Introduction

Danish universities have been subject to four major changes to their status and operations through legislation in the 1970s and 1990s and in 2003 and through an almost continuous stream of policy changes imposed by governments since then. Each reform was based on a changing idea of the university and the role it should play in creating a different imaginary of Denmark and its place in the world. A key indicator of shifts in the idea and role of the university is what the education literature refers to as ‘institutional autonomy’. Reforms that emphasised ‘university autonomy’ were common across Nordic countries and much of the rest of Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Maassen et al., 2017). Yet this similarity in language can disguise important differences in what this concept actually means in practice. In Denmark, there is a range of terms referring to this concept, but each has detailed differences in meaning. For example, central to the 2003 university law was the change of universities’ status from ‘self-steering’ to ‘self-owning’ institutions. both translated in official documents as ‘university autonomy’. Here the Danish words are explored ethnographically and ‘autonomy’ will be used as an etic, not an emic, term. That is, changes in the Danish terms for ‘autonomy’ are set within the context of changing forms of governance and depict moments when the constitution of the university, its status and relation to the state changed, along with a renegotiation of relationships between all the actors involved—politicians, civil servants, university leaders at all levels, academics, students and stakeholders. Each reconstitution of the university reflected a changing vision of the role of the university within a re-imagining of Denmark’s future.

The article takes an ‘anthropology of policy’ approach. This treats policies as both tools of government and tools for studying systems of governance (Shore & Wright, 1997: 14; Shore & Wright, 2011). Policy texts claim a particular way of defining a problem and, in shaping a solution, they set up different parameters for thinking and acting (Yanow, 2000). These new organising principles of society are most visible in shifts in the meaning of a key word, (in our case, ‘autonomy’), that invite organisations and individuals to conceive of themselves and organise themselves in particular new ways. The instruments for achieving such changes in governance are usually seemingly neutral legal or administrative procedures (such as giving the university a new legal status, a change to a funding mechanism, or asking academics to register their research outputs in a computer system). However, these act as ‘political technologies’ in that they entail re-ordering relations between people and their institutions in new systems of power. Policies, their concepts and associated technologies are key to mobilising the agency of people and organisations—willingly, unknowingly, contesting or resisting—to align themselves with the forms of governance through which the government thinks it will achieve its vision of the future.

In this article, key aspects of the policy process will be analysed for each of the four major changes to the status and operations of universities between the 1970s and the present. First, a continuous process of contestation over the meaning of ‘autonomy’ and associated keywords in Denmark will be outlined and how at certain moments an alliance of interests has managed to make their meaning of a key word not only dominant, but authoritative by enacting a change in the law (Wright 2020a). The new authoritative meanings of ‘autonomy’ will be identified that marked each of the four moments of major change. Second, insights from Ciepley’s historical and legal studies will be used to show how differences in the authoritative meanings of ‘autonomy’ (notably ‘self-steering’ democracy versus ‘self-owning’ accountability) translated into different corporate forms for universities and kinds of personhood in relation to the state (Ciepley, 2020). Third, laws that changed the university’s corporate form and relation to the state also specified changes in the management and steering of universities—reconfiguring relations between the state, its institutions, and individuals in new forms of governance. However enactment of these changes involved further contestation within as well as between ministries, as well as within and between universities about how to articulate existing (and some new) steering mechanisms (notably economic levers and systems of leadership) and political technologies (such as university contracts with government) in new ways. This article therefore focuses on changes to the meaning of ‘autonomy’, the legal construction of the university, its relation to government, internal organisation and leadership in the three major law reforms mentioned above. Each period will explore how each new status was thought suitable for the role universities were to play in the realisation of a different vision of Denmark’s future. The fourth, more recent period, shows that even without a major law reform, through the continuous contestation over the meaning and operation of universities, the concept of ‘self-ownership’ and the associated array of steering mechanisms have been rearticulated in a radically different way as the vision for Denmark’s future has changed yet again.

This approach allows for ‘autonomy’ to be a dynamic term that can be contested and shift in meaning with changing forms of governance. In contrast, the literature focuses mainly on measuring university autonomy as a fixed status. Governments have sought to measure institutional autonomy as an indicator of universities’ ability to deliver efficiently on their missions (Pruvot et al., 2023: 9).  In contrast, Karran (2007, 2009a and b) measured whether government reforms actually protected or damaged institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Karran and colleagues examined how institutional autonomy (assessed in terms of organisational, financial, staffing and academic autonomy) was protected by law in 30 European countries (Beiter et al., 2016: 306). They looked for institutional independence to be protected from government and from private interests through legislation.Footnote 1 They found Denmark’s law had a pointed ‘lack of separation’ between the state and the university, with numerous clauses in the law requiring the minister to ‘lay down rules’ on student enrolment quotas, doctoral degrees, tests, examinations and grading and the appointment of academic staff and teachers (2016: 310). They ranked Denmark ‘below average’ on institutional autonomy and fifth from bottom on the overall ranking of the legal protections of academic freedom in Europe (2016: 328). The European University Association’s (EUA) institutional autonomy scorecard benchmarked higher education systems’ ‘autonomy performance’ against each other and came to a strikingly different conclusion. The EUA’s tool was based on the same four criteria—organisational, financial, staffing and academic autonomy (Pruvot et al., 2023: 11), but it ranked Denmark in the highest cluster of ‘highly autonomous systems’ (Pruvot et al., 2023: 55 and 69). Karran et al. and the EUA came to diametrically opposed results even though they both used the Council of Europe’s four criteria (2012: § 6). They also both shared the Council of Europe’s depiction of institutional autonomy as guaranteeing protection against undue outside interference. However in contrast to their static pictures of academic autonomy and freedom, the Council of Europe emphasises that autonomy is not static but is based on ‘essential values’ that are ‘not absolute’ but rely on a balance ‘provided through deliberation and consultations involving public authorities, higher education institutions, the academic community of staff and students and all other stakeholders’ (2012: §4). The above methods of defining and measuring autonomy do not capture how the concept is crucially dynamic and deliberative.

