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International
Quality Assurance
Dr. Andris
Barblan
Secretary
General, Association of European Universities, GENEVA
Plenary
Luncheon Keynote Speech
CHEA 2001 Annual Conference • New Orleans, LA
Tuesday, January 23, 2001
In areas of Eastern Africa, when two people meet, the first person to
greet says: "I see you," while the other answers: "I
am here to be seen." In a nutshell, you have it all: recognition,
openness and trust, the ingredients of any quality assurance system.
"I see you,"..."I am here to be seen."
Indeed, when starting a dialogue, we must first
notice the presence of an opposite ("I see you"); in other
words we must recognize the outsider's presence and difference. Acceptance
of the other is a prerequisite for any real exchange. Imagine a conversation
with your own double: it would soon peter out for lack of arguments.
There would be even no point to start it—unless you like self-indulging
monologues! Any assurance process thus begins by postulating the existence
of some difference, i.e., a gap in being that makes the encounter
worthwhile.
Should you wish to define the extent of that
variance, you would need the other's willingness to engage in a process
of discovery of his specificity vis-a-vis your own nature. Hence the
importance of the "I am here to be seen," as it implies an
opening to the other's gaze and queries, the acceptance of a search
for a distinct identity. However, if the gap between our beings is to
be explored to its limits, if we wish to be transparent to each other,
there is also a need for shared references helping to bridge that gap,
a need for accepted areas of common interest, some kind of common platform—not
only in terms of rational explanations for, the more distant the positions,
the more important becomes the trust making possible the weaving of
varied situations into a compatible entity. Otherwise, difference would
engulf commonality and break the conversation.
If this is true of two persons, it is also
relevant for two institutions—or more. In the quality assurance
business, we are all seeing each other, and we are all there to be seen
by the others.
A. The European Context
The organizers asked me to look at the topic from an international perspective.
As "I am here to be seen" as a European—in this case
the main difference beyond the commonality of our basic conditions as
university people—I will limit my international perspective to
the 42 countries that have members in the Association of European Universities,
from Russia to Portugal, from Iceland to Cyprus, including of course
the fifteen members of the European Union at the core of the continent
and of its integration.
The sample is good enough, as there are at least
as many systems of higher education as there are nations that feel that
they are stakeholders in the European culture. In fact, there are a
few more, if you consider federal states like Germany or Switzerland—or
countries that are slowly reorganising themselves along federal lines,
like Spain or even Italy. Their systems are made of varied sub-systems,
which often differ widely from one province to the other. Of course,
there are commonalities of purpose or structure between some areas of
the continent: the Humboldtian model of a university where research
fertilizes teaching is still prevailing in German-speaking and Scandinavian
countries, while the Anglo-Saxon model of a chartered independent institution
typifies the British Isles; as for the Napoleonic model making the university
a tool of national public service, it survives in different forms from
France to Turkey, or in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Over time, and since World War II, differentiation
in each of these models has grown with the development of mass higher
education: in the Netherlands and Belgium, this has meant setting
up a dual offer of higher education, academic on one side, vocational
on the other. More recently, countries like Finland, Norway, Austria,
Hungary or the Czech Republic have moved the same way. Britain, on the
contrary, subsumed its vibrant polytechnic sector, vocational in purpose,
into the university world—doubling the number of academic institutions
in a few years. Other countries kept a unitary approach to higher education,
each university covering a full range of postsecondary activities in
terms of learning. In Spain, Greece or Italy, larger and larger institutions
diversified their offer, rather than spawning new and smaller universities
like proved the case in France, Sweden or Turkey. Central and Eastern
Europe inherited from a Soviet past a fragmented system of courses offered
by many small and highly specialized schools, while research was kept
aside under the responsibility of the National Academy of Sciences.
Today, the trend is towards merging—for instance, in Hungary, where
the government recently imposed a redistribution of higher education
in just a few institutions.
