Figuration Work: Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy 9781782387725

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FIGURATION WORK

EASA Series

Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Series Editor: Eeva Berglund, Helsinki University Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes, and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. 1. LEARNING FIELDS Volume 1 Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology Edited by Dorle Dracklé, Iain R. Edgar and Thomas K. Schippers 2. LEARNING FIELDS Volume 2 Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education Edited by Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar 3. GRAMMARS OF IDENTITY/ALTERITY A Structural Approach Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich 4. MULTIPLE MEDICAL REALITIES Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine Edited by Helle Johannessen and Imre Lázár 5. FRACTURING RESEMBLANCES Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West Simon Harrison 6. SKILLED VISIONS Between Apprenticeship and Standards Edited by Cristina Grasseni 7. GOING FIRST CLASS? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement Edited by Vered Amit 8. EXPLORING REGIMES OF DISCIPLINE The Dynamics of Restraint Edited by Noel Dyck 9. KNOWING HOW TO KNOW Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present Edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely 10. POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE Anthropological Perspectives from Home Edited by László Kürti and Peter Skalník 11. ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN THE PRESENT Edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell and Helena Wulff 12. CULTURE WARS Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts Edited by Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice and Christina Toren 13. POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY Thomas Hauschild 14. POLICY WORLDS Anthropology and Analysis of Contemporary Power Edited by Cris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però

15. HEADLINES OF NATION, SUBTEXTS OF CLASS Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe Edited by Don Kalb and Gabor Halmai 16. ENCOUNTERS OF BODY AND SOUL IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES Anthropological Reflections Edited by Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes 17. CARING FOR THE ‘HOLY LAND’ Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel Claudia Liebelt 18. ORDINARY LIVES AND GRAND SCHEMES An Anthropology of Everyday Religion Edited by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec 19. LANDSCAPES BEYOND LAND Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives Edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse 20. CYBERIDENTITIES AT WAR The Moluccan Conflict on the Internet Birgit Bräuchler 21. FAMILY UPHEAVAL Generation, Mobility and Relatedness Among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark Mikkel Rytter 22. PERIPHERAL VISION Politics, Technology, and Surveillance Catarina Frois 23. BEING HUMAN, BEING MIGRANT Senses of Self and Well-Being Edited by Anne Sigfrid Grønseth 24. BEING A STATE AND STATES OF BEING IN HIGHLAND GEORGIA Florian Mühlfried 25. FLEXIBLE CAPITALISM Exchange and Ambiguity at Work Edited by Jens Kjaerulff 26. CONTEMPORARY PAGAN AND NATIVE FAITH MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses Edited by Kathryn Rountree 27. FIGURATION WORK Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy Gritt B. Nielsen

FIGURATION WORK Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy

Gritt B. Nielsen

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2015 Gritt B. Nielsen All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nielsen, Gritt B. Figuration work : student participation, democracy and university reform in a global knowledge economy / Gritt B. Nielsen. pages cm. — (EASA series ; 27) “Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-78238-771-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-772-5 (ebook) 1. Education, Higher—Aims and objectives—Denmark. 2. College students—Denmark. 3. Student participation in administration— Denmark. 4. Student participation in curriculum planning— Denmark. 5. Universities and colleges—Administration—Denmark. 6. Educational change—Denmark. 7. Educational anthropology— Denmark. I. European Association of Social Anthropologists, collaborating body. II. Title. LA878.N54 2015 378.489—dc23 2014039965 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-771-8 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-772-5 ebook

To Adrian and Manuel

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii 1

Part I. Trajectories and Mappings 1

Studying Participation as/through Figuration Work

39

2

University Reform in Denmark: Negotiating Participation and Democracy

58

3

A History of Student Participation in Denmark

80

Part II. Events and Figurations 4

Time and Freedom

115

5

Ownership and Investment

152

6

Bodies and Voices

188

Part III. Conclusions and Directions 7

Entangled Figurations

225

8

Participation as Multi-scaled Citizenship

233

Reference List

238

Index

260

Acknowledgements

This book reflects some of the hopes, visions, frustrations and fears experienced by politicians, university leaders, academic staff and students during the reforms of the Danish universities over the past decades. I have shared some of their hopes and frustrations. And like the students and teachers I talked with during my fieldwork, I too have had to negotiate and balance my time in the context of growing demands for ‘efficiency’ – demands that unfortunately turn the writing of a monograph like this one into an almost counter-productive endeavour. This book, therefore, has only been possible with help and support from friends, family and colleagues. First of all, I wish to thank all the university students and staff who took their time to talk with me, opened the doors of their classrooms and meetings to me, invited me to social events, demonstrations and seminars, and allowed me to follow their everyday lives. Throughout the years, a number of people have discussed my projects with me or read and commented on different sections and versions of the book. In particular, I am grateful to Susan Wright, Don Brenneis, Steven Carney, Søren Christensen, Laura Gilliam, Kirsten Hastrup, Malou Juelskjær, Kirsten Kolstrup, John Krejsler, Laura Louise Sarauw, Anna Tsing and Jakob Williams Ørberg. In different ways, they have helped me to strengthen the project and push my thinking further. In the process of writing this book I have had many fruitful discussions with members of URGE (University Reform, Globalization and Europeanization), an EU-funded knowledge exchange scheme. In particular, I want to thank Cris Shore, Nicolas Lewis and Elizabeth Rata from Auckland University and Susan Robertson and Roger Dale from Bristol University. I also want to thank the three anonymous reviewers from Berghahn Books for much appreciated comments and suggestions, and friends and colleagues in the ‘anthropology corridor’ at the Department of Education, Aarhus University, for mak-

Acknowledgements ◆ ix

ing my everyday work both interesting and fun. Furthermore, I want to thank Don Brenneis for inviting me to the University of California, Santa Cruz, back in 2006. This stay provided me with crucial inspiration for the theoretical and methodological discussions that are now at the centre of this book. My parents and my two sisters have been there always – providing me with the confidence to continue and the courage to change track. Thank you so much. Finally, I would like to thank Nathalia Brichet for her emotional support and for her intellectual inspiration. Without that, this book would not have been possible. I dedicate the book to Adrian and Manuel, who have taught me more than I could ever hope for. What a privilege it is to be a part of these three-year-old boys’ lives.

Introduction

It is not possible to look up the word ‘student’ in The Great Danish Encyclopaedia. … Maybe this is a token of the fact that today some uncertainty exists about which box to put us into? Are we persons passing through the university on our way to the job market? Customers in the university’s education shop? Or are we a part of the institution which is to drive society forward by gaining new knowledge? One thing is certain: many discussions are undertaken about us – but still fewer with us. – P. M. Daugbjerg, ‘Kravet er stadig medbestemmelse’

The university student today is a contested and unsettled figure. In Denmark, as in many other countries, a series of reforms have been introduced over recent decades with the explicit political aim of making universities more competitive in the so-called global knowledge economy. Power relations between state, market and university have been reshuffled, as have relations between university leaders, academic staff and students. With these reforms, diverse and conflicting visions have been brought into play about what a student is and should be. The student is conceptualized in various ways (e.g., co-owner, user, consumer, future knowledge worker and revolutionary), with each conceptualization pointing to different aspects of student life and the student’s position and role within both the university and wider society. The opening quotation is from a speech given by the student council president of the University of Copenhagen in 2008. As an apparent token of the inclusion and appreciation of a ‘student voice’ at the University of Copenhagen, it has been the custom for decades

2 ◆ Figuration Work

to invite a representative of the university’s student body to speak at the annual festival in front of the royal family and other dignitaries within society and the university. The student council president, forty years after the famous revolts in 1968, argued for the need for a new student revolt. She complained that the 2003 Danish University Act and associated policies had increased marketization and competition between universities, with resulting changes in the conditions and incentives for student involvement. Students today, she argued, are no longer expected – let alone enabled – to participate and get involved in university life and in their own education as in earlier decades. The marketing of the universities as excellent places … is an attempt to make the students believe that they do not have to involve themselves. If they are not satisfied they can just choose another article off the shelf. … Imagine if the universities had not needed to be concerned about dwindling state funding and had dared to be as honest as to say: ‘We hope you will study here with us. It is far from perfect, but we hope you will take part in improving it.’ Instead, we are palmed off with a customer mentality where our opportunities for complaint are more relevant than influence and co-responsibility. (Daugbjerg 2008)

Whereas in 1968 Danish students fought to bring down what they called ‘professorial rule’ and to obtain the right to co-determination in regard to their studies, the teaching methods, planning of courses and governance of universities in general, the 2008 student council president argued for a subversion of, in her words, ‘ministerial rule’. She felt that the reforms were contrary to the wishes of the majority of the university students and staff. With reforms increasingly moving universities into the realm of the market, she said, students are encouraged to behave like customers or consumers, choosing between courses and programmes as if they were prefabricated commodities. In case of dissatisfaction, students are expected to complain or vote with their feet rather than become involved in creating and developing courses, programmes and general conditions at the university at which they are enrolled. She therefore revived the 1968 slogan of student revolt in Denmark, ‘The Demand Is Participation’, and hoped a new student revolt would erupt to promote it.

Shifting Forms of Student Participation This book is about students’ shifting forms of participation in a period of extensive university reform. It focuses on Denmark, but some-

Introduction ◆ 3

what similar reform processes aiming at making a country competitive in a so-called global knowledge economy can be found in many other places. The 2008 annual festival at the University of Copenhagen referred to above points to some of the central frictions and bones of contention in relation to the role and position of students within the university and wider society. From her position as a student politician, the student council president complained that the students’ room for participation had been gradually reduced over the past forty years, increasingly putting the student in the position of a passively receiving customer. In contrast, in his speech at the annual festival, the rector of the University of Copenhagen emphasized that ‘the ’68 revolt is over’ and that today students are a ‘natural part of the erudite assembly’ at the annual festival and have a strong voice in the decision making at the university (Rektor 2008). Likewise, in her speech the chairman of the Board of Governors of the University of Copenhagen argued for the maintenance of the newly introduced structure of governance that had given leaders more power and, in her view, secured clearer decision-making and communication structures (Chairman of Board of Governors 2008). After their speeches had been publicized and discussed in the University Post, I talked to the student council president, who confirmed that there were strong disagreements about how, when and why students should be able to participate in and influence their course of education and the decision-making processes at the university. These disagreements, she said, did not only exist between students, university leaders and the Ministry of Science, but were also present internally in the student body, where the majority of the students, in her view, did not really involve themselves actively in the continuous development of their programmes, their university and, more generally, in the shaping of wider society. It is these intertwined processes of university reform and the changes in students’ means and modes of participating in their studies, in university governance, and in the shaping of society writ large that this book seeks to grasp. In doing so, the book has a twofold ambition. First, it sets out to explore how ‘the student’, perceived as a contested figure in a period of reform, is negotiated and enacted in particular pedagogical, institutional and political settings. Through a combination of historical and ethnographic studies, it focuses on students’ changing conditions for and modes of participation in three overlapping and interconnected areas: (1) participation in their own education and learning, (2) participation in the development and governance of their university and (3) participation in the shaping

4 ◆ Figuration Work

of national educational policy and, more generally, wider society. These three areas have been carved out through an iterative analytical process, a movement back and forth between analyses of historical documents, reform policies and ethnographic material, all of which pointed to their centrality. As will be demonstrated throughout the book, the analytical focus on students’ participation in pedagogical as well as political settings foregrounds particular kinds of temporal and spatial processes through which the student is given figure and form. The second ambition with this book has been to develop a theoretical and methodological approach for working with issues of reform, policy and processes of change as objects of anthropological enquiry. It takes the point of departure in frictional events – that is, moments of contestation or ambiguity – and argues that such moments work as processes of differentiation through which conflicting student figures emerge and are enacted. Each friction points to central phenomena of the reform process, which are then analyzed and put into a larger picture by engaging and reading them through other parts of the ethnographic material. In short, the book conceives of the anthropological field as a space of differential figure production and explores how the student in a period of university reform is made to figure as part of/participant in different and often conflicting wholes. Some readers may find that, in order to make the people in this book more ‘alive’, the book could and should have provided more rich descriptions and evocative anecdotes about individual students and their lives at and outside university. Accordingly, while this book is located squarely within the traditions of anthropology of policy and feminist-inspired anthropology, readers yearning for classic ‘thick’ ethnography may feel that the book in places borders on political philosophy or sociology. However, the language and focal point in this book are obviously the results of conscious choices. The aim has not been to focus on the ‘whole’ lives of a group of Danish students as such, but rather to explore and theorize a process of reform in and through which new conditions of possibility are created for students’ subject formation. And in order to do this, a sharp focus has been placed on frictional events and the processes of differentiation and figuration they come to articulate.