Whereas institutional autonomy literally means ‘self-legislating’, this analysis starts from the premise that autonomy is never absolute: it is an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1956) with no final or closed definition and always involves negotiating governing relationships. The changes from the 1970s Danish university law to the reform in the 1990s and again in 2003 point to a wider shift from government to governance (Maassen et al., 2023; Rhodes, 1997). That is, governments moved from ‘rowing’ a bureaucracy to ‘steering’ service provision by outsourcing it to privatised or corporate-like organisations (Osborne & Gaebler, 1993) and ‘governing at a distance’ (Rose & Miller, 1992). Not only did the key Danish terms for ‘autonomy’ change, but so did the constitutional status of ‘agencified’ universities (Pollitt et al., 2001) along with the powers and responsibilities of their leaders. New governing and management systems, such as performance contracts, output measures, competitive funding, auditing and other political technologies, also made clear to workers how they were expected to conduct themselves and perform. This new form of governance thus entailed negotiating new relationships between multiple actors—government, rectors, other university leaders, academics, students, and multiple other stakeholders. As this article will show, when the meaning of key concepts changed, so did the legal status of the university and the articulation of the steering technologies through which government related to universities, and the management tools used internally within universities. If, initially after 2003, this form of governance entailed outsourcing control to agencies and relied on responsibilised, self-managed and calculative workers, these same steering technologies have recently been used to increase centralised control.

The material for this article draws on sequence of projects from 2004 to the present.Footnote 2 These started with a multi-sited ethnographic study of the way policy makers, university leaders, academics and students engaged with the provisions of the 2003 University Law. Ethnographic studies, with participation in meetings and interviews, were conducted in a science and a humanities faculty in each of the three main types of universities in Denmark. The studies were designed to include a vertical slice spanning from students and academics to administrators and leaders at institute, faculty and central levels. A continuous sequence of further projects investigated subsequent moments of contestation over key terms (e.g. freedom, integrity, efficiency and ‘pseudo-science’) and the operation of steering technologies (bibliometric research indicator, performance measures, future-planning). These longitudinal ethnographic studies of Danish universities, repeatedly returning to the same or similar sites, have spanned from 2004 to the present. In addition, Jakob Ørberg and I collected a corpus of documents (N = 134) from the 1970s to the present that were produced by government, political parties, industrial interests, pressure groups and academic and student unions, along with op eds by individual academics and other media coverage. We supplemented their analysis by interviews with politicians, civil servants, former university leaders, former and current leaders of industrial and other interest groups, union activists, journalists and other academics and students who had played formative parts in policy debates about the role of universities in changing visions of Denmark’s future.

The article is organised in four phases. Phase 1: “universities spearheading organisational democracy in Denmark” analyses the construction of the university in legislation in the 1970s and the political debates about its role in Danish democracy, whilst Phase 2: “a modernised and agencified public sector in the 1990s” analyses legislative changes in the 1990s aiming to ‘modernise’ the public sector and create a ‘new liberal’ society. In each case, it is shown how ideas about the role of universities in shaping an envisaged future for Denmark were embedded in concepts of ‘autonomy’ and their translation into legal constructions of the university and its governance. Phase 3: “global knowledge economy” focuses on the 2003 University Law and how the shift from ‘self-steering’ to ‘self-owning’ universities was central to the government’s vision of universities as drivers of Denmark’s competitiveness in a purportedly future global knowledge economy. Phase 4: “from global to national visions of Denmark” traces the way the concept and operation of self-owning institutions and their associated array of steering mechanisms have changed radically in practice from what was called ‘Aim and Frame’ steering following the 2003 reform, to ‘Commando-way’ steering more recently as the government’s vision for the role of universities changed from a global to a national perspective. Each section addresses debates at that time about the meaning of key terms associated with ‘autonomy’ and about changes to the legal constitution or corporation of the university and its forms of governance—and how these were meant to equip universities to play a role in bringing about a new vision of Denmark’s future position in the world.

