called ‘teaching taximeter’. These taximeter payments are standard
across universities, but vary enormously across disciplines. For example, a university is paid 96.000
Danish kroner for a student who passes a year’s worth of exams in a ‘wet’ (laboratory) subject such
as physics, whereas a university only receives 40.400 Danish kroner for a student passing a year’s
worth of exams in a ‘dry’ subject, such as Greek. Only research is still partly funded by a basic
grant (bevilling), which functions almost like a retainer for universities’ research functions.
However, this is increasingly supplemented by researchers’ competing for funds especially from the
national research councils and other private and public funds (including EU’s FP7-program). As
these external funders often demand institutional co-funding, this increasingly ties the basic grant to
specific projects. Across the universities there are different ways for dividing up the basic grants,
with some universities using the basic grants to secure a percentage of each researcher’s time for
self-defined tasks (often including applications for external research funding, while others use parts
of the basic grant to fund research prioritized by the university leadership but not sufficiently
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funded from external sources. This situation will be further complicated when the Ministry devises
a competitive way to allocate basic research funding to universities on the basis of research outputs
and performance targets. The intention to make this move has been declared, but keeps being
delayed and is now likely to be implemented in 2009 or 2010 at the earliest (UBST 2008a, 2008b).
The Ministry’s system of giving universities a cash advance at the beginning of the year and settling
accounts on the basis of actual output at the end of the year not only makes the university
continually in debt but also pushes risk down the system. Responsibility for efficiency and
accountability is passed from the Ministry to the university, and internally down the subcontracting
elements within the university, ultimately to the single academic or research group. One academic
we interviewed described how, in his university, each department’s and each subsection’s economic
viability is calculated on a spread sheet which shows their income from students’ passing exams
(taximeter payments) set against the number of teaching hours they had expended. Strong measures
have been taken to remedy economic shortfall. In each academic’s annual appraisal, they are
confronted with how much taximeter income they individually had produced during the year – their
own personal viability - regardless of how many courses or students they had taught. Each cost
centre within a university is supposed to access the market for their activities at the beginning of the
year and then hope that they are lucky or skilled enough to bring home the expected revenue by the
end of the year. There are echoes of the way the private sector deals with risk. The Danish
government talks of self-owning institutions having to present an annual company (virksomhed)
account, to the ministry, which refers to itself as the corporate level (koncernniveau). These
metaphors refer to the equivalent in the private sector where a parent corporation (koncern) sets up
a subsidiary company to rid itself of the liability of engaging in, for example, a financially risky
initiative. Each subsidiary company is an independent, self-managing (selvstyrende) organisation,
set up in this way so that if it fails, it can be shed, and it does not take the parent corporation down
with it. In this way, individual universities are economically self-managing and can be declared
bankrupt without affecting the Ministry’s overall enterprise of delivering on policy aims to
Parliament.
In practice, the treatment of a university as a company is no longer a metaphor, but an accounting
reality. From 2005 all universities had to transfer from cash-based accounting to accrual accounting,
and in 2006 universities presented their first annual ‘company’ report based on the same system of
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accrual accounting as used in industry. This way of accounting is based on the ‘costing’ of
activities. Potentially the income from every output can be matched against the ‘real’ cost of its
production, given the availability of data for its calculation such as depreciated value of assets, use
of space, staff costs, and materials. Whereas, previously, in cash-based accounting, the usual
method of public sector accounting, focus was on probity in the use of funds, accrual accounting
makes a standardised calculation of the profitability of each activity, which is then taken as a
measure of efficiency. This shift from the traditional value rationality of universities to the
pecuniary rationality of business systems of accounting, incurs, according to Ciancanelli (2008a,
2008b), a moral hazard. In a university context, accrual accounting neither supplies the information
necessary to fully assess the commercial viability of activities, nor does it make it possible to assess
whether a university is achieving its aims as a public-benefit organisation.
Auditing outputs
The reorganization and self ownership of Danish universities, which placed them outside the usual
state bureaucracy, has not only created new platforms for the enactment of university leadership,
but is also transforming the way the state relates to and seeks to control the universities. The
Ministry’s need to influence universities is not diminishing: budgets for the Danish higher