University Reform and Student Protests in an International Perspective Over the past decades, many countries around the world have reformed their university systems. In many places, new systems of

Introduction ◆ 5

governance inspired by the private corporate world have been introduced in order to make ‘efficiency savings’ and to improve the nation’s competitive ‘effectiveness’ in the growing market for knowledge and education. Universities are increasingly marketizing and selling education, and more and more governments have introduced or increased tuition fees for some or all students, often arguing that not only will it make students more demanding, strategic and efficient in their course of study, it will also make universities financially ‘autonomous’ and thereby more competitive. Universities are conceptualized as ‘service providers’, and students are supposed to use their growing freedom of choice between modules, programmes and universities (in Denmark and elsewhere) to make themselves ‘employable’ as well as to increase the ‘quality’ and ‘relevance’ of degree programmes. In this logic, they are to become calculating, strategic and so-called responsible customers and choosers (see, e.g., Nielsen 2012; Peters, Marshall & Fitzsimons 2000; Tlili & Wright 2005). More generally, reform of universities in many countries, introduced in the name of austerity, accountability, competitiveness and efficiency, are often described under the umbrella terms of ‘neoliberalism’ (with regard to the wider economic market logic that permeates the reforms) and ‘new public management’ (with regard to the management reforms) (see, e.g., Davies, Gottsche & Bansel 2006; Davies & Petersen 2005; Denman 2005; Larner & Le Heron 2005; S. L. Robertson 2007; Shore & Wright 1999; Shumar 2004). The term ‘neoliberalism’ has by now been incorporated into everyday language (and indeed often by its opponents pejoratively) to refer to the dominance of a logic of ‘the rule of the market’, the cutting of public expenditure and the privatization and/or (quasi-)marketization of the public sector, in which the ethos and organization of the government bureaucracy has to rely on a competitive market, business logic and the demands of ‘customers’ (see, e.g., Clarke et al. 2007; Harris 2007; Rose 1999). New public management, in turn, is often seen as one particular expression or technology of neoliberalism (Peters, Marshall & Fitzsimons 2000). Dunleavy and Hood (1994) and Peters, Marshall and Fitzsimons (2000) sum up the shift from ‘old’ public administration to the so-called new public management (NPM) as entailing, among other things: a new focus on explicit standards, transparency and accountability; a move from input controls to quantifiable output measures and performance targets; indirect government through the establishment of new (quasi-market) contract steering of performance and incentives, for example, by introducing a distinction between purchaser and provider; the introduction of accrual accounting

6 ◆ Figuration Work

and of smaller corporatized units operating with their own budgets (e.g., turning institutions or departments into ‘autonomous’ agencies); and new funding structures (judged by efficiency and capacity to produce results). These are all elements that have been introduced as part of the Danish university reform processes of recent decades (Wright & Ørberg 2008, 2009). Alongside these reforms of universities, a lot of countries have been witnessing the rise of new and massive student protests. Many protests have been directed at cutbacks to the education system and the introduction of/rise in students’ tuition fees. But students, like the Danish student council president quoted above, have also protested against the reduction in students’ formal voice within university governance or the introduction of other measures to speed up students’ pace of study and choose more ‘relevant’ study subjects. In Chile students have been the driving force behind considerable and ongoing protests since 2010. The protesting students demand a new framework for education, including free public education, increased state support for public universities, an end to the idea of profitability in higher education and the abrogation of laws forbidding student participation in university governance. The level of public funding for higher education is low in Chile; the majority of universities are private, public universities have to finance most of their activities through tuition and there is no comprehensive system for student grants or subsidized loans. Likewise, in Quebec in 2012, a great number of students went on strikes and organized massive demonstrations against the rises in tuition fees. Inspired by the French expression ‘carrément dans le rouge’ (squarely in the red) – referring to the red numbers on an indebted person’s bank account – a small red felt square, safety-pinned to participants’ coats, became the symbol of the protests and of the growing debt students face with the increase in tuition fees. The red square has since been used as a symbol in student protests against fee rises or changes in student loan schemes in other countries, including New Zealand in 2012 and the Netherlands 2015. Addressing a series of different issues related to the financial crisis and perceived flaws of capitalism, in the United States the Occupy Wall Street movement also targeted the issue of student loan debts and demanded student loan relief. And, as offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests and student groups with names like Occupy Education, Occupy Student Debt, Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee have been directed at budget cuts in higher education and rising national student debt. Similarly, in 2012, the United Kingdom

Introduction ◆ 7

experienced vast student-led protests against planned austerity measures including the rise of tuition fees and public spending cuts. Some demonstrations led to occupations of government and university buildings and on some occasions, as in Chile, the United States and Quebec, protesters had violent clashes with the police. On the European continent a great deal of the public protests carried out by students over the past decades have also revolved around the introduction of new market principles, growing standardisation, reduction in students’ democratic voice, cutbacks in university funding and the introduction of or increases in tuition fees. Many protesting students have seen these initiatives as related to or even a direct consequence of the so-called Bologna Process. The intention with the Bologna Process – an intergovernmental process that started in 1999 with twenty-nine countries (including Denmark) and in 2013 included forty-seven European countries – has been to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by making quality assurance standards and degree systems more comparable so that students and academics can pursue their education and research more freely at different European universities. In order to increase comparability, transparency and mobility across the education systems in Europe, several technologies have been introduced or emphasized, including the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS), a common European degree structure (three-year bachelor’s degree, two-year master’s degree, three-year Ph.D.), a diploma supplement and competence descriptions for each module, aimed at ensuring more flexibility for students in their choice of study and foreign courses, and at degrees and grades becoming more compatible across the participating countries.1 In the international Bologna documents, higher education is seen to have several purposes ranging from securing students’ ‘employability’ and ‘personal development’ to the ‘maintenance of a broad, advanced knowledge base’ and the ‘preparation for life as active citizens in a democratic society’ (Bologna Working Group 2005: 23; see also Sarauw 2012). Despite this broad understanding of higher education, some critics, including student protesters, have criticized the Bologna process for mainly promoting marketization, neoliberalization and European standardization in which universities are made to compete with each other while identifying Europe as an attractive area for foreign students in which to choose to study. The 2000 Lisbon Strategy2 set out by the European Council (EC) and the inclusion of higher education in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has given

8 ◆ Figuration Work

an even stronger impetus to this criticism. Whereas GATS promises the further removal of restrictions on market access and on barriers to global competition in higher education (see, e.g., Knight 2002), the aim of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy was to make Europe ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ by 2010 (EC 2000). Student protests against education reforms on the European continent have been particularly widespread in France, Austria and Germany in the years 2009–10, criticizing what the protesters saw as the introduction of ‘neoliberal’ education reforms based on an AngloSaxon model. In Germany and Austria students protested against the (re-)introduction of fees and the implementation of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees system in the Bologna Process, which they felt put pressure on them and lowered the quality of their courses of study. They complained that education, as one German student leader said, is becoming ‘less about seeking knowledge and more about preparing to fill a need in the economy’ (Houlton 2009). In France in 2009, lecturers and administrative staff mobilized and joined forces with the students against increased tuition fees, new governance laws and university leaders’ increasing power. Similar points of critique have been raised in Denmark, where, after a period of stagnation in the mid-1980s and 1990s, collective and collaborative extra-parliamentary efforts and campaigns across pupil and student organizations gained more of a footing by the late 1990s. As will be discussed in later chapters, with the passage of the Danish University Act in 2003 and subsequent policies a series of student-led demonstrations, happenings and occupations erupted against cutbacks, various policies to speed up students’ pace of study and the reduction of students’ democratic voice in governance in favour of so-called strong and strategic leadership. The student council president’s speech at the University of Copenhagen’s annual festival in 2008 is but one example of some of the critiques raised by Danish students.

Why Denmark? In light of the wider tendencies in university reform and the widespread student protests in many countries, what can a study of student participation and university reform in Denmark tell us? Why and how is the Danish case interesting? For many protesting students in other countries, the Danish system must seem almost like a dream scenario. All universities in Denmark are public. Education is free

Introduction ◆ 9

for all domestic students who, if living away from the parental home (which the vast majority does), can receive a monthly study grant, in 2015 equivalent to approximately *790 or US$865. As of 2013, all domestic students have the right to receive the study grant for five years, and if they start their study no later than two years after finishing upper secondary school, for a maximum of six years. Thereby, they are able to receive state study grants for a three-year bachelor’s degree, a two-year master’s degree (in Denmark called the candidate degree) plus one extra year if they for some reason get delayed or choose to change course. This gives Danish students a kind of economic freedom and independence that many students in other countries do not have. The Danish system is also unique and of particular interest because, in the wake of the 1968 revolts, students in Denmark obtained greater formal power in the universities’ governing bodies than students in other Western countries. And, compared to students in most other countries, Danish students still have a strong voice in university governance, where they have seats on the boards of governors, in the academic councils and half of the seats on the study boards. However, in a historical perspective, the strong formal voice given to students in the 1970s has gradually diminished, and with the 2003 Danish University Act student politicians felt that their influence had decreased further. The University of Copenhagen student council president’s call for a new student revolt, demanding more student participation in decision making, shows how new rationales about education and knowledge have also gained a footing at Danish universities. In the 2003 Danish University Act, previous traditions of workplace democracy and elected leaders were replaced with appointed leaders, growing external influence and ideals of strong strategic leadership. In fact, Denmark has been more extreme than many other European countries in their reforms of the governance system – a tendency that politicians from other countries on certain occasions have referred to as ‘the Danish disease’ (Wright forthcoming). The introduction of a new university governance structure took place in parallel with the explicit political aim of making the universities more responsive and accountable to students’ wishes and choices. As the former minister of science repeatedly maintained – echoing his colleague in charge of university education throughout the 1980s – the student should be at the centre of the education system (see, e.g., Regeringen 2002a; Sander 2006). New possibilities for students to influence not only their own course of education but also what educational offers are available at the universities seem to be emerg-

10 ◆ Figuration Work

ing. Indeed, the notion of the student’s voice as the main element of student participation and influence seems to be increasingly accompanied by a focus on the student’s choice. These initiatives have gone hand in hand with new political measures for increasing students’ pace of study and making them choose what is described as more ‘relevant’ subjects (that is, mainly within natural and technical sciences). Tensions, therefore, exist between, on the one hand, what in Denmark is often conceived of as a traditional and Humboldt-inspired ideal of university education where the student is to be(come) an independent and critical thinker who takes responsibility for his/her own creative explorations within a discipline, and, on the other hand, a notion of education as a question of choosing and combining ‘relevant’ modules (and finishing within the formal time frame) in order to become ‘employable’. Likewise, potential tensions exist between, on the one hand, ideals about workplace democracy and vast student participation in university governance and, on the other hand, a stronger focus on efficient complaint procedures and students’ opportunity to ‘vote with their feet’ (through increased freedom of choice). In one sense, therefore, the university reforms in Denmark can be seen as a particular kind of exemplar of, to use the overly reductive terminology, ‘neoliberal’ universities in the making. Developed on the basis of a strong welfare state model, the Danish traditions for democracy and student participation in the university system have been heavily discussed as more and more reforms, based on new public management ideals and notions of improving Denmark’s competitive edge, have been introduced over the past decades. Accordingly, the Danish case may serve as a prism for the wider international tendencies and debates about the role of universities and the repositioning of students in a global knowledge economy, while at the same time showing the particularities and uniqueness that characterize Danish universities and the reforms they are undergoing. The analyses thereby allow for a refinement of the social and political debates around core issues of the marketization and consumerization of education, the role and form of democracy at university and in wider society, and what kinds of (participating) students and citizens are perceived as (un)desirable by whom, when and why.