If one moves from systems of institutions to
the services provided, things vary considerably, a degree in
law being taught in Germany in 5 to 7 years or, in France, in 4 to 5
years. In both these countries, there is no control at the entry as
all students with a diploma from a secondary school are entitled to
register in the university of their choice. In England, where there
is a strict admission process, students first graduate when they are
22 or 23, whereas in Germany they usually leave higher education between
25 and 27 years of age. Here, classes are large, there they are small
and pedagogy differs accordingly. In several countries, a first degree
takes 4 to 5 years to obtain—corresponding to the level of an MA—and,
until recently in Italy, the Laurea was the only degree awarded. Moreover,
the division into disciplines—and the corresponding degrees—varies
from a country or a system to another. In other words, students of different
ages train in schools of different scope in fields of different importance
on the basis of different intellectual inputs. Add to this that such
training is done in more than 30 different languages with the support
of as many diverging systems of grants or loans. No wonder that non-Europeans
have difficulties piecing this all together—but the same is true
of the Europeans themselves, all the more so as the national borders
too often still limit intellectual mobility.
Then, what does unite institutions and systems
of higher education in Europe? In general, higher education services
are mainly provided by state institutions, which are supported
by public money. Indeed, private higher education is still rare or very
recent—except for traditional Catholic universities—for instance
in countries where the government has difficulties to meet increased
demand, like Portugal or, in Central and Eastern Europe, Romania, Hungary
or Poland. Even there, however, the general consensus remains that higher
education is a public service, the organization of which is the
responsibility of the state: Governments are thus expected to ensure
as equal an access as possible to all citizens able to benefit from
academic training, be they in large cities or in underpopulated areas;
consequently, they regulate provision, allow for teaching in specific
areas of knowledge, control quality and pay for teachers or support
staff—people who, in many countries, are enrolled as civil servants.
In other words, European states all consider that they have a proactive
and integrative part to play in higher education while European citizens
consider that they pay for higher education as taxpayers rather than
as customers. Hence the difficulty for impoverished governments to introduce
fees or even legislation encouraging institutions to generate extra
income by their own means. The central role of the state explains the global homogeneity of higher education in Europe as well as its practical fragmentation due to some 40 governments feeling rather
jealous of their own prerogatives in university education: National
borders are still difficult to cross for academic purposes. And that
is true for students and for professors.
As a countervailing feature, there is the economic process of integration in the European Union: In a market of
some 400 million people, when goods, individuals and services are free
to move, intellectual training should also enjoy relaxed protection
since citizens must be able to use their education in all member countries
of the Union. Hence, the EU Commission and Parliament have been active
in simplifying rules, in moving from degree equivalence to the recognition
of qualifications or, at present, to the acceptance of learning outcomes;
thus, the trend is towards the host country having to prove that the
degree granted in another country, at least for three-year professional
qualifications, is clearly lacking in comparison to the national scale
of competencies. The other approach was to show in the daily reality
of institutions that the presence of other Europeans in their classes
was more of an advantage than a danger. ERASMUS—and its companion
programmes like COMETT, LEONARDO or COMENIUS—started in the mid-'80s
and have helped hundreds of thousands of students to join a course—for
a term or two—in another country before coming home to take a degree.
This encouraged institutions to discover how similar was their teaching
beyond explicit differences: Apart from common national molds, universities
also refer to shared traditions leading to common scientific references
in most fields of learning. On that basis—made evident by mobile
students—the European Commission helped create ECTS, a credit transfer
system allowing to compare the workload of students when training in
a specific field, even if using different languages. The success of
the ERASMUS program has made EU programs most attractive in non-EU countries,
in particular in the many Central and Eastern European states asking
for membership in the Union. Brussels acts as a magnet inside and outside
of the EU, thus stimulating the creation of platforms of convergence.
B. The Sorbonne and Bologna
Declarations
Internationalization means that countries also recognize the need to
see each other while accepting to be seen by others. Thus, in 1998,
a few nations decided that their commonalities deserved strengthening
into a multilateral effort of academic cooperation—an initiative
for which they would take the lead rather than the European Commission.
