ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
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is a political crisis as well. During the last few years both private wealth,
especially of banking institutions, and public poverty have continuously
increased. Public poverty is linked directly to mass unemployment and to
a
tax
system favoring private companies. The German sociologist, Ulrich
Beck, has presented a thesis demonstrating that large companies have
become almost the only taxpayers. This means that the real tax is paid by
the working people. This development may be attributed to the neo-liberal
politics by the German conservative liberal government during the last six–
teen years. Its models are drawn from the Thatcher government in Great
Britain and the Reagan administration in the U.S.A. However, both coun–
tries have meanwhile changed governments. Germans will vote in
September this year.
This neo-liberal paradigm, I believe, is of direct relevance, since the
poles of state regulation and freedom of market neo-liberalism favor mar–
ket forces and reduce the structural measures that supposedly limit their
freedom. What is more, neo-liberalism tends to declare such structural
measures as outdated and replace them by catchwords such as flexibility,
deregulation, and private responsibility. However, patterns of private entre–
preneurship became dominant, and are now being applied to all other
social institutions, such as health care and issues of public safety, as well as
to education. We are, in fact, witnessing the streamlining of efficiency, the
so-called econornization of society.
No wonder, then, that universities too have become victims of this
pervasive economic pattern. State regulation, which could also mean pro–
tection, is cut back in favor of exposure to national and global competition.
German higher education has not yet been privatized and students are not
yet thought of as consumers, but it is on the way. This happens not only
by way of strong economic and political forces outside universities but
even by inside forces that are trying to institute competition and customer
orientation, such as the introduction of student fees. Furthermore, plans of
dividing universities into research and teaching ones no longer meet with
general resistance. There are many who cherish the idea of establishing
powerful university management at the cost of democratic decision-making.
No doubt we are on the way. However, is it the right way? We can observe
that wherever university management already has acquired strength, a new
rationality is spreading-which tends to classify scientific output according
to its so-called usefulness for society. More precisely, budget cuts are being
made in the social sciences, such as social pedagogy, gender studies, educa–
tion. Why is that so? It seems that these disciplines share a fascination with
problems generated by society, such as poverty, unemployment, deviant
behavior, etc. One well-known German scholar has argued that problems
themselves are made marginal by marginalizing the disciplines that deal