The Notion of Participation In the Middle Ages, when the first European universities were established, the Latin word universitas – literally meaning ‘whole’ or

Introduction ◆ 11

‘total’ – referred to a community or corporation in which students and teachers organized themselves as a kind of guild in order to be recognized by the authorities and obtain judicial protection, corporative autonomy and the right to teach, examine and award academic degrees (Kristensen 2007: 28; Perkin 2006; Wernick 2006). The student, in other words, was seen as part of a certain whole of students and teachers, a whole that in some cases was student-led (e.g., Bologna in the late twelfth century) and in other cases teacher-led (e.g., the Parisian university around 1200). Today, with current and recent reforms, it has become relevant to ask not only what kind of whole the university is, and how the student is encouraged and enabled to be a part of it, but also whether new kinds of wholes and communities – imagined or physical – are being produced for the student to be part of and participate in. As the student council president of the University of Copenhagen argued above, there are many ‘boxes’ – or ‘wholes’, if you wish – into which the student can be put, and it is the constant processes of the creation, negotiation and breaking down of conflicting student figures, and the wholes or worlds they are to participate in, that this book attempts to grasp. In university research and politics, as well as within the wider university population, the notion of student participation is most often taken as denoting the formal provision of student representation on governing bodies (see, e.g., Bergan 2003; Persson 2003). That raises questions in regard to the boards and councils on which students are included, how many seats they have, whether they have formal decision-making power and whether they are included in the election or appointment of leaders. While such questions are indeed important in light of current Danish and international reforms, the narrowing down of the notion of participation to address issues of formal governance runs the risk of ignoring the various other and interconnected ways in which students are enabled, incentivized or alternatively prevented from becoming participants in particular communities and decision-making processes. Empirically, as we shall see, some students, leaders and politicians today restrict the notions of ‘democracy’ and ‘student participation’ to address participatory democracy and a form of life; others link the notions to representative democracy, and yet others argue that ‘democracy’ and ‘student participation’ also include aspects like freedom of choice and complaint procedures. In this light, it seems pertinent to explore how the room for student participation is changing with contemporary university reforms and what the consequences are for the qualifications and competences

12 ◆ Figuration Work

students obtain through their course of education at university. Furthermore, it seems relevant to do so by looking at the different – and interrelated – ways in which students are enabled, and have the desire, to participate in and influence their education and learning, the development of their own programmes of education and, more broadly, that of the university and society writ large. In order to do this, a broader analytical notion of student participation is needed as a starting point, rather than the narrower focus on formal provision that is typically used in higher education research and politics. To participate means to take part in, be a part of and/or have a share or interest in something. Participation is a relational concept, and to describe a person as a participant necessarily implies an understanding of what the person is participating in. Importantly, this what of the participation can relate to a process or an activity, as well as to a sense of community or whole of which one is part. Participation, therefore, may both be a means to gain influence and an end in itself in that participation may work to integrate people into a larger whole (see, e.g., Gaventa 2004; Jupp Kina 2012; Nelson & Wright 1995). In fact, the English word ‘participation’ translates into two different Danish words – medbestemmelse (participation in decision making/co-determination) and the broader term deltagelse (participation) – which in different ways connote ‘influence’ and ‘integration’. The word deltagelse has connotations that often but not always suggest ‘co-determination’. For example, when students are, as will be shown later, described as ‘participants’ in a race for knowledge, they may enjoy growing decision-making power over their own course of education in terms of freedom of choice between modules across universities and countries; however, ‘participation’ here does not necessarily include student participation in class or leave any room for decision making about the very conditions and institutional structures established to support this imagined race. Likewise, students can be allowed to deltage (participate) in a meeting without being granted any (formal or de facto) medbestemmelse (participation in decision making/co-determination).3 On the other hand, the very act of participating in a meeting or lecture potentially gives the student a sense of inclusion and belonging that is not necessarily conveyed through other kinds of participation and influence, such as freedom of choice or complaint procedures. The issue of students’ medbestemmelse in institutional decision-making processes was already raised in the nineteenth century and has been a key student political issue in Denmark since the 1960s, when students revolted

Introduction ◆ 13

and explicitly fought for medbestemmelse and workplace democracy (see chapter 3). Whereas the role of students’ participation on boards and councils has been continuously questioned over past decades, less discussion or critique has surrounded current political and pedagogical slogans about putting ‘the student at the centre’; that is, focusing more on the students’ qualifications and needs and encouraging them to participate actively in class and in the shaping of their education. One could ask if these ‘student participatory’ ideals, like the notion of ‘participation’ in the developing world in the 1990s, to some extent have become an unquestionable orthodoxy and as such ‘tyrannical’ (see Cooke & Kothari 2001). Indeed, some of the participatory challenges that development workers in the global south have struggled with – and which have been extensively discussed in the anthropological literature (see, e.g., Cooke & Kothari 2001; Hickey & Mohan 2004a) – are also present in terms of student participation. Robert Chambers (1994: 2), for example, has argued that in the developing world ‘participation’ has been used, generally speaking, in three ways: as a cosmetic label, to make whatever is proposed appear good; as a co-opting practice, where local labour is mobilized to participate in someone else’s project; and as an empowering process, where local people are enabled to define and design their own projects, and to manage them according to their own decisions. Likewise, at Danish universities, student participation is not merely a question of empowerment. As will become apparent in subsequent chapters, student participation as a cosmetic label (both in class and in university governance) and as a co-opting practice (where students are encouraged by, for example, teachers to fight against reform initiatives the teachers disagree with but do not feel in a position to fight) are also present in university life today and have been in earlier times. When used as an analytical term, Victoria Jupp Kina (2012: 321) has argued that in literature from the northern sphere the notion of ‘participation’ is in a ‘conceptual muddle’ in that it ‘can refer to anything from a physical presence in a specific space to autonomous decision-making’. She therefore advocates the introduction of other analytical terms to differentiate between various forms of participation. Drawing on research in Brazil, she points to ‘protagonism’ as one such term and argues that participation here is seen as a means for developing the more fundamentally empowering protagonism. In discussing children and youth participation, Hart (1992) goes even further and proposes a ladder of participation with eight steps ranging from non-participation (‘manipulation’, ‘decoration’ and ‘token-

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ism’) to different degrees of participation (ranging from ‘assigned but informed’ participation to ‘child-initiated, shared decisions with adults’). Such a static and stage-oriented categorization, however, does not only fail to grasp the processual nature of participation, as Jupp Kina points out (2012: 333); it also idealizes one form of participation and thereby runs the risk of becoming ‘tyrannical’ (Cooke & Kothari 2001). While the present study concurs that ‘participation’ is a multifaceted word, in this study it is exactly this elasticity that allows an exploration of how various forms of participation at different moments are brought into play – how they interconnect, overlap, interfere with and even defer to one another. Empirically, the notion of student participation is constantly negotiated and, as will be shown throughout the book, has been used in contradictory and shifting ways over time, in that different worlds and wholes are conjured up for students to be part of/take part in. Instead of starting with one a priori and static categorization and valorization of lower and higher ‘degrees of participation’, throughout the book I explore and theorize how various elements or dimensions of what some actors (but not necessarily all) perceive as democracy and students’ participation interconnect and stand out as central to the way students are enabled to shape their studies, their university and larger society. Therefore, analytically, the notion of ‘participation’ is here used as an umbrella term to cover the fluid dimensions of ‘participation’ as a means and as an end in itself; a question of influence as well as integration. As will be elaborated shortly, I use the term ‘line of participation’ to describe the main aspects and tendencies in different and prominent forms of student participation across time and place. I point to four central lines of participation – aggregative, integrative, transformative and preserving – and a key argument is that different lines not only promote different forms of student influence and sense of belonging; they also involve different kinds of learning opportunities.

Figuration Work In accordance with this focus on a broader notion of student participation – as a question of students being part of some larger whole (e.g., a physical or imagined community, amorphous and transient or long-lasting and seemingly more uniform and stable) and/or taking part/participating in particular pedagogical or political processes

Introduction ◆ 15

– the book puts forward and develops a particular approach that will be termed ‘figuration work’. With this approach, as noted, the anthropological field is conceived of as a space of (frictional) figure production. It takes as the point of departure frictional events, that is, moments of contestation or ambiguity, and argues that such moments work as processes of differentiation through which students are constantly figured and re-figured. Figuration work, here, can be seen as a way of conceiving of and doing fieldwork as well as a strategy for analysis. A frictional event is used as a starting point for further enquiry – in fieldwork and analysis – in that the core aspects of the friction are analyzed through engaging with related parts of the ethnographic material. The aim is to point to more general features of a process of transformation. In this sense, figuration work as a particular form of fieldwork has a lot in common with extended case method approaches (see, e.g., Gluckman 1940; Evens & Handelman 2006; Burawoy 1998). However, if the extended case method, as developed by Gluckman, aims to grasp the change of social relations by ‘extending’ a conflict situation by exploring ‘a series of specific incidents affecting the same persons or groups through a long period of time’ (Gluckman, quoted in Handelman 2006: 99), this book ‘extends’ a frictional event by exploring the trajectories and shaping of the lines of participation that go into and are actualized in the friction. It, so to speak, stays with the friction, the awkwardness, the trouble. Throughout, the book will show how a figure never exists in isolation; it is always enacted as part of something larger than itself, and it will be shown how, co-produced with different student figures, are also the ‘worlds’ they are perceived to be participating in – as ‘parts’ of often conflicting ‘wholes’ like ‘the programme/discipline’, ‘the university’, ‘a common student body’, ‘the nation-state’ and ‘the global knowledge economy’. Thereby, and in drawing on work within the area of anthropological globalization studies (Tsing 2006), anthropology of policy (Shore and Wright 1997, 2011; Sutton and Levinson 2001) and the work on ‘figures/figuration’ by feminist thinkers (e.g., Haraway 1991a, 1992, 1997; Strathern 2002, 2004; Tsing 2010), the book offers a specific way of conceptualizing largescale processes of transformation and studying the relations between students’ various modes of participation and the ways the purpose of universities is being redefined. A more detailed methodological discussion will be presented in the next chapter. In the following, I explore the key conceptual and methodological moves related to my use of ‘figure’ and ‘figuration’.