education sector are rising and universities’ ability to generate innovations, on which Denmark’s
prosperity in the competitive global economy is thought to depend, has moved universities to the
centre of political attention. As the political importance of universities increases, so the Ministry
develops ever more tools for the coherent steering of universities. One example is an often
overlooked clause in the revised University Law of 2007, which states that the development
contract should now not just reflect the university’s priorities, but cover the university’s total
activities (Ministeriet for Videnskab, Teknologi og Udvikling 2007).iii Another example is the
development of a new regime for auditing which exists only in a draft report, but which a senior
Ministry official informed us in an interview already largely reflected current practice.
This report, Udvikling af universiteter – et moderne tilsyn (UBST 2007) has on its front page a
picture of an open hand reaching out towards a blue sky – an image that invokes aspirations to
improvement, but which when seen against the content of the report, also signals the measurement
of continually improving yield from activities, which Strathern finds is the original meaning of
‘enhancement’ (Strathern 1996/7: 4) The report states that the new auditing system is proposed to
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address itself to the self-owning universities in such a way that the universities’ self ownership and
ability to govern themselves is not endangered. However, the ministry sees it as its responsibility to
help the universities to enhance their performance. This is why the auditing of the ministry is
divided into a reactive and a proactive audit. Reactive audit is the annual reporting and ad hoc
interventions into universities whenever there is suspicion that they are not conducting their
business according to the law. Proactive auditing is a constant optimizing of the universities’
abilities to deliver efficiently on society’s expectations. Legally, universities not only have to follow
the law in their spending of public money, they also have to spend the money according to the
conditions for its allocation. This last side of audit opens the way for rich interpretations.
The proactive audit responsibility of the Ministry translates into a very busy yearly activity cycle
where ministry officials meet with university administrators at all levels in an effort to have a
continuing dialogue on specific details. Part of this dialogue is to follow up on activities related to
development contracts and to construct contract supplements to include problem areas or new
policy initiatives, which have been taken after the main development contract, was agreed. The
development contract continues to be the main strategic tool for the coordination of university
activities, but now through a focus on the output of activities. The Ministry’s intention is to
coordinate development contracts to such a degree that they can be used for benchmarking the
performance of universities against each other. This benchmarking functions in parallel with the
gradual shift of university funding to a performance-based system. This means that money will be
sent to where the best performance is, rather than to specific institutions. However, the main use of
the development contract according to the drafted new audit regime is to function as a steering
instrument providing information around which the ongoing adjustment of university activities can
take place.
Compared to the birth of the development contracts in 1999 the focus has substantially shifted.
Where initially the development contracts were a means to provide space for universities to state
‘themselves’, the development contracts, as they are described in the new audit regime, today have
become technologies for the Ministry’s control and optimization of university activities.
Furthermore, where the initial purpose of development contracts was to transform universities into
coherent organizations capable of responding to the demands of society in the modern welfare state,
the new audit system seems to have a different function. The new audit regime, or at least the
14
‘proactive’ part of it, focuses primarily on the outputs of the university’s activities and thus on
university conduct. The organization of the coherent self of universities seems to be assumed after
the university law of 2003 set up the new leadership system. Responsibility for keeping up this self
and solving any contradictions in its activities is now left for the university leadership to solve. In
this sense the new audit system involves a constant optimization or modulation of the universities’
incentive structure in order to secure high performance. The instability of this system reaches its
most radical expression in the Ministry’s intention to include in the audit a recurring evaluation of
the university law’s suitability for the high performance of universities (UBST 2007: 23). Where
audit reveals that the law itself is limiting universities’ optimization of performance, it will produce
suggestions for amendments to the law. Instead of providing a stable framework for what it means
to be a university, the law becomes just another dynamic element in the Ministry’s steering
assemblage, undergoing constant modulation and adjustment.
Conclusion
Whereas Rose’s (1989) study of governance through the free choices of the individual focused on
the role of social technologies in forming a subjectivity that would think of itself and act on itself