Phase 1: universities spearheading organisational democracy in Denmark

Interviewees often remarked that the 1968 student revolts happened more in Copenhagen than in Paris. A ‘remarkable alliance’ formed between students who wanted educational improvements and who occupied the rector’s office at Copenhagen University; new categories of junior academics dissatisfied with ‘professor rule’ in which only full professors could sit on committees and run the university; and politicians from both left and right who had given up trying to get universities to reform themselves (Hansen, 2006: 5–6). The outcome of this contestation was that the Social Liberal, Liberal and Conservative coalition government passed a law in 1970 (Hansen, 1971) to end ‘professor rule’. At that time there were three universities: the University of Copenhagen, which was founded with permission from the Pope in 1475, and had developed alongside the Danish state, but not as an integral part of it; Aarhus University which was established in 1928 by the city’s business community, civil society and city council as an independent (selvejende, literally ‘self-owning’) university; and Odense University (later Syddansk University) established by a law in 1964 to ease the pressure on other universities from a vast expansion of student numbers. The 1970 law turned all three into ‘state institutions’ funded through the annual national budget and supervised by the Ministry of Education. A civil servant was appointed in each university as University Director and was accountable to the ministry for the proper legal operation of the university, whilst the rector was responsible to the ministry for financial probity (Ørberg, 2007).

The 1970 law also substantially changed the university’s internal governance. It created a university electorate of all academics and students and a system of participatory democracy with executive powers vested in a multilayered structure of boards and councils. This meant professors in Copenhagen were no longer the sole occupants of committees and decision making, and in Aarhus the governing board (bestyrelsen) and its city representatives no longer controlled the university. Now, academics and students in a department constituted a ‘council’ (institutråd), which would make decisions and elect a leader to carry out its decisions, represent the department, and run its daily business. In addition, each major education programme was planned and managed by an elected study board of academics and students. Departments were clustered into faculties ruled by an elected faculty council with academics filling two-thirds of the positions and students one-third. They elected a dean as chairman of the faculty council, charged with implementing the council’s decisions. The law designated a senate (konsistorium) as the highest authority of the university, consisting of the deans of faculty, academics’ representatives, student’ representatives, and the rector. The rector was elected by the academic and student representatives on the senate and faculty councils. He (always referred to as male in the law) was both accountable to the Minister of Education, and to the senate and other faculty, departmental and education committees. Whilst the rector had sole power to act for the university to the outside world, it was the boards and committees at all levels that had decision making powers. The clarity of the rector’s voice depended on being in accord with this multiplicity of semi-independent units and committees and the newly enfranchised university community of academics and scholars (Ørberg, 2007).

The 1970 law was always meant to be revised after a few years in the light of experience. A law passed by the Social Democrat government in 1973 (Undervisningsministeriet, 1973) clarified the responsibilities and powers of the minister, the rector, and governing committees. The role of the rector was strengthened with better defined responsibilities and executive powers, although the senate still held the general executive power. The structure of institute and faculty boards and the senate remained unchanged but one major change was that technical and administrative staff were enfranchised with representation at all levels equal to students and half that of academics, including on the senate. The elected representatives of administrative staff now joined with the elected representatives of academics and students to elect the rector.

In terms of institutional autonomy, the 1970s laws brought all three universities under the aegis of the state—or in David Ciepley’s terms (Ciepley, 2020 and personal communication, 3 February 2023), they became part of the personhood of the state. Funding came from a budget line in the annual Finance Law and each university had a separate account and large discretion over its use. In Ciepley’s historical and legal perspective, the university was a membership corporation, changing from a collegial model (professors only) pre-1970 to a republican model (first all academic staff and students, and then all who worked and studied at the university) after 1970. The university had autonomy in the sense that its membership elected its decision-making boards and their leadership. However, the system was highly complex. There was considerable institutional autonomy in relation to the state, but this was distributed through semi-autonomous faculties and departments rather than being exercised by the university as a whole. The complex tiers of elected and semi-autonomous decision-making councils in Weick’s (1976) terms formed a loosely coupled system. Such a system, according to Weick, affords local self-determination, for example in teaching and research, and the capacity to buffer a lower unit against unwelcome moves from above. It also means local adaptations can be made to a discipline’s environment or international developments without disrupting the whole university or necessitating system-wide change. As the rector had no management powers, his (sic) coordination of such loose coupling required skills for negotiation (or horse trading) and an ability to embody the voice of ‘the university’. For example, if the rector was formally responsible for financial probity and accountability, the senate was the university’s ultimate decision-making body, and faculties often negotiated directly with the ministry. Indeed, Ove Nathan, who was rector of the University of Copenhagen from 1982 to 1994, went so far as to describe himself as ‘a janitor without a budget.’ (‘pedel uden budget’) (University of Copenhagen, 2006).