16 ◆ Figuration Work

Figures … My initial curiosity about the shifting room for students’ participation, the very reason why this book came about, was primarily initiated by the passing of the Danish University Act in 2003. Consequently, the question of how to conceptualize and study reform and policy processes has been central. While greatly inspired by both of them, the book – as will be discussed in more detail in chapter 1 – takes a critical stance towards two seemingly opposed, but nevertheless intimately connected, approaches that are often deployed in anthropologies of policy. The first is the Foucauldian governmentality approach, which – despite claims to the contrary – tends to view policy as a more or less straightforward execution of political programmes. The second is the anthropological insistence on ‘appropriation’, which in its critique of ‘implementation’ studies attempts to assign agency and creativity to the people towards whom a policy is directed. While sympathizing with this latter ambition, the book argues that the notion of appropriation tends to work as a retrospective concept in that it implicitly presents policy as a ‘thing’ for someone to react to and thereby (tacitly) presupposes a given character of political programmes. Furthermore, the notion is unfortunate if taken to connote (as often suggested in dictionaries) an act of forceful, almost colonising, acquisition of something (here the policy) without the permission of the original owner. This does not resonate well with the understanding of policy, presented in this book, as a messy and multi-dimensional process with no single original ownership. And it may work to downplay potential feelings of disempowerment among people engaged in a policy process. As an alternative, and because the focus here is on students’ shifting forms of participation rather than one policy process per se, the book develops a particular kind of methodology and fieldwork approach that focuses on the continuous and negotiated enactment of figures and figurations: how the student is given form and made to appear – that is, to figure – in different ways in and through different policy-related events. The term ‘figure’ stems from the Latin fingere (to mould, to fashion) and thus denotes the creation of a certain shape or form. A figure is often conceived as something imagined, something physical (tangible and concrete, e.g., a statue) or something abstract (as in a geometrical drawing). However, rather than attempting to discern what is ‘real’ from what is ‘ideal’ in any absolute way, it seems to me of greater interest to explore which figures take form and give people their grips for engagement, as well as when, how and with what con-

Introduction ◆ 17

sequences. We all live our lives with images and figures – conceptual, ideal and material – about the proper and desirable world, and the benefits of the notion of ‘figure’ as used here is precisely that: at one and the same time, it may connote something ‘real’, tangible and representative (figurative), as well as something ‘ideal’ or emblematic (figural). In this study, inspired by Donna Haraway and other feminist thinkers (Braidotti 1994; Haraway 1992, 1997; Strathern 2002, 2004; Tsing 2010), the figure is seen as transcending this classical division of imagined versus real, physical versus abstract. I thus take the notion as moving beyond the long-debated distinctions between discourse-materiality and reality-representation in that the ‘figure’ conveys both (see Haraway 1997: 8ff.). Or, to borrow a phrase from Haraway, the ‘imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact, and so I take the actual and the figural seriously as constitutive of lived material-semiotic worlds’ (1997: 2). From an anthropological perspective, as shown by Barker, Harms and Lindquist (2013, 2014), the notion of ‘figure’ may seem similar to notions like ‘social type’, ‘ideal type’ or even ‘character’. Like these authors, I see such notions as related to the extent that they are concerned with the connection between the practices, desires and self-understanding of particular persons and the more general organization or transformation of a society. In this sense, figures – like social types – come to communicate something bigger than themselves, as Barker, Harms and Lindquist put it (2013: 159–60). They can convey particular tendencies or ‘structures of feeling’ in time. However, notions like ‘social type’ or ‘ideal type’ have typically involved a different (non-ethnographic, more literary or deductive) engagement with empirical material than will be promoted here with the notion of ‘figure/figuration’. For example, the Weberian ‘ideal types’ (e.g., goal-rationality, value-rationality, emotional-rationality, traditional) are sociological abstractions that emphasize particular elements believed to be common to most cases of a given phenomenon. It is a way to classify and understand actions within a series of (predefined) categories, and ideal types are therefore often used as a tool for comparing particular phenomena across time and place. A different use of ‘social types’, as discussed by Barker, Harms and Lindquist (2013), can be found with authors like F. Engels, G. Simmel and W. Benjamin, who all made use of ‘social types’ to present and critique developments of their time. Engels gives short accounts of particular impoverished individuals and uses these to criticize the social inequality established with the Industrial Revolution. Here, as Barker, Harms and Lindquist put it (2013: 161), individuals become

18 ◆ Figuration Work

‘metonyms of the new class of proletarian urban poor’ – they are seen as products of large-scale societal transformations. Georg Simmel ([1908] 1950), in turn, saw ‘the stranger’ as a general sociological form that could be traced back in time – appearing in different versions, with different functions and roles. Urban life and the capitalist economy, Simmel argued, elicited a new metropolitan type with a ‘blasé outlook’. In a similar vein, and as a means for understanding the social transformations of his time, Walter Benjamin identified ‘the flâneur’: ‘the nineteenth century bourgeois man who meandered through the city, first as a consumer of – and later, a reporter on, the curious sights of the new commodity culture’ (Barker, Harms & Lindquist 2013: 162). Benjamin explored the continuous change and metamorphoses of social types like ‘the flâneur’ and the flâneur’s later incarnation, ‘the sandwichman’, and used these as a window onto more general changes in urban commodified society. None of these authors, however, engaged in in-depth ethnographic explorations and, to different degrees, tended to see their ‘social types’ as products or instantiations of particular transformations of their time. They did not convey much of a sense of the ways in which people who seemed to embody these ‘types’ experienced, contested or influenced the social developments. While maintaining that figures indeed point to something bigger than themselves, the present study does not see them as mere products of a new social structure or order. Rather, they are, as Barker, Harms and Lindquist say, ‘both producing and produced by the … ground against which they stand out’ (2013: 164). They are both models of and models for societal development – and they may (dis-/re-)appear across time and place in different versions. Furthermore, the figures explored in this book are not seen as ‘mere abstractions’ – they are indeed also real persons. However, figures are always both more and less than any individual. They are, as discussed above, both concrete and abstract, both real and imaginary, always involving, as Haraway puts it, ‘at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties’ (1997: 11). Therefore, I agree with Barker, Harms and Lindquist when they argue: It is not a question of finding figures that are somehow representative of a social group or place, but rather of understanding particular figures as evocative nodes that reveal relationships and forms of mediation between individual lives and wider social processes. A figure is both real and symbolic, individual and social, an agent imbricated in social structures and processes. (2013: 166)

Introduction ◆ 19

Whereas Benjamin and Simmel identified one figure as somehow emblematic or iconic of particular social organizations of their time, this book is more concerned with how in the period of extensive reform different and conflicting figures are enacted, assembled and conjured up in and through the actions and words of different people. How do different figurations relate to each other? On what ‘grounds’ are they likely to stand out? Are some figures more prominent than others? When? Where? How? And how have different figures played a role over time? In a sense, the book can be said to extend the discursive focus on ‘key words’ and ‘mobilising metaphors’, employed as a central method in parts of the anthropological policy literature (see, e.g., Shore & Wright 1997: 18–19), to a focus on the emergence and entanglement of ‘key figures’: how a figure connects to and/or eclipses other figures, how it gains its power through the mobilization of particular people and elements, and how figures are articulated and assembled. Here, the notion of ‘figuration’ plays a central role.

… and Figurations Whereas the notion of the student as a ‘figure’ tends to direct our attention to the diverse names attributed to the student (e.g., customer, co-owner, revolutionary, etc.), in this study the notion of ‘figuration’ entails an unfolding of the compositional elements of the figure; that is, an exploration of the various temporal and transient assemblages of, for example, political technologies, pedagogical practices and personal desires that come together to work, and that at particular historical moments are given a common denominator or ‘figure’. The word ‘figure’ works as both a noun and a verb and, in this book, the notion is meant to convey a process of figuration that constantly vibrates between emergence/process (verb) and freeze-frame/closure (noun), and between being one and being many. Rather than seeing the figure as a once and for all statue carved in stone, it should be understood in a more processual way, as a process of figuration – that is, of incessantly assembling, articulating or interlinking diverse elements into a whole in and through which students figure in particular ways. Importantly, the components of the figuration come to codefine each other; they are – to use Strathern’s vocabulary – a kind of prosthetic cut/extensions to and of each other (2004: 36ff.), and in that sense they gain, as a figuration, new capacities for acting. Put differently – and in resonance with what Strathern has called a ‘postplural

20 ◆ Figuration Work

perception of the world’ (ibid.: xvi) – a figure is both more and less than itself. It is, so to speak, internally fragmented and externally a unit (ibid.: 25, 36), both one and many (ibid.: 67), singular and plural, a whole and a part. Consequently, I take ‘figuration’ to convey some of the same attributes as the notion of ‘assemblage’, which over the past decade has been used in a growing body of philosophical, sociological and anthropological literature (see, e.g., Deleuze & Parnet 2006; Latour 2005; Marcus & Saka 2006; Ong & Collier 2005; Rabinow 2003; Sassen 2006). ‘Assemblage’ literally means a collection of elements. However, in Deleuze-inspired research it is used to address the process of arranging, organizing or relating a contingent ensemble of practices and things, while cutting connections with others (cf. R. Cooper 1998; Wise 2005). Similarly, when I use the notion of figuration, I put emphasis on contingent and transient connectivity, on how various elements (spoken words, technologies, pedagogical and political practices and traditions, etc.) are connected and thereby promote particular conditions and spaces for thinking and acting. In addressing the process of relating and connecting a contingent ensemble of practices, things, words and so forth, I also find inspiration in the notion of ‘articulation’, as used by Stuart Hall (see Choy 2005; Grossberg 1996). ‘Articulation’ has a double meaning of both referring to the act of uttering, expressing/being articulate about something – this is indeed relevant in a study like this, where educational rationales, policies and protests are often uttered, orally or in writing – and, in Hall’s words, to ‘the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions’ (Hall, quoted in Grossberg 1996: 53). Whereas the Deleuze-inspired assemblage thinking often seems to emphasize transformation and potentiality (see, e.g., Braidotti 1994), Hall draws on Laclau’s analyses of politics and takes an explicit interest in ideological dominance and social power relations. He focuses on the conditionalities of articulation processes – on how, when and why certain elements are connected (or not), and on particular ideological elements that ‘do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects’ (Hall, quoted in Grossberg 1996: 53). Importantly, Hall emphasizes that historically there can be what he calls ‘lines of tendency’ or ‘lines of tendential force’ (ibid.: 53–54) in the kinds of articulations that occur in particular places. That is, even though articulations and connections between different practices and elements are contingent and non-necessary, over time and in particular places some articulations may be more prominent and long-lasting than others.

Introduction ◆ 21

In my use of ‘figuration’, I share Hall’s interest in the political (and pedagogical) dimension of subject formation and in the power relations that shape particular conditions for the processes of articulation. In contrast to ‘order’, ‘structure’ or ‘logic’, the notion of ‘line’, introduced by Hall, connotes a dynamic movement in the clustering or dominance of particular forms of figuration. As we shall see, it is possible to detect a certain resonance across time and place in the ways students desire and are encouraged/allowed to participate. Inspired by Hall, these resonating participatory practices and rationales across time and/or place will be termed tendential ‘lines of participation’.

