The Acceleration of Soft Privatization in European Higher Education. On (non)human agency assemblages of private providers, pandemic forces and digital fuel

Across Europe, we are witnessing a drastic growth in the use of private sector services within public education institutions and administrations (Cone & Brøgger, 2020; Lundahl et al. 2013; Schofield et al, 2013). As researchers, students and administrative staff in higher education, we meet these for profit private services (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2017) embedded in our everyday routines and tasks through phenomena such as private research funding and outsourcing of educational and administrative functions. Despite significant variances in marketization of higher education (Jungblut & Vukasovic, 2018), this embedding of private services in public education is blurring the traditional European conception of public education as a state operated service, free from private interests (Wiborg 2013). This paper uses the notion of ‘soft privatization’ to explore how private sector participation in higher education often seems to be highly integrated in, rather than break from, public governance of education in a European context (Cone & Brøgger, 2020). With the notion of soft privatization, the paper aims to describe how public education governance increasingly make use of delegation of public operations to non-state or autonomous quasi-state agents while retaining the principally public status of institutions. Using the case of Denmark, this paper explores how the infrastructural core of both educational services – such as communication and teaching platforms (e.g. Blackboard, Zoom and Teams) – and administrative services – such as ‘research information management systems’, registration of working hours, accounting, and PhD programs – has been taken over by private providers. In recent years, this integration of private providers in the infrastructure of higher education and administration has accelerated and the Covid-19 lockdown has further amplified this development (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). As already indicated in studies on post-disaster adjustments in educational governance, it is not uncommon that reorganizations and new initiatives applied to cope with an extraordinary crisis end up extending beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the event itself (Atasay & Delavan, 2012; Klein, 2008). In continuation of this, the paper addresses the prospects and consequences of the COVID-19 acceleration of soft privatization in public higher education.