What vision of Denmark’s future was embedded in these university reforms? At the time, and to this day, the 1970s governance of universities is often referred to as ‘democratic’. Universities were envisaged as playing important roles in strengthening Danish democracy at a time of social and economic upheaval in at least three ways. First, politicians saw the university’s structure, with its diversity of semi-independent decision-making bodies, as a means both to integrate participants’ knowledge into decision-making and to secure the university’s institutional independence by preventing the emergence of a hierarchical structure that the ministry could surmount (Betænkning, 1985: 15). Second, as Hansen points out, following the considerable expansion of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘democratisation’ referred to universities’ recruiting students from a wider span of social backgrounds and, in time, staff would also come from a wider social base (Hansen, 2006). Technical and administrative staff and students were seen as participants from society at large and the university was seen as being responsive to and contributing to a democratic society. Third, according to an interview we held with a professor who was then a student activist, organisational democracy was politically controversial, but the Social Democrats successfully argued that if Denmark was to transition to Scandinavian workplace democracy, then the public sector should lead the way, and universities should spearhead that development within the public sector (Wright & Ørberg, 2020: 106). Even though debates about reforming universities continued through the 1970s and 1980s, the legislation setting out the relations between the Ministry of Education and the university and between the organs within the university remained unchanged until the 1990s. In that time, however, the visions of democracy that informed the 1970s faded and were overtaken by other ways of envisaging the future of Denmark.

Phase 2: a modernised and agencified public sector in the 1990s

In the 1980s, the political vision changed to ‘modernising’ Denmark’s public sector. Denmark, like much of Europe, had been rocked by financial crises following OPEC’s oil-price hikes in the 1970s. Under a Social Democrat government, the Ministry of Finance initiated a programme of reforms to control public finances and reorganise the public sector. This programme was continued by the Conservative-Liberal coalition that came to power in 1982 and by subsequent governments. Denmark sought inspiration for its modernisation agenda from the OECD’s Public Management Committee (PUMA), and a Danish civil servant eventually became its head. In 1995, PUMA produced a highly influential report (OECD, 1995) that stressed an urgent need to adopt a paradigm shift to new ways of ordering the state in the face of economic and political turbulence and ‘ever-faster multi-fronted change’. In 1996 a report from the Ministry of Finance reviewed the ways that Denmark had already been moving in this direction since the 1980s (Ministry of Finance, 1996). The Ministry called its system ‘Aim and Frame Steering’, and the aim was to enhance political leaders’ control over ‘service deliverers’ and thereby over the size and cost of public services. As a first step, ministers were to focus on setting the overall political aims and budget for a sector rather than running a bureaucracy. Ministries were broken up into ‘agencies’ whose managers were contracted to implement and administer policies against specific output measures. To achieve this they were given greater autonomy over budgets and personnel. The second stage was to establish similar ‘principal-agent’ relations between ministries or their agencies and service providers (Wright & Ørberg, 2020: 99–102). But this meant reshaping institutions in the education and other sectors into coherent organisations with a strong leadership capable of making efficient use of a budget and producing contracted outputs.

The Minster of Education, Bertel Haarder (Liberal party), was in the forefront of this agenda to ‘modernise’ the public sector (Haarder et al., 1982). In 1984, he established a committee to propose a way to secure universities’ continued independence and self-government whilst also making them capable of the effective leadership and administration required by the modernisation programme (Ørberg, 2007: 10). The committee’s report (Betænkning, 1985) argued that the aim of the university’s governing committees should not be to further democracy. They thought the process of dividing the seats on university committees between the three interest groups (academics, administrative staff and students) led to inexpedient ‘keeping of the domestic peace’. They thought clearer responsibilities and executive powers were needed to make universities into efficient decision-making and accountable organisations united in an efficient effort to further their purposes (Betænkning, 1985: 19–20).

It was not until 1992 that there was sufficient political support to implement some of these ideas in a University Law (Folketinget, 1993). The university’s organisation in departmental and faculty boards and the senate was not changed, but the rector and the deans were given executive powers over them. The senate was still the university’s highest ruling body but it began to look more like a company’s governing board than the executive committee of a democratically organised public institution (Ørberg, 2007: 11). Its numbers were reduced from 32 to 14, plus the rector as chair. Two external members were introduced for the first time, along with five members representing management (usually the deans), two representatives of academics, two technical and administrative staff and three students. Its role was to protect the university’s long-term interests and approve the organisation of the institution, its statutes and budget—but the power to set the budget was passed to the rector. The rector could still be held in check by the senate and still shared power with the other departmental and faculty boards but he (sic) was no longer directly accountable to them. Instead, the rector was now directly elected by all the academics, administrative staff and students in the university. The dean’s power was similarly increased by taking over some of the faculty board’s executive roles and by having a seat on the senate. The dean was also directly elected by all the faculty’s employees and students, but had to be approved by the rector, giving the rector some vertical executive power that was not present in the 1970s laws (Ørberg, 2007: 12). The rector had a clearer mandate to act and speak as the representative of the university, although the tiers of semi-autonomous boards still meant the university was not a coherent organisation with one voice. The 1992 law represented a political compromise between sustaining ‘participatory democracy’ in semi-autonomous units and protecting the university’s institutional autonomy from the state, and the modernising agenda’s need for universities to become efficiently managed and accountable to outside interests and thereby fit the principal-agency vision of a modernised Danish state. The Ministry of Education meanwhile reformed technical schools according to the ‘modernising’ model. In 1991, they were freed from detailed ministerial steering, although their education was still regulated by a partnership with the ministry and employers’ representatives. They were made into ‘self-owning’ institutions with ownership of their buildings and a governing board that controlled their own budget and appointed the leader. To give the leader foresight over the school’s income, and induce schools to compete for students, their funding was changed to a standard ‘output payment’ every time a student passed an exam (Wright & Ørberg, 2020: 102).

