As indicated in the panel description, state-university relations across Europe have undergone massive transformations, ranging from establishing new control institutions to reaffirming institutional autonomy. In this reform wave, Denmark can in many ways be seen as an extreme case, as the reforms affecting the Danish higher education system has gone further than in many of the comparable European countries.
In the proposed paper, the massive transformations that the Danish university system has undergone will be described – from the democratization reforms in the 1970’s to the extensive management reforms of the new millennium. Particularly the 2003- and 2011-reforms are radical illustrations of the common European movement towards ‘managerialism’, with the transition from elected to appointed managers, the introduction of external majority boards as the supreme authority at universities, the increased use of control institutions, such as the a new centralized accreditation institution, the introduction of development contracts between the minister of education and the universities, which to a unprecedented degree contractualizes the relationship between state and university.
The proposed paper will attempt to shed light on the Danish development, and discuss how such a development can be understood by seeing it as the materialization of specific ideals and visions of the university. The development is analyzed by way of Johan P. Olsens ideal types of the European university (Olsen, 2005), the concept of the competition state (Hirsch, 1995; Cerny, 1997; Pedersen 2011) and the notion of governmentality (Foucault, 2010; Dean, 1999), to offer new insights into the state-university relation, and the possibilities and obstacles that this relation faces in times of crisis.
