Interview: Universities must be able to reward excellence[fr][de] 

"I believe that governments need to create an environment in which universities themselves can become excellent," said Minister Turk. 

Turk believes such an environment is "definitely not one that promotes average egalitarianism, in which the top university professors are treated as civil servants set up in some salary bracket, where business activities of university staff may be discouraged or where universities have to fight to get as many people as possible enrolled as their funding corresponds to how many subscriptions they have rather than the quality of the output". 

His comments are likely to infuriate French student and teachers' unions at the very least. French unions took to the streets last year in response to reforms introduced by President Nicolas Sarkozy which gave universities greater autonomy to decide upon their budget and staff (see EurActiv 08/11/07)

Instead of forcing top-down co-operation through government incentives such as co-funded research and education projects, Turk urged the governments of countries which "keep university activities under rather tight control" to give academia more freedom to be entrepreneurial and to be "more flexible in hiring and firing" and determining how excellence in universities is rewarded. 

Turk thinks that the way forward is for universities to set up partnerships with governments "so that trust is built. Because in order to give somebody more freedom, you need to set up trust". He also thinks that universities should change their internal organisation, overlooking the democratic 'everybody has a say' model and giving "much more power to the very best in the universities" rather than average students and staff members.

Turk argues that once universities become more entrepreneurial, business and universities will start to speak the same language and come together through mutual interest very quickly. 

"What could be unpopular to some is that of course this would create differences between the best professors and the average professors, those who do industrially relevant research and those who don't, those students that are involved in projects and those who aren't," acknowledged Turk. 

"Whenever such differences arise they are not popular with those who fear they might be on the losing end," he added.

The European Commission is broadly supportive of Minister Turk's position. In May 2006 it issued a Communication making detailed recommendations on how to modernise higher education in Europe. It aims to foster co-operation between business and academia to increase knowledge and technology transfer and speed up the commercialisation of research results (see EurActiv 10/05/06). 

The EU executive argues that many member states have tried to "preserve" their universities by "micromanaging" and "imposing an undesirable degree of uniformity" on them. This has, according to the Commission, generally led to a high level of average performance. But it has also imposed conditions which "prevent universities from diversifying and from focusing on quality," it believes. 

To read the interview in full, please click here.