A stream of reports argued for similar reforms in universities. The evaluation agency (EVA, 1995) argued for the establishment of university boards with an external majority, the engineers lobby group (ATV, 1997) argued for leadership reform, and the academic unions’ umbrella organisation (Salinas, 1998) caused uproar among its university members by proclaiming that elected leadership was ‘outdated, weak and incoherent’. Meanwhile research at the new Alborg University showed that the 1992 law’s enhancement of the power of deans had resulted in decisions being sewn up between the rector, deans and senate, and academics felt their participation was futile (Rasmussen, 1995). A student on Copenhagen University’s senate drew a similar picture, calling it ‘skin democracy’ (FORSKERforum, 1997: 14). Even within the Ministry of Education, the debate continued over how universities could fit into the vision of a modernised state and aspects of the technical schools’ model were only introduced piecemeal. Most importantly, the output payment for education was applied to universities in 1994. In an interview, a former senior civil servant explained that the Ministry of Education favoured steering through such incentives and funding allocations attached to simple outputs, as this gave universities scope for their own decisions about how to use their income. However, in contrast to the Ministry of Finance, they opposed any principal-agent-style contract between the Ministry and the university, as this would turn universities into a ‘steering hierarchy’ with the Ministry on top (Wright & Ørberg, 2020: 108–9).

A law in 1999 tried to strike a middle path. It did little to alter the framework of university decision-making and universities remained under the remit of the Ministry of Education. However, the Minister of Research was given a new competence to enter into ‘development contracts’ with universities over their objectives and activities (Folketinget, 1999: Sect. 2 point 3). These voluntary agreements between the Minister and the rector would collect all the university’s activities around a particular topic (e.g. internationalisation) into one public document that clarified the institution’s mission, objectives and strategy (Andersen, 2006). This was intended as a pedagogic tool, enabling the university to see how it could come together around a task under the central coordination of the rector—thereby also cutting into the power of deans and faculty boards (Ørberg, 2007: 13–14). Rectors were still not necessarily the strongest leader in their universities, but development contracts would enhance their position as the subject speaking for all the university (Ørberg ibid).

Meanwhile the Ministry of Finance’s principal-agency model for a modernised Danish public sector was not only being introduced in other educational institutions, but had been codified and applied to most other sectors. By the early 2000s, the issue about how to agencify universities had moved from persuasive pedagogy to pressing urgency as it was tied to a new vision of Denmark’s place in the world.

Phase 3: global knowledge economy

In 1995, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published a highly influential report (OECD, 1995) that depicted a fast approaching and inexorable future in which ‘knowledge’ would be the central resource in a new ‘global economy’. Competitive advantage lay in a highly skilled workforce converting knowledge into innovative products or new ways of organising operations. The OECD urged its (then) 34 members to retain their position as the world’s richest countries by becoming ‘knowledge economies’. They would ‘head’ this global economy and outsource repetitive, dirty and dangerous work to ‘hands’ in the rest of the world. The OECD’s Redefining Tertiary Education (OECD, 1998) put its accumulated work on higher education into this new frame by projecting a vision for universities in this future global knowledge economy (Wright and Ørberg 2011). The report mapped the changes needed in curriculum design, quality management, university leadership, and funding. International policy making moved fast to capture the opportunity to dominate this global economy. In 2000, the European Council’s Lisbon Strategy stressed that it was ‘urgent for the Union to act now to harness the full benefits of the opportunities presented’ and confront the ‘quantum shift resulting from globalisation and the challenges of the new knowledge-driven economy’ (EC, 2000: §2, §1). Universities had an important role in making the EU ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economy growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ by 2010 (EC, 2000: §5). A European Research Area was to create a single, borderless market for research, innovation and technology and attract the best ‘brains’. A highly skilled workforce would be achieved by halving the number of 18–24 year olds who were not in further education and training by 2010. The Lisbon Strategy set out the ‘new open method of coordination’ (OMC), the soft-power methods the EU would use to help Member States develop their own policies to achieve these targets. The OECD’s Public Management Committee (PUMA), its Centre for Educational Research and innovation (CERI) and its Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) all used OMC methods by involving member states in peer review, disseminating best practice and distilling policy advice, then setting targets and timetables, and using statistical indicators and benchmarks to compare members states’ progress and publicly report on their achievement (EC, 2000: §37).