Figuration as Generative World Making Lastly, in line with Haraway and others, this book’s use of the notions ‘figures’ and ‘figurations’ also involves commitment to engage critically with contemporary processes of transformation. Above, it was discussed how certain figures may be understood as providing unique insights into larger societal transformations. Haraway, however, takes the notion of figures/figuration in a slightly different but equally critical direction, in that she uses it to criticize and subvert dominant norms and distinctions. In dissolving dominant dichotomies and confusing the borders between, among others, nature and culture and man and woman, her cyborg figure, for example, is meant to open up new spaces for acting and thinking. Haraway writes: ‘Figuration is about resetting the stage for possible pasts and futures. Figuration is the mode of theory when the “normal” rhetorics of systematic critical analysis seem only to repeat and sustain our entrapment in the stories of the established disorders’ (1992: 86). In this vein, Haraway calls for a kind of feminist politics that could embrace ‘partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves’ (Haraway 1991a: 157). Accordingly, Haraway stresses that figures should not be seen as literal and self-identical; they have a tropic quality, she argues, in that they, as noted above, involve ‘at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties’ (Haraway 1997: 11). This book shares the ambition put forward by Haraway and Braidotti of not just engaging in negative critique (aiming at deconstructing existing and dominant dichotomies, revealing them as [socially] constructed, historically contingent and claiming that things might be different), but rather exploring and pointing to, as Braidotti puts it, an ‘affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a mul-

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tiple and constant process of transformation’ (1994: 111). However, whereas Haraway, Braidotti and others (e.g., Castañeda 2002) use the notion of figuration as a way of pointing to alternative visions of subjectivity – exceeding modern dualisms and moving towards notions of ‘situatedness’ and ‘becoming’ – this book follows a more ethnographic path.4 It explores how people, at the intersection with the anthropologist, also and often in quite subtle ways engage in critical, generative and subversive figuration work. It shows how in moments of friction, the world may be (momentarily) dichotomized and oppositional figures are produced, but also how people, in and through figuration work, constantly break down, re-work and re-assemble these (dichotomous) figures. Figuration work, as used here, is therefore tightly connected to world making – to the ways in which the people we as researchers engage with, and as we engage with them, enact, conjure up, claim and become part(icipants) of/in various worlds. As Haraway says, figurations can be ‘condensed maps of contestable worlds’ (1997: 11), and in using ‘the computer’ as an example of a tropic figure, she states that ‘the computer’ is ‘a part-for-whole figure, for a world of actors and actants, and not a Thing Acting Alone’ (ibid.: 126, emphases added). The notion of figure/figuration, therefore, can be understood semiotically as a way of describing how what gives form and shape to agency – things, persons, words – are figured and assembled as part of particular worlds.5 In this vein, and inspired by Tsing (2010) and Haraway (1997), I see ‘worlds’ as tentative arrangements of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ that are never stable or isolated but always entangled. To be entangled, as proposed by Karen Barad, is ‘not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence’ (2007: ix). Importantly, therefore, figures do not just contain worlds; they shape worlds, and in doing so, the enactment and conjuring up of certain figures and figurations entail the potential for re-forming the world(s). In showing the relations between parts and wholes and, in Strathern’s terms, the ‘oscillation’ between different, yet comparable, worlds or value systems (2002: 92–93), the book emphasizes the transformative potential of not only the researcher’s constructions of figures (which is Haraway’s strategy) but also of people’s everyday practices and analyses in which figures are constantly (re-)enacted. Thus, the empowering and political dimension of the notion of ‘figuration’ is also localized in the quite mundane activities of, among others, students and teachers. In this way, the book could also be read as an attempt to put together

Introduction ◆ 23

feminist theories of figuration for the use of social anthropologists, showing how figuration happens in particular ethnographic settings, and thereby opening up new spaces for (political and participatory) subjectivity – as well as for policy making.

Empirical Foundations The frictional events, which in this book are used as the point of departure for analyzing conflicting student figurations (former and current, and their interconnections), can take the form of anything from a conflict situation in class, demonstrations on the street, debate in the newspapers to the negotiations a single interlocutor may have with him- or herself in an interview with me. Accordingly, the empirical foundation for the book has been generated through a combination of participant observation, interviews, analyses of policy documents and historical and archival enquiries into the shifting participatory roles of the student. A condition in this study has been my own embeddedness in and familiarity with the area of study. As a former student, present researcher and university teacher, I have personal experiences, satisfactions and dissatisfactions with the university that I bring with me to this study. Even though I chose not to study my own university (due to the potential difficulties with matters of authority, trust and confidentiality that could emerge from studying my own students, colleagues and leaders – see Alvesson [2003] for a discussion of ‘self-ethnography’), I have an embedded and embodied naturalness, as well as taken-for-granted assumptions, regarding the workings of a Danish university. This knowledge, I have found, has been both an advantage and a disadvantage. The ‘foreshadowed problems’ (Malinowski, quoted in Hammersley & Atkinson 1995: 21) with which I started the enquiry were already thoroughly empirically grounded and provided me with a broad and embodied understanding of the issues at stake. However, as no approach can ever be exhaustive or omniscient, this knowledge has undoubtedly made me blind to other issues that a researcher from a different country or university tradition would have found equally interesting to pursue. I have attempted to confront the challenge in any study to keep questioning the problems and issues that can emerge as relevant at any time throughout the research process, no matter how well one thinks one knows the field. The challenge, Hastrup (1992) has suggested, can be seen as a question of becoming professionally astonished. This professional as-

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tonishment is to a high degree, of course, generated through one’s engagement with other researchers’ writings. Furthermore, I also found that a comparative sensitivity across both time and space was a productive way to promote a focused and iterative process of questioning the empirical material of the study. Therefore, my approach has consisted of three interconnected fieldwork activities. First, I have gone into depth with policy papers and historical accounts of negotiations over student participation. Because this study aims to explore a process of institutional change, the reading of university policies and laws as well as international agreements ratified or agreed to by Denmark (e.g., the Bologna Process) have been essential empirical material. I have treated this material and the debates about it in the newspapers as articulations (in Stuart Hall’s sense) through which students are made to figure in particular ways by introducing, encouraging or restricting certain kinds of participatory conduct on their part. In addition to exploring these contemporary political figurations, which are discussed mainly in chapter 2, I also decided to go back in history to explore the changing room for student participation over time. An important reason for this was that history could give me a different way of questioning the familiarity and naturalness of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. Whereas my study lacked the more traditional ‘exotic’ travel in space to provoke a curiosity of the researcher, I found that, as Wolf argued (1982: 3–4), travelling in time could help create a productive curiosity about the diverse ways of figuring the student today. The empirical foundation for this historical part of the study – like the contemporary aspect based on interviews and participant observation – has taken its point of departure in different ‘frictional events’ over time through which the student’s modes of participation have changed and have been up for debate. The discussion of the historical development of students’ participation in their own teaching and learning, in university governance and in the shaping of wider society, is the focus of chapter 3. Second, I have done fieldwork at three Danish universities, which entailed auditing and observing three third-year courses within natural science programmes, interviewing students, tutors and leaders, participation in various social events and attending meetings of different governing boards. The part of the enquiry that builds on ethnographic participant observation and interviews took place mainly in 2005, 2006 and 2008. My ambition with this study has not been to write ethnographies of one or several Danish universities as different ‘organization cultures’. However, certain kinds of conduct and lines of participation are indeed (made) more likely at some universities

Introduction ◆ 25

and departments than at others due to, for example, different pedagogic principles and institutional traditions of student participation. The comparative differences between institutions are thereby valuable parts of the process of being professionally astonished. Takenfor-granted issues of student participation at one university may be challenged at another and thus allow for and encourage further exploration. This is why I chose to conduct ethnographic participant observation at three different Danish universities. I used the exploration of traditions and events at one institution to engage with and question traditions and events at another. The selection of three universities for in-depth explorations of students’ participatory conduct was informed by institutional differences between universities. The three universities include one ‘traditional’ university with faculties covering the traditional broad areas of the humanities and the social and natural sciences (University of Copenhagen), one ‘mono-faculty’ and profession-oriented university (the former Danish Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University, today a part of the University of Copenhagen) and one ‘reform’ university established in the wake of the democratization processes of the late 1960s, which made new notions of student participation central (Roskilde University). At all three universities, I participated in meetings of different governing bodies, especially the study councils, whenever issues of relevance to this study were on the agenda. My selection of three particular programmes for following classes and exploring diverse kinds of student participation was based on where relevant reform processes had been introduced. I chose to follow courses and participate in social and formal events in three different programmes and departments that had been recently reformed, were in a process of being reformed or were in some way challenged by the strategies, ideas or thoughts about reform of either the university leadership or wider national and international tendencies within education politics. The courses I followed were all in third-year natural science programmes. The reason for choosing third-year programmes was twofold. First, these students have at least two years’ experience of being at university and are therefore able to compare and reflect upon new governmental or educational initiatives. Furthermore, in their third year students are on the brink of choosing more specialized candidate programmes, meaning that they have greater freedom of choice and are now expected to be increasingly independent, critical and creative in terms of their own learning processes. The reason for choosing to attend courses offered by natural science programmes was threefold. First, some reforms had been in-

26 ◆ Figuration Work

troduced to these programmes shortly before I began my study. Second, the mono-faculty university mainly consisted of natural science programmes. Third, a similarity across programmes would mean that some students would have experiences of earlier studies or ‘optional modules’ within one of the other universities. In their reflections about their studies, the students often compared their own or friends’ experiences at other universities. Having been at all three universities, I could not only engage more thoroughly with the students’ own accounts, but also obtain comparative knowledge of a given practice or tradition by relating teaching traditions, forms of student participation or study environments across institutions. The third aspect of this study consisted of doing fieldwork with national and institutional student organizations and networks. This involved participation in meetings concerning university reform, participation in various happenings and public student protests against reform initiatives and explorations into the media debate on the same issue. An important aspect of my fieldwork has also been to follow public and institutional negotiations over particular proposed laws or policies. Here I followed the work of the National Union of Students, some of the student councils (the main student organization in Danish universities) and student networks in their activities, protests and lobbying for particular issues. I explored the internal dynamics of the student body in terms of different and conflicting modes of participation, positions in the politics of education and ideals about what a student is and should be. I therefore participated in different social and political events, at public demonstrations or happenings, and at seminars, hearings or meetings concerning the role and conditions of Danish universities. For example, I followed the work of the so-called 3% Network – an independent student network that protested against proposed welfare reforms in 2005 – and a conference, called ‘Reboot ’68’, on the revolutionary potential of the current student generation. These two initiatives and the work and strategies of the National Union of Students and the student councils are the focal points of chapter 6.

