The university in a national context – recontextualisation

Universities are facing a diverse set of demands. On the one hand, universities are expected to produce new short-term knowledge which can be applied in beneficial innovations. Whereas, there is concern within the universities that the nature of science is not understood in society. Scientific knowledge production is a longitudinal process, while there are expectations in the environment for universities to produce short-term innovations to benefit economic and busi-ness life.

due to regional policy in Finland, universities has been established in differ-ent parts of the country. The criticism at a national level towards the success of such a regional policy accelerated at the beginning of 2000. The re-contextualisa-tion within the themes of regional policy and the region in the rector’s discourse concerning transforming the university organisation are identified by exploring

the frequency of the words ‘regional policy’ and ‘region-related’ words in the micro-level text analysis (see Appendix 5).

At the end of 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium, the region-al policy themes are discussed frequently in the rector’s speeches. The rector discusses the regional impact of universities in 2001. The measurement of the regional impact of the universities is one feature of the higher education poli-cies emphasising innovation. The regional impact of the universities is measured mainly on two bases (speech 2001). The measures include how many the students are employed at the university region and on the other hand, how many techno-logical enterprises are started in the university area locally.

The rector stresses discursively how the regional impacts of universities are not understood properly. The nature of university education and research out-comes do not only have a local effect, but also nationally and even globally. In the case of the University of Joensuu, the impact of the university radiates to a much larger area than just around university area. For example, teacher education at the University of Joensuu has created a basis for the development of the educational system for the whole of Eastern Finland (speech 2001).

due to having a local university, there are employees in the area who are able to serve the need for more highly educated professionals. This is one of the reasons (speech 2001) why the regional policy of decentralising the govern-mental offices in the region has succeeded better than in the 1970s in Finland.

due to the University of Joensuu, there are highly educated professionals in the region (local) and this allows the decentralisation of governmental offices (na-tional) in the Joensuu area. This is manifested by the establishment of the Finnish Government Shared Services Centre for Finance and HR which started its opera-tions in Joensuu in 2010.

Themes in the rector’s discourse concerning regional policy in the context of the university are kept silent since 2006. This is the very year when the university reform begins. The Ministry of Education started the program of the structural reorganisation of the Finnish universities in 2006. The aim of the programme was to create high quality, strong, well-profiled, and internationally competitive universities. This was accomplished by cutting the overlapping activities of the universities and gathering the universities into larger units. The university re-form was included in the programme of the government of Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen in 2007 (Tirronen 2008, 12; Nevala 2009, 483).

The rector begins his speech in 2006 with the statement that “The structures dominate the contemporary Finnish higher education policy discourse.” The structures refer mainly to the management and locational structures (speech 2006) of Finnish higher education. The general assumption behind the higher ed-ucation structure discourse is ‘the achieved benefits of the accumulation’ (speech 2006). The direction is for the bigger university entities.

This is identified in this study as representing hegemony in the higher educa-tion policy discourse because larger entities are seen as being a self-evident mode of the efficient structures. The structural reorganisation programme presented by

the Ministry of Education in 2006 included an alliance project alliance between the University of Joensuu and the University of Kuopio (Nevala 2009, 435).

The rector points out the lack of public discussion on essential elements from the point of view of the science system. There is no discussion on the structures of science; the role of the universities themselves and the relationship between the universities and research institutes (speech 2006).

The universities renewed their inner organisational structures on the basis of the propositions given by the Ministry of Education. The University of Joensuu strengthened the status of its faculties in 2006. The disciplines were gathered together in larger units. discipline based departments were replaced by faculties with units of disciplines. Administrative units were established to serve several disciplines (Nevala 2009, 435-436).

The University of Joensuu had a history of proactivity concerning manage-ment at the university. The Ministry of Education gave approval to the experi-ment of ‘lump-sum-budgeting’ during the late 1980s. ‘Lump-sum-budgeting’

meant that the segmented national allocation of budget resources (Clark 1998, 107), which came with regulations on all conceivable expenditures, was replaced with a single lump-sum allocation – the university could quite freely spend as it wished.