The debate about how to prosper in this vision of a future knowledge economy was taken up avidly in Denmark (Wright & Ørberg, 2017). Danish politicians and civil servants were actively involved in committees and working groups of the EU, OECD and Bologna Process. They acted as conduits between their own ministry and international policy making (Wright, 2020b: 71–75). The confederation of Danish Industry (DI 1997), the engineers’ association (ATV 1997) and the Danish Centre for Analysis of Research Policy (CFA) issued a torrent of reports about knowledge transfer between universities and large firms in the Danish knowledge economy (pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, engineering, information and communication technology). These industries sought greater public funding for universities to produce more engineers and to engage in high risk, long-term scientific research, as the basis for industrial innovations (Wright & Ørberg, 2020: 95–6). These arguments repurposed universities as the instrumental suppliers of knowledge workers and innovative research for a globally competitive industrial sector.

There was a protracted debate in the policy community (with little involvement by universities themselves) about how universities’ organisation and leadership should be reformed for them to fulfil this role. Some reports from government and industrial pressure groups explained how Danish universities needed a similar organisation to the flat governance structures of firms. With flexible networking and mobility between institutions, the task of leadership was to facilitate cross-disciplinary and self-managing groups that were capable of adapting to a continually changing world. Against this, DI, for example, argued that universities needed a hierarchical organisation with strong leadership that was not impeded by collegial rule and ‘complacent culture’ (DI, 2000: 7). The rector should be a strong, central decision-maker, with whom industry could do business.

After a long debate, the Liberal party, the Social Democrats, DI and representatives of knowledge-based firms, along with unions representing both manufacturing workers and university graduates (but against the wishes of many of their members employed in universities) agreed on the hierarchical industrial model for universities to drive Denmark’s competitiveness in the future global knowledge economy (Wright & Ørberg, 2020: 114). This vision chimed with the Ministry of Finance’s continuing public sector reforms. The university, redesignated as a ‘service provider’, would be ‘set free’ from direct Ministerial management. Leaders would have enhanced capacities to manage a clearly bounded and hierarchical organisation to which the ministry could contract out responsibility for producing innovative knowledge and knowledge workers. When a Liberal and Conservative government took power after the 2001 election, they carried this shared position into law (Folketinget 2003).

The 2003 University Law made fundamental changes to the status, governance, organisation and leadership of universities. Their status changed from ‘self-steering’ (selvstyring) to ‘self-owning’ (selvejende) institutions – both translated as ‘autonomous’. This made the university into a juridical person that was separated from the state and could enter into contracts. Universities were charged with a new legal responsibility to exchange knowledge with ‘surrounding society’, which meant ministries, industry, other public agencies, local authorities and community and interest groups could make demands on universities for their services. As ‘free’ agents and autonomous legal persons, universities were to negotiate these demands and agree them through contracts. In doing so, the law also made universities responsible for defending their own research freedom and ethics: the state had no duty to protect the university from political or industrial pressures.

A juridical person in Ciepley’s terms is ‘an invisible and intangible legal posit’ that cannot act: it needs an agent (personal communication). In this case a new governing board (bestyrelsen) became the highest authority – it is the university. It consisted of a majority of appointed external members, including the chair, and a minority of elected representatives (1 or 2 academics, 2 students and 1 administrator). The internal governance of the university was then turned upside down. The rector, deans and institute leaders were no longer accountable to their constituencies. Now the board appointed the rector who appointed the deans who appointed the institute leaders, and each leader was accountable upwards. Staff and students were no longer represented in the figure of the rector. He or she would only be accountable to the governing board and would be the interlocutor for government and industry, speaking for or as ‘his/her university’ (Ørberg, 2007). The elected senate, faculty boards and institute boards were all abolished. Only the study boards with elected students and academics remained and new faculty-level Academic Councils gave elected academics quality assurance functions and no powers. According to Ciepley, usually a self-owning institution would be self-governing and generate its own policy. But in Denmark, the change from self-steering to self-owning meant academic and technical staff and students lost their membership status. They became employees and clients. Despite the law saying leaders should involve academics in major decisions, this has never been achieved (Hertel, 2023: 3). One of the ways the minister said he was ‘setting universities’ free was by giving leaders ‘freedom to manage’, with executive powers and no downward accountability. The ‘self-owning’ university was structured as a coherent organisation, capable of being managed, with vertical integration and a consistent subjectivity.

‘Setting universities free’ also meant developing a new governing relationship between the ministry and the university as the state could no longer instruct ‘self-owning’ institutions (Ørberg & Wright, 2020: 127-156). The government could either pass legislation, or request universities to do something voluntarily. But the government  had three important steering tools. First, ‘self-owning’ universities (unlike the technical colleges) for the most part were not allowed to own their land or buildings. This meant they lacked capital assets through which to raise mortgages or loans and finance their independent development. Payments also changed from grant (bevilling) to performance payments (tilskud), and this gave government the capacity to control universities’ liquidity. The output payments for teaching were used to micro-manage numbers and kinds of students and to give preferential payment rates for STEM as against Humanities courses. Second, development contracts were no longer a voluntary and pedagogic tool: now universities were required to enter into four-yearly development contracts with the ministry. These reflected the ministry’s policy priorities and although there was no funding attached to them, the state auditor annually reviewed contractual performance. Third the system for assuring accountability became a proactive inspection regime (tilsyn), with ministry officials visiting each university twice a year to ‘help improve’ organisational efficiency and performance.

