Harsh words of advice for Europe's universities

"Knowledge in modern societies has become too important to leave its production and its transfer solely to universities," says Professor Georg Winckler, President of the European University Association. But that does not mean that we can leave them to languish and carry on in their bad old ways.

 

The first thing to do is to sort out their funding. Here the buck stops with governments. "The European university system suffers from a severe funding gap. The growth in student numbers has not been accompanied by an adequate growth in public funding."

 

The Professor has the right audience for his message. He gave his speech at the "informal Education Council in Vienna".

 

Professor Winckler likes the way they do things in the USA, where "without any national planning and with very few regulations, autonomous universities have created a system that, as a whole, grants broad access to students and achieves world-class research excellence in an enormous range of scientific fields distributed among a number of universities".

 

You get the feeling that Professor Winckler is more than a little upset by what is going on in Europe. "Despite strong econometric evidence supporting the relevance of modern growth theories, despite the many commitments of EU member states to the (renewed) Lisbon strategy, gross expenditure in R&D and in higher education has stagnated in nearly all of Europe."

 

Would the universities know what to do with more cash if it came their way? Maybe not, "due to bureaucratic rigidities, institutional inertia, and lack of funding, [universities] have failed to cope with this growth in an adequate way".

 

You'll have to read the speech to get Professor Winckler's six-point solution to the sorry state of Europe's universities.