as a ‘governable subject’, what we are analysing here is a further shift in liberal governance. The
focus on the changing role of universities’ development contracts reveals this transition. First they
were a pedagogical tool encouraging universities voluntarily to create themselves as the kind of
freely acting governable subjects described by Rose (1989). By responding to the ‘opportunity’ to
engage in development contracts with the government, universities were to create themselves as
strategically acting organizations capable of delivering on the expectations of the ‘surrounding
society’. Second, the government shortcut this process of ‘setting free’ bureaucratically managed
institutions and converting them into governable selves: in the 2003 University Law, the
government’s image of the kind of subject they needed universities to become - a free, rational,
coherent, strategising organisation – was imposed on them. The university leadership, installed by
this law, was required to enter into development contracts with the state as a way to tie their
activities to the purpose of their funding. Third, the existence of this ‘free’ subject was assumed,
and government’s concern turned to how to control it, how to measure and optimise its outputs, and
especially how to steer it to ever-enhanced performance. From this point on, the university owns the
problems of creating itself, or rather, the responsibility for organising the university is passed to the
15
new leaders. They have ‘freedom to manage’, and government is henceforth only concerned with
performance and outputs, not with how they are achieved.
Anders Fogh Jensen (2007) in a recent Ph.D. thesis about the neo-liberal project in Denmark has
argued similarly: whereas in the disciplinary society, the government’s project was to form the
individuals and institutions that would contribute to governance by exercising freedom, the postdisciplinary, control society organizes itself around the output and performance of specific
activities. The technologies associated with this shift are, first, the change from funding universities
in advance, as an essential capacity for the nation state, to funding in arrears, tied to achievement of
specific outputs and performance measures, and second the use of the development contracts as a
tool for continual adjustment of the measures. At present, some university performances are directly
related to government funding while other activities are stated as output indicators in the
development contract and not yet directly related to a particular payment. These output and
performance indicators will be used to measure the success of universities and may be translated
into future funding criteria. Universities are continuously ‘just about to’ meet the outputs they have
contracted to achieve, or are continually trying not to fall short of ever-rising expectations attached
to their funding. If the Ministry finds from its audits of universities that a university is not meeting
their measures of outputs or their scores on performance indicators, they have the capacity to adjust
the development contract system in order to change the intensity or direction of the university’s
effort. The emerging framework in which universities are to be enacted is one of constant
modulation based on constant optimization of university activities in different areas. At the same
time, the fact that the development contract now covers all aspects of the university’s activities,
limits the possibilities for universities to develop a more independent strategy, or to plan outside of
the logic set up by the contractual indicators, the incentive structure of taximeters and the planned
competitive system for allocating universities’ basic grants. The very tool that was initially devised
as a way to get universities to set up a general strategy through which to plan and organize their
actions and create themselves as coherent organizations, is now used to tighten universities’
responsiveness to governments’ demands for a plethora of different performances.
The consequence of this shift from the production of a coherent, governable self to a focus on
performance, we argue, is that the university now has to perform its self to multiple contexts
according to diverse criteria, and this fragmentation puts the assumed coherence of the self in
16
jeopardy. At the University of Copenhagen’s annual ceremony in 2006, the Rector, Ralf
Hemmingsen, whose role it is to project the university as a governable self, described in his speech
the great effort and inventiveness needed to covert the internal energy of the university into a
performance that would surmount the government’s ever-rising expectations and indicators. He
devoted his speech to a reformulation of the strategic mission of his university. The speech came in
the midst of a process in which the University of Copenhagen was tying to construct a coherent
strategy for its activities, involving much debate around the university. It also came as the
university was about to have the Agricultural and Veterinarian University and the Danish
Pharmaceutical University merged into it as two whole new faculties. The merger was shifting the
profile of the university in the direction of the life sciences. There was a need for the leadership to
create a visionary strategy for the benefit of both the merged institutions and the government, at the
same time as reassuring the parts of the university that felt threatened. In his speech, the Rector
promised to the government that he would deliver on all its current demands:

original basic research

higher number of graduates and in world-class

successful competition on quality for research funding

compete worldwide on quality

knowledge transfer to the rest of the education system

top class further education programmes

help innovate new products

cooperate with businesses
The Rector said that in order to do all these things, the university had to organize itself around the
core academic values of research freedom and unstinting quality. He described the current mission
of universities as a radical project of self formation. Whereas the Kantian enlightenment project had
been about the self-formation of the individual attending university in the 19th century, now there
was just as profound a change in the self-formation of the university as an organization. It is up to
him, as Rector, the figure that stands for the university as an organization, to create coherence out of
the multiple tasks the university is measured on. He presented an image of his summoning up all the
efforts of the different parts of the university – the bottom-up logic of the way a university works –
and turning them into a coherent response to the government’s ever-rising expectations of what this
university can achieve, in terms of its top-down logic. In an image which summed up the
17
inventiveness and sheer effort involved, as well as maybe involuntarily underlining the absurdity of
trying to convert the university’s strategy and its core values into the government ambitions, he
promised that the University of Copenhagen would create a performance as innovative and striking
as the first “flop” which transformed Olympic high jumping.
This is a long way from the government’s attempts in 1999 to get universities to build systems
internally that would enable them to prioritize, state their own ambitions and give the appearance of
a coherent self. The Rector in 2006 exemplified the super-human effort needed to coordinate all the
diverse commitments, outputs and performance indicators that now needed to be made to look like
a coherent prestation to government, to ensure economic survival in this heavily top-down steered
system of governance. This tension is also outsourced down the system, so academics are also
responsible, as freely contracting agents, for performing according to a vast variety of different
parameters. They may be expected to incur a similarly huge effort to coordinate their multiple tasks
in an academic self. For the rector, the only way he could imagine staging the university as a
coherent actor in this system of governance, and meeting all the criteria that the university and he
himself were being measured on, was to try and summon up energy and performance from
throughout the university to make a breakthrough that seemed as stupendous (and as unlikely) as
inventing a new way of high jumping.
In sum, to address the four questions posed by this book, in the public governance of universities,
self ownership and the system of development contracts are tools for the construction of the
subjectivity of an organization to make it ‘freely’ responsible and accountable for the achievement
of government’s aims. The driving force behind these reforms is to change the role of universities.
No longer just concerned with producing truths and graduates, the university is now to be a central
actor in Denmark’s positioning in the global knowledge-based economy, with responsibility for
ensuring that Denmark maintains its position as one of the wealthiest in the world. The effects are to
organize universities according to a top-down logic, with a system for ordering its activities in
response to this logic so that its strategic leader can deliver them as performances to meet the
expectations of government. However the diverse incentives systems and performance indicators
which a university responds to mean that it takes a stupendous effort to gather up the university’s
diverse activities into a coherent reading of its organization as a self. It is worth asking whether,
potentially, over-stretching the university’s responsiveness to these diverse external demands could
18
endanger the day to day work, the bottom up initiatives, which the leaders convert into the
prestation that an apparently coherent organization makes to government and surrounding society.
The normative assumption about the creation of governable subjects is that they are unified and
coherent, and that the incentive structures to which they ‘freely’ respond encourage the formation of
such coherent selves. This study suggests that neo-liberal governance in Denmark is no longer
focusing on the kinds of self that its steering instruments induce. Instead government is focusing on
the performance and outputs of its free subjects. The incentive structures, payment systems and
performance indicators are increasingly being brought together into a consolidated tool for
governing, and for constantly adjusting the efforts and performance of its subjects. But from the
subject’s point of view, these steering instruments make demands to act as different kinds of selves
in many diverse contexts at once. Feminism has long seen the coherent self and the fragmented self
as two alternatives, based on quite different theoretical premises. If the 1970s idea that gender is a
social formation based on biological sex differences, gave ‘women’ a fallacious, but strategically
useful, basis for collective action, the 1990s notion that women, both as a category and as
individuals, are situated in so many contexts, with so many diverse demands for different kinds of
performance in different relations of power, meant that their project became one of managing the
fragmented self. The form of governance being developed in Denmark is creating organizational
subjects who are fragmented selves, responsive to diverse demands and constantly recalibrated
expectations, but one of those expectations is also that they will become and present themselves as
coherent selves. It was the iconic image of ‘superwoman’ - who tried to hold in unity the different
kinds of woman she was as a high-flying employee, an ideal mother, loving wife and good,
participating citizen – who cracked apart the contradictions in feminism. The image of the rector,
engaged in inventing a way to turn the diverse efforts and fragmented subjectivity of the university
into one coherent jump over the government’s ever-rising bar, sums up the stupendous effort
entailed in overcoming the emerging tension of demanding that a fragmented self be presented as a
coherent self in the Danish form of self governance.
19
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ii
At this annual event, the Queen, the Minister, other dignitaries and senior academics assemble in the University’s
elaborate lecture hall, to hear an address from the Rector.
iii
Whereas the 2003 University Law states: § 10 Stk. 8. Bestyrelsen indgår udviklingskontrakt med ministeren, the
equivalent clause in the 2007 University Law states: §10 Stk. 8. Bestyrelsen indgår udviklingskontrakt med ministeren
om universitetets samlede virksomhed.
i
22