The Litany of Class, Gender and Race/Ethnicity Whereas in other countries, the classic litany of class, gender and race/ethnicity would be obvious markers of distinction – along the lines of which students would figure differently and as part(icipant)s of different wholes – in this study, class, gender or race/ethnicity did

Introduction ◆ 27

not stand out as remarkably significant. In terms of the issue of gendered participation, I found no particular patterns in the way male and female students tended to participate (or not) in class, in university governance, in extra-parliamentary student political activities and so forth. Furthermore, in university governance and student political networks as well as in the natural science courses I followed at the three different universities, there were a relatively equal number of male and female students. So while one of the frictions I explore in chapter 4 could have opened up for a more in-depth discussion of gender differences at Danish universities, for the above-mentioned reasons I chose not to go down that lane in earnest. Other researchers (Hasse 2002; Højgaard & Søndergaard 2002; Søndergaard 2006) have worked extensively on the role of gender at Danish universities, so readers interested in this topic can find in-depth analyses there. Similarly, race/ethnicity did not stand out as a significant aspect in the figuration processes. To many foreigners, familiar with universities in other countries, the student population at a Danish university might seem relatively homogeneous in terms of students’ ethnic, linguistic and/or national background. At the three study programmes where I attended classes, I met only one student who had a different ethnic background than Danish/Scandinavian (he came to Denmark from the Middle East with his parents when he was three years old) and one student who came from Iceland (which was a part of first Norway and then Denmark until 1918) and therefore spoke Danish with a bit of an accent. Likewise, I only met a few students with a different ethnic background than Danish who were involved in the student union or as student activists. The small number of ethnic minority students did not make ‘ethnicity’ stand out as a key component of differentiation and figuration. However, by exploring an event where a group of international students from China complained to the minister of science about low-quality education (chapter 5), I do touch upon how different educational backgrounds and traditions play an important role for the way students (can) think of themselves as part of the university. In terms of the issue of ‘class’, the difference between rich and poor in Denmark is much smaller than in countries like the United Kingdom or the United States. While the difference between rich and poor has grown over the past decades, the state study grants and loan schemes make it financially possible for students with various backgrounds to attend all Danish universities without having to be too concerned about their financial situation or about ending with a huge debt. However, as Jens Peter Thomsen (2008) has shown, the socio-

28 ◆ Figuration Work

economic background of students still plays a significant role in terms of their chances and likelihood for studying at a university in that young people with parents who themselves are academics statistically have a greater chance of studying at a further education institution than youngsters with low-skilled parents – especially at study programmes where you have to have a high average mark to enter. Marianne Gullestad’s studies of the role of egalitarianism in the Scandinavian countries (see, e.g., Gullestad 1989, 1991) can shed an interesting light over the lack of apparent significance of gender, ethnicity or class to the participatory figurations that I have explored in this book. Gullestad argues that the Scandinavian countries (and especially their development of strong welfare states) have been characterized by a particular emphasis on ‘equality as sameness’, which involves ‘ways of under-communicating difference during social encounters’ and not necessarily ‘actual same-ness’ (1989: 85). I do not claim that a stronger focus on gender, ethnicity or class throughout my study could not have revealed particular participatory patterns, power relations or inequalities. What I am saying is that gender, ethnicity or class did not figure in any significant way – or at least, following Gullestad, these differences were under-communicated – in the main frictions concerning students’ participation that I encountered during my fieldwork. Focusing on one or more of these categories, therefore, would seem like an arbitrary and a priori methodological choice rather than something that stood out and offered itself to me as a relevant focal point.

Organization of the Book The book is divided into three parts. Part I, called ‘Trajectories and Mappings’, introduces the theoretical and methodological trajectories I have followed and developed in this study in order to approach the reform processes as objects of anthropological enquiry. It thereby works as a ‘mapping’ for the coming explorations in this book, in that ‘mapping’, as suggested by Tim Ingold (2000a: 232), is taken to mean ‘the retelling of journeys made’ and a ‘rehearsal for journeys to be made’. In the first chapter, I elaborate on the central methodological choices made in the book, and I unfold the key notions of friction, event and tendential lines of participation. I also discuss how the book combines synchronic and diachronic explorations of Danish university reform and the shifting forms of student participation.

Introduction ◆ 29

In chapter 2, by analyzing central contemporary university policies and political negotiations, I explore contemporary Danish university reform and the central rationales of participation promoted by different groups of people engaged in education politics. In particular, I point to the existence of two central and conflicting lines of participation. One tendential line I relate to the Humboldtian notion of students as part of universities as well as to the Danish notion of ‘co-citizenship’, which highlights democracy as a form of living rather than as a question of procedures and representation. This line, therefore, emphasizes particular kinds of integrative participation. The other and more recent line of participation puts emphasis on students’ participation in a knowledge race. Here participation becomes instrumental and strategic, and the wholes in which the students are to participate (e.g., the university, the knowledge economy) are best described as aggregated, rather than integrated, wholes. I show how within these different lines of participation, the student is positioned in very different ways as a participant in and thereby co-producer of his/her own education and learning; the development and governance of the university; and the shaping of national educational policy and the wider society. These general explorations of contemporary university reform are then put into a historical perspective in chapter 3. Here, I explore how students’ participation in national and institutional politics as well as in pedagogical processes of teaching and learning has changed and developed during the past two centuries and if particular lines of participation have been prominent in this period. It is shown how the student figure has embodied different and often competing visions of students’ participation in the three main areas. Furthermore, even though all three participatory dimensions have been at work at all times, they each seem to have been the main object of friction and negotiation at different historical times. In short, in Denmark change in student participation in ‘society’ was followed by new forms of student participation in university governance, which was ultimately reflected in stronger student participation in teaching and their own learning at university. This linear account is then supplemented with a different reading that conveys a sort of circuitousness in the way that particular lines of participation emerge, are eclipsed and re-appear throughout the period. I point to the entanglement of what one could call a transformative (or subversive) line of participation and a preserving line of participation, which over the course of centuries past have been actualized in different ways at different points. Similarly, there have been continuous frictions between students who

30 ◆ Figuration Work

believe in more activist-oriented approaches to obtain influence and students who advocate parliamentary approaches. Part II of the book, ‘Events and Figurations’, consists of three chapters that analyze the ethnographic material generated through interviews and participant observation. Each chapter uses a particular frictional event as its point of departure and, from this friction, explores the ways different and conflicting figures of the student are generated, negotiated, dismantled. The student figures that are generated in and through the events are thus (re-)assembled and (re-) articulated in various ways as the event is unfolded, related to and read through other parts of the ethnographic material. A common theme in the three chapters is how the notion of being an ‘active’ student (and citizen) is contested and understood differently by various actors. With different emphasis and weight, the chapters address the three interconnected and overlapping participatory areas. The frictional events that are used as points of departure in the three chapters conjure up, articulate and connect the areas in unique ways. However, or thereby, each chapter also sheds a particular light on one of the participatory areas. One way of reading these three chapters, therefore, is to see them as a move from frictions in the class room (chapter 4), to friction over appropriate student participation in university governance (chapter 5) and, lastly (chapter 6), frictions in national student politics and activism, and the ways students attempt to influence national (university) politics and promote changes in larger society. Or put differently, one could see the chapters as explorations of pedagogical, institutional, and political aspects of students’ participation and how these are put in play and intertwine in various ways. Even though all three participatory areas are present in all events and discussed in all the chapters, chapter 4 puts special focus on students’ participation in their own education and learning; chapter 5 raises the issue of students’ voices and appropriate participation in the running and development of their university; and chapter 6 highlights contestations between different factions of politically active students about the best ways to obtain influence on national university politics and to participate in the shaping of larger society. Since chapters 4, 5 and 6 provide the main analytical bulk of this book, I will outline them in some detail here. In chapter 4 I explore how students as learners are offered and/or claim a particular space for participation in their teaching and learning and how this space may be changing as demands for efficiency, flexibility and student-centred education converge in new ways. The

Introduction ◆ 31

participatory space explored here is first and foremost related to the question of students being/becoming a part of a discipline/academic community and whether this should be as a ‘pipette holder’ in the professors’ project (i.e., a kind of co-opting participation, as Chambers [1994] calls it) or as a student who more independently could develop and explore particular academic trajectories. Taking the point of departure in a reform with which a new block structure, shorter modules and more ‘activating’ teaching and examining methods were introduced, the chapter shows how students are incentivized to become a particular kind of ‘incessantly active and efficient student’ with strong time management skills. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre, I argue that students’ participation come to figure in two potentially conflicting temporalities: ‘subject-oriented time’ (that is, where the study rhythm and time are felt as intrinsic to the student subject’s engagement with the subject area of study) and ‘standardized policy time’ (that is, the prescribed time frame and pace of study), and I show how a good many students experience ‘arrhythmia’ or temporal discordance between them. In combination with new accountability technologies between teacher and student, which tend to put weight on students’ ‘satisfaction’, the time pressure seems to work to support the production of a particular kind of student-learner figure: the ‘acquisitive learner’ who is mainly oriented towards what is necessary to pass examinations, rather than incentivized to conduct independent critical exploration of a subject area as an ‘inquisitive learner’. Chapter 5 takes its point of departure in an incident in which a group of fee-paying Chinese students identified themselves as ‘customers’ with a right to reject ‘low-quality products’ and complained to the Danish Ministry of Science about the quality of their international programme. The Chinese students were enrolled at a Danish university, Roskilde University (RUC6), that upholds a strong ideal of student participation and encourages the students to be ‘co-owners’ rather than ‘customers’. I show how conflicting notions of ‘ownership’ can be seen as a key element in the conflicting student figurations conjured up in the frictional event. Ownership, I argue, may connote both a ‘part-whole’ relationship of belonging and a severable ‘subject-object’ relationship of belongings. Whereas the former addresses a constitutive, non-instrumental and non-severable relationship that revolves around appropriateness and communal identity, the latter revolves around a person’s mastery of a thing that can be separated – legally, physically, emotionally – from the one who owns it. The participation of the RUC ‘co-owner’ ideally revolves

32 ◆ Figuration Work

around collective identities, and it is as a democratically active coowner and co-citizen, and not (solely) as an ‘employable’ individual, that the student is to be integrated into and take part in the different wholes of the so-called ‘house’, the university and larger society. In contrast to this understanding of the co-owner, the Chinese students described not only themselves but all students as ‘customers’ with a right to high-quality ‘products’. In this respect they fit well with the increasingly important political notion of education as a personal investment and property. However, the ethnographic exploration of the frictional event shows that figures are by no means uniform or self-identical – rather, the co-owner and costumer co-define each other. In relation to their more ‘passive’ fellow Chinese students, the complaining Chinese students could be seen as conveying a sense of ‘active ownership’ over their education. But, compared to the ideal of the ‘co-owner’ student, their participatory conduct was more customer-like than embodying co-ownership. Chapter 6 analyzes how, through different forms of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activities, politically active students attempt to influence national educational policies and promote changes in both the university and wider society. A central question is how approaches that I call parliamentary versus activist, and student-as-such versus student-as-citizen, work in different ways to produce particular student figures and how these figures are capable of ‘collecting up’ one or many people by embodying particular visions or interests. A key question here is to what extent ‘the student body’ can be seen as a ‘whole’, and if so, whether students taking part in this whole can be characterized by integrative participation and/or aggregative participation. More generally, the chapter points to a growing tendency among students towards flexible, ad hoc and single-issue participation. This tendency, however, may work both in relation to the student organizations’ aim of producing one student body with one voice, and in relation to some of the more loosely structured student networks’ hope of bringing the protests of different people momentarily into networked agreement, but without restricting their initiatives and creativity by focusing on one finite ideology, identity or voice. Part III, the last part of the book, is called ‘Conclusions and Directions’. Chapter 7 sums up my main findings, and I show how the various frictions and negotiations of the student figure explored throughout the book convey a continuous oscillation between what I call ‘aggregative participation’ and ‘integrative participation’ as well as ‘preserving participation’ and ‘transformative participation’. Ac-

Introduction ◆ 33

cordingly, I argue that students’ shifting modes of participation during the current processes of university reform in Denmark are best understood as a question of entangled figuration, which means that ostensibly oppositional figurations are co-produced and are fundamentally dependent on each other in order to take shape. The ‘customer’, for example, is not stable and uniform but takes shape through its entangled relations to other figures (in Denmark, primarily the ‘co-owner’). This means that, contrary to the way ‘social types’ are often used in the literature, any one ‘figure’ cannot, in and by itself, be seen as an index of contemporary transformations at university and within larger society. Rather, a series of entangled figurations, with different temporal and spatial amplitudes, could be said to characterize contemporary processes of Danish university reform. In this vein, in chapter 8, I argue that making policy makers, university leaders, teachers and students more attentive to the entangled character of contemporary student figurations could open up for an ‘affirmation of the positivity of difference’ (Braidotti 1994: 111) that, in allowing for a different elasticity and diversity in students’ participation, in turn would open up new and important learning spaces. Participation, I emphasize, should be acknowledged as a process that not only involves the idea of making a difference, but indeed also involves learning. I argue that understanding student participation as a question of ‘multi-scaled citizenship’ – that is, where students could and should (be allowed to) participate in multiple political and pedagogical spaces with multiple temporalities – could not only encourage students independently to explore, engage with and reflect upon different forms of participation, but also provide them with a more comprehensive understanding of the world(s) they are part of.