At the invitation of the French Minister of Education, his German, Italian
and British colleagues met in Paris on the occasion of the 800th anniversary
of the Sorbonne University: For two days in May, the four Ministers
headed discussion groups and took part in panels with European academic
leaders, union representatives, student delegates and prominent scientists
(thus consulting the people directly involved in their sector of responsibility).
They later signed a declaration calling for a common architecture
of degrees in their four countries. The process was to remain open
to other nations willing to join. Without saying it, the Ministers were
recognizing the similarity of their power in higher education by committing
themselves to converging reforms in their national system of higher
education—in fact, they were referring to Anglo-Saxon structures
of learning, the BA, the MA and the PhD as a potential tool of increasing
commonality.
A year later, in June 1999, in Bologna, the
Italian Minister of Education reciprocated the invitation but extended
it to all European nations interested by complementary reform in their
academic development. Thirty Ministers joined the meeting, from Romania
to Portugal, from Sweden to Greece and, after a day of conversation
with some 200 representatives of the higher education sector in Europe,
they signed another declaration pledging themselves to the creation
by 2010 of a common European space of higher education implying
early reforms in specific areas of concern.
Those reforms would be launched under their
national responsibility but would attempt to steer change into common
developments: Each country was thus to work on introducing a two-tier
structure in curricula, i.e., a first degree of at least three years,
the BA, leading either to the labor market or to a second degree, the
MA, in the next year or so. Thus, European students should be able to
train and prepare for a PhD after a five-year period of earlier training
at the university. This should entail easy comparison between learning
experiences: hence the need for reinforcing the credit transfer system
and for exploring its transformation into a European credit transfer
and accumulation system. Credit transfer and accumulation also imply
some kind of appreciation of learning: The Ministers thus indicated
their intention to set up converging paths as far as evaluation and
quality assessment was concerned. As a result, international mobility
would increase further, a trend that could be reinforced by practical
measures helping students and staff to cross borders without suffering
disincentives such as bureaucratic delays and administrative red
tape. Helping individuals to make out of Europe a common whole should
be based not only on technical measures, however, but also on enlarging
the European dimension of curricula.
Finally, the Ministers expressed their wish
to meet 2 years later and to take stock of the measures decided in their
various countries to turn their intentions into action. The Czech Republic
offered to host a ministerial summit in Prague in May 200—where
higher education delegates would also present to political leaders their
views on the further development of a European space of higher education.
To prepare their position, the institutions of higher education decided
to meet as a Convention six weeks earlier, at the end of March in Salamanca,
Spain; the higher education community—students and unions included—would
decide there of their support to the development of some 6 to 10 levers
for change which Ministers in Prague could include in some kind of action
plan for the further implementation of the Bologna Declaration.
"I see you."..."I am here
to be seen." Over the last two years, the Bologna process ignited
hundreds of conversations, discussions and debates—in institutions,
in university associations, in student organizations, in ministerial
cabinets and among graduate employers. All were trying to imagine the
shape of a European space of higher education and their role as stakeholders
of such a system where commonalities of purpose, of structures and of
action would help bypass or subsume traditional differences. At a European
level, the 30 Ministers nominated in their cabinet one officer to take
charge of the Bologna process, these contact persons meeting with higher
education representatives and EU delegates at least every six months
to exchange notes and steer national transformation along converging
lines of European interest. With the support of the European Commission,
various conferences have explored the potential of new structures in
the region as a whole, for instance to allow for credit accumulation;
for professional integration after three years of study for a BA; for
the provision of transnational education; or for accreditation as a
result of quality assessment. In each of these meetings, ministerial
representatives joined with representatives of the higher education
sector, at national or European level. Europe is brewing with ideas
for change and several countries have already taken far-reaching
decisions. In Italy, for instance, the universities were given two years
to change all their curricula from a traditional four to five year structure
leading to the Laurea, the U.S. equivalent of a MA, to a two tier structure,
three years for a BA and two more years for a MA. At the same time,
however, to allow for real changes, the government decided to relax
administrative controls on academic provision and to grant real autonomy
to institutions so that they could differentiate their services according
to their strengths and to the needs of their own community. In Rome,
indeed, the Bologna process is no paper tiger only!