At the time of passing the reform, there was debate about whether the new status, organisation, steering and management of universities would ‘set them free’ to be a ‘power force in society’. Would the state setting the policy and resources for universities through what was called ‘Aim and Frame steering’ provide opportunities for leaders and academics to use their enhanced capacities and initiate developments for Denmark beyond what the ministry could envisage (Ørberg & Wright, 2020:130)? Or would the ministry-university relationship become that of principal and agent? Would the ministry’s steering tools, the relationship with the boards, and the hierarchical and upwardly accountable management turn the university into a tightly controlled service provider? Would disenfranchised academics, administrators and students be tightly managed to produce the instrumentalised teaching and research outputs the government deemed necessary for competitiveness in the global knowledge economy? The university’s leadership was autonomous in the sense that it was ‘set free’ with enhanced capacities to manage the organisation—but they were also responsibilised to produce the results that government required (Amsler & Shore, 2017; Rawolle et al., 2017; Wright & Ørberg, 2008), Initially, as the next section shows, the government’s ‘Aim and Frame’ for university policy did enable leaders and academics to position their universities and disciplines in a new global context. But over time, the vision of Denmark’s future in a global knowledge economy became blurred with a new national focus. The ministry’s control of universities’ liquidity became a major tool for implementing political decisions against which university leaders found they had little room for manoeuvre, let alone independent action.

Phase 4: from global to national visions of Denmark

Between 2003 and the present, there has been no further major legislation, but the way Aim and Frame steering has operated has changed considerably as the politicians’ vision of Denmark has transformed, and with it, the role of universities. This shift is best illustrated through changes to internationalisation. The government followed the 2003 law with a Globalisation Strategy in 2006 which aimed to ensure Denmark maintained its position as ‘one of the richest countries is the world’ (Government of Denmark, 2006:1). A year later the Ministry of Education and Science and Foreign Ministry collaborated in establishing intergovernmental agreements, a Sino-Danish Centre in Beijing and innovation centres in seven ‘innovative hotspots’ around the world. An attaché at each innovation centre was to link companies and education and research institutions in that country to counterparts in Denmark with a view to collaborative education, research and enterprises. The government provided this framework for university leaders, academics and students to fill out using their enhanced capacity for strategic action. Acting on their own visions for the international future of their university, discipline and education, this resulted in a very successful growth in international networking, collaborative research and publications, and new English-medium education programmes (Wright, 2022).

Suddenly, in 2018, the Liberal-led coalition government instructed universities to cut 1,200 places in English medium education by the start of the next academic year. Universities were each told how many places to cut, and their freedom consisted of deciding how to do so. In November 2020, the Social Democrat government required further cuts. This was not only a reversal of the globalisation policy; it was also a change from arms-length ‘Aim and Frame’ steering, which relied on leaders, academics and students using their capacity for innovation to enact a political vision of Denmark’ place in the world. Now, in what came to be called ‘Commando-way’ steering, a command from on high was to be carried out without question by a hierarchy of responsibilised leaders.

The shift from globalisation to de-internationalisation signalled the politicians’ adopting a nationalist vision for Denmark. In 2013, the Court of Justice of the European Union had ruled that if EU/EEA students in Denmark worked 12 hours per week, they were eligible for a student grant (SU). The Danish Folk Party mobilized the annoyance felt by many of the other political parties to negotiate a political agreement that set a ceiling for SU spending on EU students. The ceiling was breached in 2018 and, despite the cuts to international-student places, again in 2019. The Danish Folk Party’s spokesperson for education and research, Jens Henrik Thulesen Dahl, explained his party’s thinking:

The problem is that we offer an education service here that they don’t have in Romania, so clearly, they look to take a degree up here, but we need to ensure first and foremost, that our tax funds go to educating Danish young people. …Education must be conducted in Danish, because if we offer English language education we are open to these migrant workers.Footnote 3 (quoted in Richter, 2018).

In other words, Danish free higher education and student grants were for Danes. The only way to stop EU and EEA students (without breaking international agreements) was to close courses in English, even though this also stopped non-European, fee-paying students from coming to Denmark. Not only was this deleterious for university economies and pedagogies, it also went against the argument, put over vehemently by DI, that international students were needed for the Danish labour force. The main political argument was that international students were a drain on the Danish economy, even though research by the rectors’ association Dansk Universiteter, and the ministry itself showed that all students, even humanities students and even those who left Denmark immediately on graduating, made a positive contribution to the Danish economy (Wright, 2022). This neo-nationalist ideology was reinforced by the migration crisis in 2015 and gradually became mainstreamed in Danish politics. After the 2015 election, the Liberal party government relied on the Danish People’s Party, which had 21% of the vote, to pass legislation. This gave their neonationalism enormous influence, not least in higher education policy. In the 2019 election, the Social Democrat party won, largely by adopting this stance of protecting the welfare state against foreigners (Brøgger, 2023: 283).