Notes All Danish quotes have been translated into English by the author. 1. The 1997 Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education in the European Region (the so-called Lisbon Recognition Convention) was formulated by the Council of Europe and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] and is now ratified by most European countries. It has played an important role in facilitating greater academic mobility and making joint solutions in order to promote the recognition of qualifications in higher

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2.

3.

4.

5.

education (see http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/highereducation/Recognition/ LRC_en.asp And http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/Bolo gna/. Accessed March 25th 2015). The 2000 Lisbon Strategy (sometimes also referred to as the Lisbon Process or Agenda) is not to be confused with the 1997 Lisbon Recognition Convention. The Lisbon Strategy was launched by the European Council, an institution of the European Union, in order to create a so-called knowledge-driven economy and make the European Union the most competitive economy in the world by 2010. In contrast, The Lisbon Recognition Convention is a central part of the Bologna Process which as noted above aims at creating the European Higher Education Area by making academic degree standards and quality assurance standards more comparable and compatible throughout Europe. The Lisbon Recognition Convention was formulated by the Council of Europe, an international organisation, founded in 1949 to promote co-operation between European countries. The Council of Europe is an independent body, it cannot make binding laws and is not controlled by the European Union. The negotiations on a 2006 law regarding the Danish Folkeskole (primary and lower secondary school) provide a good example of how medbestemmelse (co-determination) and deltagelse (participation) are sometimes argued to differ. In the new law, the word medbestemmelse (co-determination, used in the previous law’s objects clause: ‘preparing pupils for co-determination, co-responsibility, rights and duties in a society with freedom and democracy’) was changed to deltagelse (participation). An opposition politician criticized the shift in wording because, she said, ‘participation [deltagelse] is not the same as co-determination [medbestemmelse] – participation is the pre-condition for responsible co-determination. The signal sent is that it is on trial: “You are allowed to participate, but we are the ones who make the decisions”’ (Vestager 2006). One point of criticism of, for example, Haraway’s and Braidotti’s work on figuration has been that the figure/figuration concept remains abstract and that it is neither related to concrete processes, that is, how particular figurations emerge and are negotiated in empirical locations, nor made explicit in relation to how/if the figurations have practical political applicability (see, e.g., Adrian 2006: 97; Pelletier 2004). Bruno Latour (2005: 53) also uses ‘figuration’ in a semiotic way to describe the form and shape of agency. Instead of talking of ‘worlds’, however, he states that the thing that acts is given figuration through its inscription in a particular story or account. Likewise, the notion of ‘figured worlds’, as introduced by Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain (1998), links to a narrative and literary approach. They define figured worlds as culturally and collectively imagined ‘as if’ realms that are peopled by particular figures and characters: ‘By “figured world”, then, we mean a socially and culturally constructed realm of interpretation in which particular characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to

Introduction ◆ 35

certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others’ (Holland et al.: 52). They see a ‘figured world’ as a backdrop for interpretation (ibid.: 54) and the context of meaning (ibid.: 60); that is, a frame within which people ‘figure’ who they are. They thus argue that people’s identities and agency are formed dialectically and dialogically in these ‘as if’ worlds. 6. The university was originally, in 1972, called Roskilde University Centre, abbreviated RUC, to signal the intention of offering medium-cycle as well as long-cycle higher education. With RUC’s Strategy Plan for 2020, of April 2008, the name was changed to Roskilde University, leaving out the term ‘centre’ in order to signal, as it says in the plan, that ‘Roskilde University is a poly-faculty university with education to the highest scientific level’. The abbreviation RUC was, however, kept, and since the English translation of the university name has always been Roskilde University, I refer to the university as either RUC or Roskilde University.

Part I Trajectories and Mappings

1 Studying Participation as/through Figuration Work

At the outset of this project my curiosity and interest were strongly connected to the then Danish government’s initiatives related to the 2003 Danish University Act and the public debate surrounding them. I was curious about the consequences of these new initiatives and the seemingly changing rationales of what a university and a student are and should be. In the public debate, the 2003 Danish University Act was both perceived and promoted as introducing important and radical change. The Danish minister of science launched the Danish University Act as the biggest and most radical change to Danish universities since the establishment of the University of Copenhagen in 1479 (Aarsland 2002: 3). Some critics argued that the act would mean the end of ‘the classic university divided into faculties and destroy a 500-year-old research culture centred on non-goal-oriented basic research’ (Langballe 2003). Others referred to the end of ‘the free university’ born in 1479 (Ølgaard 2003) and to the ‘ruin [of] a 400-year-long tradition of independence from other interests in society’ (Søndergaard, quoted in Rehling 2003). From an institutional perspective, the 2003 Danish University Act may indeed represent a particularly dense and coherent articulation of a process of reform – and one that has strong links to similar reforms in other countries, not least in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, for the majority of the students I talked to, the law was not a relevant point of reference. Only the students engaged in education politics related particular initiatives at the class or department level to the law or associated ministerial regulations. What was experienced

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as radical change by some teachers, students or politicians was not necessarily perceived as change at all by a majority of the students. Furthermore, what in one perspective might be conceived of as the enactment of neoliberal policies, resembling reforms in other countries, in another perspective seemed to take on a variety of different meanings once negotiated in and confronted with students’ multiple desires and dreams as well as existing pedagogical traditions and forms of governance. Therefore, an analysis of shifting and conflicting student figures is highly dependent on how the workings of ‘reform’ or of a ‘policy’ are conceived. The challenge in exploring the conflicting figures of the student seems to be to acknowledge the 2003 Danish University Act as the articulation of a dense moment of change while at the same time resisting an uncritical ‘ontological dumping’, as Hastrup (1999: 167) calls the process in which a particular conception of the world is transformed into an ‘objective’ and ‘natural’ fact. On the one hand, ‘it’ (the act) is there, physically on paper, with real and tangible consequences to follow; on the other hand, it is not a stable or unitary ‘thing’ but is constantly re-enacted in different ways in different situations. Over the recent decades, anthropologists have addressed challenges like this by de-centring the anthropological ‘field’ as a convergence of people and place. In this process, the notion of ‘politics’ has assumed a prominent place (see, e.g., Hammersley & Atkinson 1995). In Shore and Wright’s anthropological approaches to the study of policy processes, for example, the anthropological field is re-conceptualized as a ‘social and political space articulated through relations of power and systems of governance’ (1997: 14). In a similar vein, Gupta and Ferguson (1997) suggested replacing the metaphor of ‘fieldwork’ with ‘location work’. Rather than privileging locality and spatial sites – and with them the method of participant observation – ethnographic attentiveness, they argue, should be given to the different ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991b), that is, to the ‘interlocking of multiple social-political sites and locations’ from which different forms of knowledge are available (Gupta & Ferguson 1997: 37). The conception of the area of this book follows a similar path in emphasizing that the ‘real’ is neither singular nor a given but something that is constantly enacted and brought into being as and through situated practices. It suggests the notion ‘figuration work’ to describe the entangled mode of fieldwork and analytical work that pays attention to friction and the production of figures/figurations across

Studying Participation as/through Figuration Work ◆ 41

scales of time and space. At any scale one is bound to find gaps and friction. Any cut out conceptual whole can always be questioned by the diversity that appears at another scale. Having discussed the key notions of figure and figuration in the introduction, in this chapter I elaborate upon the methodological choices and developments of this book. As I hope to make clear, one central aim is to explore the student as a multi-dimensional figure rather than as a one-dimensional imprint of dominant political discourses and rationalities. In order to do this some methodological terrain needs to be covered.

Epochalism and the Study of University Reform As discussed in the introduction, there are no doubt certain common tendencies to university reform worldwide. Fazal Rizvi (2006) has argued that a convergence in ideas and ideologies concerning educational policy worldwide is being promoted and supported, not least through intergovernmental organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), UNESCO and the European Union (EU), international conventions and collaborations, and the coercive strategies of bodies like the World Bank towards developing countries (see also Henry et al. 2001). These tendencies are, as noted earlier, often described in terms of new public management (with regard to the management reforms) and neoliberalism (with regard to the wider economic market logic that permeates the reforms). The Foucault-inspired ‘governmentality’ studies of, for example, Nikolas Rose (1999) and Mitchell Dean ([1999] 2006) have paid special attention to neoliberalism or advanced liberalism1 as not just an economic project, but a mode of governing directed and informed by a new liberal mentality of rule. Government – understood in its Foucauldian sense as ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1982) – here becomes a question of governing at a distance through the very freedom of the citizens. That is, the subject-citizen is to think of him- or herself as a freely choosing consumer with certain rights and to become a calculating and ‘enterprising self’, that is, self-directed, aspiring for autonomy and responsible for his or her own success and happiness (Rose 1992, 1999). These governmentality-inspired studies often work with what one could call a ‘policy triad’ of, first, political programmes and justifications for particular ways of exercising power (‘political rationalities’); second, everyday practices and methods introduced to gov-

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ern particular people in particular ways (‘governmental or social technologies’)2; and third, the perceptions, experiences and conduct (’subjectivities’)3 of the people towards whom these rationalities and technologies are directed (Nielsen 2011). Both Rose and Dean dissociate themselves from epochalist accounts of the present and advocate analyses of the minor, everyday practices or processes of negotiation and little shifts in our ways of thinking. In this vein, Rose advocates a focus on the interplay between ‘political rationalities’ and ‘governmental technologies’ (see, e.g., Rose & Miller 1992: 175). Nevertheless, both authors often seem to prioritize political discourses and programmes at the expense of the everyday practices, struggles and negotiations through which policy is constantly being enacted and re-enacted (see, e.g., Clarke et al. 2007: 20ff.; O’Malley, Weir & Shearing 1997). Indeed, a potential pitfall of research into reform processes is to over-emphasize the amplitude and effect of the political rationalities and discourses presented in law and policy material. While there is no doubt that market logics and principles of governance from the private sector have gained a footing, we need to be careful not to assume a priori their workings and effects. Perhaps this is especially so in the case of public universities, an area with radically different traditions, norms and values. The problem with notions like ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘new public management’ is that they often come to describe a singular evolutionary and unilinear direction in global processes. Change, as Paul du Gay (2003: 670) points out, thereby appears to be the ‘inevitable outcome of abstract, non-locatable impulses and imperatives’. The heterogeneity, specificity and situatedness of any process of change is downplayed or even ignored. Indeed, if politics and policies are reduced to a mentality of rule or a practice of thinking (governmentality) in which political discourses outline subject positions for people to inhabit, the ‘peopling of policy’ (Ball 1997) and the figures or subjectivities that policy is perceived to elicit tend to become rather one-dimensional. The persons towards whom a policy directs its efforts are construed in the image of, and as mere effects of, a political rationality, the so-called subject positions enacted through the political programmes of the policy are left unquestioned and unexplored, and the relationship between rationality, technology and subjectivity becomes a neat three-step progression (see Nielsen 2011). In the words of O’Malley, Weir and Shearing, these governmentality studies are at risk of generating ‘ideal typifications which often are in danger of being little more than the systematized self-representation of rule’ (1997: 504).4 In this way, neoliberalism or advanced liberalism