C. The Internationalisation of Quality Processes
Many other examples could be added to show that a process has really
begun, even if nobody really knows where it will lead to in the coming
decade. One thing is sure: It deals with identity structures, university
profiles, service quality, customers' satisfaction and student protection.
To enter discussion of these areas of interest, the Bologna Declaration
points to four aspects in the exploration process of European similarities:
readability, comparability, compatibility and transparency. In fact,
they represent four stages in a deepening dialogue between the "I
see you" and the "I am here to be seen." And that is
why they can have wider than European value.
Readability: At first, the partners take mutual note of their
presence, wonder about the shared elements of their identity and the
definition of their differences; to size up each other, they need to
test the value of those words and concepts used to communicate. While
doing so, they tend to develop a set of common references with
which they can introduce each other.
In the Bologna process, this stage is represented
by the recommendation to use a diploma supplement, i.e., a document
that would explain the content and efforts implied in the learning of
the various disciplines that combine into a degree. Indeed, experts,
teachers and employers of graduates had been working already for a while
on a template reflecting these discussions by making clear not only
the learning acquired and the capacity to comprehend a discipline shown
by the degree holder, but also the national context and the preliminary
experience of the student which would give depth to the graduate's competencies—as
recognized in his or her own country. The document took years to develop
as it required a long consultancy process in order to ensure that the
concepts used were the same despite the many languages and academic
systems dividing the European higher education community. The diploma
supplement is now being added to degree certificates in pilot institutions—before
its use is soon generalized.
Even if the process proved long and difficult,
readability did not imply changes in the provision of higher education
in the various countries adopting the supplement. Common references
just allowed for clarity; they did not entice value judgements on the
partners. They represented signs posted on the road to understanding
the other.
Comparability: Shared references are a sine qua non for
comparisons, the second stage in a deepening dialogue. "I am
here to be seen" sounds very passive but the gaze of the other,
by itself, implies a living contact with the partner. Hence, to explore
differences as part of their conversation, partners need a set of
common criteria that reflect their acceptance of each other's queries.
In the Bologna process, this stage is represented
by the recommendation to generalize the use of the European credit transfer
system. ECTS had been created for assessing the workload of exchange
students joining courses in another institution as part of the ERASMUS
program: Acceptance of the content of the course had been prepared by
teachers from several institutions meeting to compare discipline requirements
and pedagogy in advance of the exchange of their undergraduates, usually
for their third or fourth term of studies. In such a protected environment,
workload—i.e., the teaching process—represented the main variable
when comparing the learning experience since trust about the content
had been developed otherwise. Students' workload for a year had to be
expressed in terms of 60 credits. Each institution was to devise ways
to allocate effort to credits and it soon became apparent that the exercise
could be done for all curricula at all levels in any given institution.
Universities began to move from a partial use of ECTS in the ERASMUS
framework to an institutional use of ECTS credits not only for the external
but also for the internal comparability of academic provision. All countries
are now encouraging the spread of the system—and also its possible
extension to content evaluation as the generalization of ECTS
no longer requires preliminary discussions with international partners
about the extent of common course material and the similarity in didactics.
The process was slow to develop, but now hundreds
of universities have decided to use ECTS as a matter of course, since
it helps them to monitor the provision of services inside the institution.
Common criteria allow for the common understanding of differences, which
partners—national or European—can now recognize as objective,
but they do not require institutional changes in order to iron out such
differences.
Compatibility:
Shared criteria are a prerequisite for compatibility, the third stage
of an inquisitive dialogue. At that stage, value judgements become the
norm as a consequence of the comparative exercise. To keep the openness
required by a working partnership, i.e., the trust in a fair and constructive
evaluation by others, the need for a set of common principles
becomes obvious.