This novel system during the late 1980s and at the beginning of 1990s prom-ised that funds not spent during the current year could be kept as local savings and carried over to the next year. This procedure eliminated the irrational bu-reaucratic behaviour that funds not spent within the each fiscal year had to be returned to the government. This requirement made the last month of the fis-cal year throughout the government in Finland a free-for-all for spending spree (Clark 1998, 107).

Budget control was decentralised from the state to the universities. The man-agement aspect took a step forward in the University of Joensuu because the lump-sum allocation of the budget was decentralised internally within the uni-versity to the departments. The first step from the national level to uniuni-versity level decentralisation was also acceptable to academics. A greater degree of in-stitutional autonomy was achieved (Clark 1998, 107).

The decision making procedures were decentralised and simplified and re-sponsibility was decentralised to the departments in the University of Joensuu.

Most decisions were made by the academic leaders, instead of the collegial coun-cils. The rector allocated the funds directly to the departments in lump sums without any earmarking, and department heads were responsible for the funds.

The collegial bodies were involved in policy design and planning and in recruit-ment decisions for academic staff (Hölttä 1995, 237).

But the management aspect step was a more delicate matter to accept for the academics according to Clark (1998, 108) because inner organisational routines were disturbed. For faculties and administrators alike, the increased autonomy tore up the traditional lines of basic-unit income and expenditure. The new budg-eting also brought some difficulties as some faculties were unsure at the outset

whether they wanted such full responsibility for deciding on how money would be spent within their domain.

There was also confusion as to who would make the decisions. Was the power to be given to a strengthened department head, a full professor within their sepa-rate internal domains, or to an elected council, or an inclusive department body of faculty, students and non-academic staff? There were doubts about ‘manage-ment’. What was in it for the administration? do ‘they’ really mean it? Is there a hidden administrative hand in all this? As the budget experiment continued, the departments gradually learned how to manage their lump-sum budgets (Clark 1998, 108-109).

The discourse concerning the structures of the Finnish higher education dominates the rector’s speech in 2006. The alliances are proposed as the new structural entities (speech 2006). However, the rector questions if the universities have been able to ‘read’ the ‘mysterious signs on the ‘map’ of science and higher educational politics (speech 2006). There is also great mystery surrounding how the Ministry of Education trusts that the universities will develop structures by themselves and voluntarily (speech 2006).

The Ministry of Education directed extra funding for the renewal project of the universities. On the other hand, there were processes within the public sec-tor that were directed towards reducing budget funds. According to Tirkkonen (2008, 11), the structural development of the universities was included as part of the productivity programme of the Finnish government which started in 2003.

The aim of the productivity programme was to increase the productivity of the public sector and to squeeze the size of the public sector in Finland.

In the university reform, it was indicated (speech 2007) by the Ministry of Education that only some universities were profiled as high level, international, research intensive universities. Those universities could then expect to receive more resources. But what would happen to rest of the universities that were not indicated directly by the Ministry of Education (speech 2007)? It was obvious that those universities would have to fight harder for the scarce resources of the state budget (speech 2007).

In 2008, in his speech titled, ‘the University of Tomorrow’, the rector discusses the future directions of the universities in Finland. In his view, Finnish universi-ties are based more on the idea of a knowledge-offering institution than in many other countries.

“… the current Finnish university model which is characterized by not only public funding, but also a relatively homogenous university concept –that is more clearly based on the idea of a knowledge-offering university than in many other countries.”(Speech 2008)

However, the rector also expressed the view that focusing on a knowledge offer-ing concept will be expected only from those universities considered to be “top universities”:

“The predominant direction of change is the marketizing and globalisation of the university institution. It seems that higher education is governed by the viewpoints of customership and employment, as well as intensifying supranational competition for good and paying students. Also in research there is a notably growing pressure for commercialization, which is followed by strong specialisation in economically useful fields and bias in applications. As the missions of universities become differentiated, increasingly many of them are directed in a market-led way and only the ‘top universities’ can afford to be truly universities of knowledge”. (Speech 2008)