The neonationalist agenda has been manifested in two further policies. In 2021, as universities were adjusting to the end of the Corona lockdowns, the government instructed universities either to cut 10% of their student places, or move them out of the cities. There had long been debates about regional inequalities, with 33 rural communes classified as ‘outlying Denmark’ (udkantsdanmark), marked by lack of opportunities and social inequality. The ‘relocation’ (udflytning) policy emphasised universities’ role in unifying Denmark as a nation and was also thought by many to be the Social Democrats’ attempt to woo the rural vote prior to local elections (Brøgger et al., 2023:21). The universities, for the first time, made a coordinated response and negotiated the reductions down to 6.4%. Whilst this demonstrated a new capacity for action, they still were made responsible for working out how to achieve this political target by 2030.

A further dimension of the neo-nationalist vision of Denmark was evident in proposals announced in 2022 to reduce half of all masters’ (kandidat) degrees from 2 years to one year. The Social Democrat government had set up a Reform Commission in 2020, which reviewed the whole education system from the point of view of labour market needs and making a robust economy—not including educational considerations. On higher education, the Commission claimed, on the basis of its own calculations, that whereas 16% of the 25–69 age group had a bachelor’s or master’s degree in 2020, this would rise to 30% by 2050 (Reform Commission, 2022: 12). They argued for changing half of the master’s degrees to one year, or to an industrial degree where students worked alongside studying, increasing intake into professional bachelor degrees for welfare state professionals, and offering free education for adults later in life (Reform Commission, 2022: 7, 104). Employment was only considered in terms of the Danish labour market, not European or global labour markets and the proposals went against the Bologna mobility gaols and the European three-cycle degree system (Brøgger, 2023: 285). After extensive lobbying and public debate, the Social Democrat, Liberal and Moderate coalition government reached agreement with four other parties to reduce places on bachelor degrees by 8%, retain 70% of 2-year masters programmes, and make 10% of the rest into 11/4 year bachelors and 20% into industrial master’s degrees. In addition, industrial lobbying for international students in certain sectors of the Danish labour market resulted in universities being allowed to set up 1,100 English medium study places each year from 2024 to 2028 and 2,500 each year from 2029. Universities succeeded in securing a permanent commitment about the level of education output payments for humanities and social sciences, which had been insecure. The government then established a national committee to decide in absolute secrecy how to implement the candidate reforms. This committee was chaired by the Ministry of Education Science with ‘universities’ (i.e. rectors), students and employers as its members—notably the perspectives of educators were absent. Rectors’ newsletters to staff were saying that the result was not as bad as feared, but this still envisioned universities as the instrumental suppliers of skilled labour for the Danish economy, and treated university leaders as the responsibilised agents of neonationalist political policies.

Conclusion

This article has traced four historical moments when politicians’ vision of Denmark’s future and its place in the world has substantially changed over five decades. At each moment, the universities’ role in achieving that future vision was redefined: from spearheading workplace democracy, to being part of a modernised public sector based on principal-agent relationships, to driving the global knowledge economy, and finally providing the labour market needs of a welfare-protectionist and neo-nationalist Denmark. Each of these moves occasioned new relationships between the government and the university and within the university—indeed who constituted the university also changed. Throughout there have been terms that can be translated as ‘autonomy’, but the meanings and practices have differed radically at different moments. A ‘self-steering’ institution with a range of loosely coupled, elected and semi-independent boards was changed into a ‘self-owning’ institution, where a governing board with a majority of government-approved external members became the highest authority and appointed a rector over a tightly hierarchical organisation and a chain of upwardly accountable leaders. Initially, within the framework of ‘self-owning’ institutions, the relationship with government meant the minister set the policy aims and the legal and budget frame and the leaders, academics and students used the university’s enhanced capacity for strategic action to enact their own priorities and academic agendas whilst fulfilling the political vision for Denmark’s future. Most recently, this relationship between the government and the university has changed radically. In a bowdlerised meaning of autonomy, the government now makes decisions about the role of universities in Denmark’s national welfare state, regional development and labour market needs and these are handed to leaders (with varying degrees of prior consultation) who have the ‘freedom’ and responsibility to devise the way to implement them in their institution. This became clear in a recent interview about the relocation policy:

Wright: But you are a ‘self-owning institution’, aren’t you? They can´t just tell you what to do, can they?

Senior administrator: But in the end they can. They do own us, so on the bottom line they can tell us what to do. They did not pass a law, but they could have done that, as they have a political majority behind this plan. And as a state employee, we have an obligation to adhere to the agendas of the ministry and the parliament.

Wright: But you are not state employees, are you? ….

Senior administrator: Yes, in principle we are. We answer to the state as our employer. It would look very strange if we refused to adhere to the political agreement that has been made. That is not an actual possibility. I do think this is on the edge of what the political system can tell a ‘self-owning institution’ to do.

At its baldest, in this ‘commando-way’ steering, ‘autonomy’ means leaders have the freedom to work out, with very little room for manoeuvre, how to fulfil the political targets set by government.