In the Bologna process, this stage is represented
by the recommendation to assess the impact of credit accumulation and
of quality evaluation on European higher education. Traditionally, quality
structures have been developed by governments wishing to monitor—or
control—the value of academic services in their country. In Europe,
authorities rarely sanction faulty departments or institutions; rather,
they attempt to spur improvement so that higher education as a public
service can be continued. The sophistication of the process, and its
extent, however, are very different from country to country, and so
is the maturity of the agencies entrusted with the assessment. France,
Britain and the Netherlands were the first to engage in the cyclical
evaluation of their universities and developed central structures able
to audit institutions and evaluate programs. Later, other countries
followed suit, but each with a different set of priorities and modalities.
In the early '90s, the European Commission decided
to convene the various actors in the field, mainly the national agencies,
to see if some common agenda could be drawn out from various country
approaches. As states were considering that the control of education
remained a basic prerogative of governments, European efforts had to
be limited to the development of a platform for information exchange.
That was the basis for ENQA, the European Network of Quality Agencies,
set up two years ago. However, after the Bologna Declaration was signed,
comparison of good practice seemed very minimal compared to the ambitious
goal of a European space of higher education. Institutions have
not only to develop side by side, under frontier protection, but also,
and much more so, to work together across national borders. Compatibility
of governance procedures, of development conditions, of curricular patterns,
of program selection, is now needed and this implies a consensus on
shared principles by which the academic world could abide everywhere
in the region.
The conferences organized at the European level
in the framework of the Bologna process all search for such core principles
that would institutionalize convergence by turning it into compatibility:
moving from credit transfer to credit accumulation, from academic degrees
to qualifications with market value, from national protection to competition
with border-less education, from evaluation to accreditation—all
these themes imply transformations in systems and institutions if they
are to adapt to changed conditions. As a result, compatibility means
commitment, i.e., taking choices of improvement at the risk of convergence.
Transparency: At the end of the dialectical process, partners
should all recognise that "they are here to be seen," in other
words that their books are open and that their agenda for change and
their priorities are shared by the European community of higher education.
Thus, its development as a whole would grow on a trust based on a common
understanding of higher education's new international identity.
In the Bologna process, this last stage is represented
by the call for a European space of higher education to be set
up by 2010. Indeed, if intellectual services are to be as free flowing
as material goods, financial products or individual citizens in a Union
enlarged to the wider part of geographical Europe, openness will need
to be reinforced, although without harming institutions in weaker positions—perhaps
by stressing again the importance of public service, i.e., the regulatory
tradition of political authorities, at executive and legislative level.
However, the most innovative element in the Bologna process in terms
of transparency is the ongoing dialogue between the Ministers and the
representatives of the higher education community. Claude Allegre, then
Minister of Education in France, at a CRE conference in Bordeaux just
a few weeks before Bologna in 1999, urged higher education institutions
"to put their act together" in order to become reliable partners
for politicians interested in tomorrow's knowledge society—a good
justification for an enlarged autonomy at the service of the community.
Since then, the tension between the political and academic poles of
the debate has been kept and, born out of that tension, exchanges, proposals,
meetings and debates multiplied in a seemingly disorderly but constructive
way, uninvited opinions coming to the fore as well as fully thought
through strategies of change and progress.
This paradoxical situation can question administrative
rationality but, should one of the poles be turned off, the other would
immediately stop and the circuit of innovation would die out. As a result,
the future of the Bologna process is much linked to the openness and
the will for transparency manifested in its first few years. Uncertainty,
flexibility and inventiveness are both the children of tension as well
as the conditions of social innovation. History will say if European
higher education will have taken up this opportunity for re-engineering
its development, thus managing a course of discomfort in order to weave
the European dimension in all its activities, norms and values. The
process is risky, but that is why it is so challenging and interesting.
D. Lessons from Europe
Let us stress first the obvious: For people to meet, there must be an
occasion to do so. Even better, there must be a need to so. In Europe,
since the end of World War II, countries and institutions have met again
and again, getting to know each other, comparing each other, committing
to shared purposes, joining in common action. This is the whole history
of the movement of European integration since the '50s.
It matured faster in the economic field—the
creation of a single market for goods, capital and services—than
in social areas or the intellectual domain. In the latter fields, nation-states
pressed to retain their autonomy as far as social and educational policies
were concerned. The complexity of the process increased when the Union
moved from 6, to 9, to 12, to 15 members. And now it is expecting another
14 nations to join in the coming decade! Basically, however, all these
countries—when entering the Union—accept the existing state
of integration and adapt their internal structures to those prevailing
in the Union. This is what is called in Brussels the acquis communautaire.
In other words, states and institutions must become euro-compatible
before entering the community. And, here too, compatibility means transformation.
The need for intellectual services to become
an integral part of some kind of acquis communautaire has grown
with the free flow of individuals moving in search of labor from one
country to another: Anywhere in Europe, people want to capitalize on
their training and acquired competencies, and in the same conditions
if possible. The future enlargement of the Union from a community of
some 400 to some 600 million inhabitants now compels nations to move
from ad hoc bilateral recognition to a multilateral acceptance of the
education given in other countries. But, if this is not to be done at
the detriment of the citizens—i.e., the lowering of requirements
to reach the lowest common denominator existing between varying systems
of education in some 30 countries—converging paths towards the
improvement of the system considered as a European whole must be defined
and agreed upon by all partners in the higher education community.
For many years, and in many areas of knowledge,
this is still the case; people and institutions have remained at the readability stage, getting to know the differences rather than
pointing to the commonalities. In the Union, there have been efforts
steered by the Commission in Brussels to move to the comparability
stage of any dialogue, for example through ECTS, and even to compatibility,
through common programs like ERASMUS or SOCRATES. But, even there, the
work was based on the search for existing commonalities rather than
on inventing new ones. A European added value based on a set of common
principles agreed upon for Europe as a whole was not so essential.
The Bologna process—paradoxically by turning back to the nations
themselves as the main partners in the integration movement—is
emphasizing again that the whole is more than the sum of its parts,
and that, as a consequence, Europe has a structure of its own that can
become the target for converging approaches in higher education and
research.
Such a European identity should be the basis
for the presence and action of European institutions of higher education
in other parts of the world, either by attracting more students to Europe
or by offering European courses outside the region. Indeed, the Ministers
have asked for increased attractiveness in order to compete better with
the rest of the world. Cohesion—expressed by readability, comparability and compatibility—would be our best comparative advantage—but
there is a long way to go! All the more so, as many competitors are
nearer to that objective than the many countries of Europe considered
as a group.
The Bologna Declaration would have had no impact
had it not fallen on prepared ground. Indeed, and this is true for any
process in international quality improvement, compatibility cannot be
reached if the earlier stages of the dialogue have not been developed
-- the readability and comparability stages. The growth towards transparency
is really an organic process. Bypassing earlier stages in the encounter
process is like building a house on sand.
An organic process implies patience, a growing
understanding of each other's commonalities, a slow trial-and-error
approach to define shared references, shared criteria
and shared principles. Patience and caring for changes achieved
step by step are then the keys to transformation into a compatible international ensemble whose dynamics are given by a nexus of tensions, those
poles of decision—political, academic, economic—looking for
shared power in order to reach a common aim. Hence, the importance of
having and being strong and credible partners.
To sum up, any encounter of the other, any taming
of the fears evoked by the other, is based on a change of attitude,
moving from suspicion based on an emphasis on differences to convergence
patterns which stress commonalities, i.e., potential areas of confidence;
convergence, as a consequence, leads to discovering coherence
between activities, norms and values as far as they express the institution's
identity; when taking advantage of such shared features in academic
work in order to develop compatible programmes, institutions then move
to some kind of cohesion as a team of actors. As soon as trust
has developed to the point of setting up common activities using the
group's own specificity, the process should move from cohesion to consistency,
or transparency in action.
"From convergence to consistency,"
this should be the motto of quality improvement and accreditation in
higher education, at national, European or global levels.
"I saw you"..."I was also here to be seen."
Now the floor is yours.
Thank you for your attention.
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