Studying Participation as/through Figuration Work ◆ 43

– despite the authors’ explicitly opposite intentions – tend here to become a kind of hegemonic political discourse marking the entrance to a new historical epoch of liberal governmentality in which citizens are turned into self-governing individuals and freely choosing consumers (Clarke et al. 2007: 15ff.). Importantly, analyses in which the diversity of social life is reduced, concealed and abbreviated into a few capital letters, like ‘NPM’ (new public management) or ‘NL’ (neoliberalism) (the meanings of which are often tacitly assumed to be uniform and agreed upon), may have a strength in pointing to similarities across sectors and countries and in providing a clear and visible form, figure and grip for people to hang on to and engage with. However, even if such ‘abbreviation accounts’ and figures provide clear-cut analyses and criticisms of certain conditions and changes of the time, they may indeed – from an anthropological perspective – seem too clear-cut, simplistic and reductive. I agree with the anthropologist Sally Falk Moore that using the legal as a point of departure for an anthropological research project has the advantage of (potentially) cutting across what are often conceived of as different scales or levels (1994: 370). As an anthropologist, a legal aspect obliges one to open up one’s field and follow the connections between different scales, thus pushing the gaze of the researcher beyond the ‘small scale’ and ‘local’ units of classical fieldwork. The challenge, therefore, is to be able to explore the connections between larger policy programmes or rationalities and situated locally negotiated practices without ending up either with an idealized reproduction of general political rationalities in a one-dimensional or implicit ‘peopling’ of policy, or with isolated descriptions of myriads of complex ‘local’ practices. Here, recent research within the amorphous field of ‘the anthropology of policy’ points to possible routes to follow.

Anthropology of Policy Ethnographic explorations into people’s everyday lives have aptly shown that their subjectivities and use of social technologies are rarely so clear-cut and neat as presented in a political rationality (Shore & Wright 1997, 2011; Sutton & Levinson 2001). This is why, in assigning agency and creativity to the people towards whom a policy is directed, Sutton and Levinson (2001) have suggested replacing the notion of policy ‘implementation’ with policy ‘appropriation’. Appropriation, they argue, ‘highlights the way creative agents “take in” elements of policy, thereby incorporating these discursive and insti-

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tutional resources into their own schemes of interest, motivation, and action’ (ibid.: 3). People are not puppets or the helpless victims of policy but interpret, reject and adapt policy according to their own situated lives and values. In short, they argue, people ‘make’ policy through practice in that ‘appropriation is a kind of taking of policy and making it one’s own’ (ibid.). In a later article, Levinson, Sutton and Winstead (2009) reiterate that ‘appropriation’ is used to emphasize the creativity of agents as they negotiate and take in elements of policy. Here, they detail that the term addresses moments of a policy process ‘when the authorized text or policy signal circulates, by various means, across the various institution contexts to which it applies’ (ibid.: 779), and they therefore emphasize that the ethnographic field should be multi-sited and ‘attuned to the production and flow of reified texts across sites’ (ibid.: 789). This recognition of an individual’s capacity to influence the workings of policy is important and pertinent (if one does not lose sight of the fact that people may feel disempowered and pacified in particular policy processes). However, in light of this book’s main ambitions, the concept of appropriation also seems to involve a few challenges, one of which is it’s tendency to work as a retrospective concept. That is, the subjects whose conduct a policy intends to govern seem to be mainly conceived of as responsive and reactive to some pre-given ‘policy element’ or ‘policy whole’. This implies a certain reification, directionality and human intentionality of policy processes, which, in light of my analytical interest in the emergence of different student figures, has proved to be unfortunate. To avoid the risk of an a priori reduction of complex and continuously evolving actions of negotiation into an ‘object’ (i.e., the ‘policy’), it is important to emphasize that it is only through these very actions of interconnection that the ‘policy’ is momentarily produced, crystallized or manifested as a ‘thing’. In other words, the action also constitutes the very phenomenon it can potentially be conceived as being a reaction to. This is why I talk about the co-production of figures and wholes/worlds. Furthermore, the notion of ‘policy appropriation’ tends to promote or emphasize a certain kind of intentionality: it seems to direct the analyst to conceive of people’s conduct as directed towards one thing in particular, namely, ‘the policy’. In this way, one runs the risk of, on the one hand, assigning ‘policy’ a too dominant role in people’s lives and, on the other hand, restricting the analytical scope to the explicit policy negotiations of intentional (and maximizing) human beings (e.g., the charmed circles of policy negotiators like politicians, leaders and politically engaged teachers and students).

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With the ongoing negotiation of students’ participation and the production of diverse student figures as my main analytical concern (and not, for example, ‘the Danish University Act’ per se), I want to keep open my ability to explore how student figures are conjured up not only through explicit policy negotiations, but also in the more mundane practices and situations of ‘ordinary’ people who are not directly and intentionally involved in strategic manoeuvres and attempts to re-define and obtain ownership of a particular policy.

Frictional Events and Differential Lines of Participation The methodological move I have taken is to work with a triad of friction, figure/figuration and world making. As noted earlier, in order to grasp the complex processes of change in students’ opportunities and desire to participate in the shaping of their education, their university and larger society, this book pays attention to the dynamics and processes of what I, inspired by the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2005), have come to call ‘frictional events’ – that is, situations in which conflicting, but entangled, student figures and notions of desirable and undesirable student participation are actualized and take form. Friction, in Tsing’s use, works as a grip of encounter. She is concerned with the friction of ‘global connections’, and her point of departure is the 1990s liberal imaginaries of a ‘global era’ in which free trade and open borders would make possible the unimpeded flow of goods, ideas, money and people to the benefit of economy, science and society. But ‘global power’ and ‘globalization’, Tsing argues, do not operate as well-oiled machines. Encounters and interaction necessarily involve friction, she says, with an implicit reference to, among others, Bill Gates’s aspirations for ‘friction-free capitalism’ and the extremely efficient market. Friction, therefore, addresses the vicissitudes and contingent aspects of encounters; it is, in Tsing’s words, ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (2005: 4). Friction can therefore also be understood as the rubbing together of different agendas and rationales that create and promote new worlds – partially related to quests for efficiency, competitiveness and different forms of economic liberalization. In this vein, with the notion of ‘friction’ (rather than mere resistance or counter-power), I wish to signal that there need not be one ‘coherent total policy order’ or ‘hegemonic (neoliberal/capitalist) power’ against which a given action is a protest. There may indeed be manifold competing rationales and lines of participation that, despite

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being carried forth through institutional patterns of participation, are not settled but appear and are re-articulated through friction at different times and in different situations. The notion of friction, then, can be used in relation to a variety of situations, as when the same word is attributed different meanings by different people;5 when people with opposing views quarrel; when a particular technology is negotiated and put into use in conflicting (and often unintended) ways; or when ambivalence is apparent in a person’s attitude or conduct. Some may argue that the use of ‘friction’ here becomes too broad and thus the notion loses its analytical strength. I, however, find that working with ‘friction’ in this manner makes it possible to relate and explore a series of different situations that in different ways are related to the attempts to reform Danish universities to become more competitive in the so-called global knowledge economy. If friction is only taken to mean public contestation or conflict, for example, I would be able to shed light upon the students’ public protests but not on the tensions or ambiguities that people often live with and are faced with in their everyday lives. The strength in anthropological analyses, I believe, often lies in relating apparently mundane activities with larger and explicit processes of transformation and stabilization. Furthermore, to some people, the notion of ‘friction’ has an unfortunate connotation of designating an encounter between two stable and pre-given entities. In contrast, I want to highlight the generative connotations of the word ‘friction’. In ‘friction’ something is produced (e.g., movement, heat, fire), and connected and articulated elements co-produce each other. They are (re-)defined and (re-)produced through the very processes of articulation. It is in order to emphasize this generative aspect that I talk about frictional events.6 I take my cue from anthropological and philosophical traditions in which ‘events’ of conflict or negotiation are explored as singularities, that is, as unique and unrepeatable, as a point of unpredictability and a potential for transformation (Foucault [1971] 1998, [1978] 1994, 1991; Gluckman 1940; Kapferer 1987, 2005; Moore 1987, 1994). When it comes to the ‘event’, anthropologists have had long discussions about the status of events in terms of process versus system, stability versus change and, at a more philosophical level, ontology versus epistemology or the real versus representation (see, e.g., Hastrup 1990; Moore 1987; Sahlins 1985). Here, it is important that any ‘event’ or situation conveys a kind of simultaneous twofold character. On the one hand, the event happens in a given time and place, and often with the anthropologist as concrete participant; on the other

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hand, the event always points beyond itself in both time and place in the sense that larger macro-social and historical processes and conceptions are integral to the micro-dynamics of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. The event, therefore, is never just an empirical form of an existing system, but reveals the very processes through which any perceived ‘system’ or ‘order’ is constantly re-produced, negotiated and changed (see, e.g., Kapferer 2005; Moore 1987, 1994).7 Due to the inconvenient problematics of words like ‘structure’, ‘order’ or ‘system’ (as connoting something rather stable, total and pre-given), the dynamic twofold character of frictional events is perhaps most fruitfully understood through the notions of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’. In his attempt to add history to structure and vice versa, Marshall Sahlins argues that cultural order exists both in potentia and in presentia: This is really a pernicious distinction, structure and event. If only for the relatively trivial reason that all structure or system is, phenomenally, evenemential. As a set of meaningful relations between categories, the cultural order is only virtual. It exists in potentia merely. So the meaning of any specific cultural form is all its possible uses in the community as a whole. But this meaning is realized, in presentia, only as events of speech and action. … An event is not just a happening in the world: it is a relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system. (1985: 153)

Whereas Sahlins does not convey a sense of the virtual as in itself changing and changeable in this short quote – rather, it is evoked as an order that can be realized in manifold ways – he points to the aspect of potentiality and virtue that I find it important to stress: the virtual should be understood as latently providing a certain virtue and capacity to act. As a domain of latency and potentiality, it therefore orients – but does not causally determine – people’s conduct. Here, the writings of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2006) – who most people today perhaps associate with the notions of ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ – become relevant. Deleuze’s use of the virtual, however, is not uniform. In some places he characterizes the virtual as the realm of ‘problems’ and the actual as ‘solutions’ (Boundas 2005; Patton 1996). Elsewhere, he argues that an actual perception ‘surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other’ (Deleuze 2006: 112). In this regard, the virtual can be seen as a kind of ‘contextual space’ or a ‘space of resonance’ of an actual moment in time (Seigworth 2000: 236). Importantly, Deleuze

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does not perceive of the actual as mirroring the virtuality that it embodies. Hallward uses the weather as a pertinent example: To measure the ‘actual’ weather at any given moment in time and space is like taking a static snapshot of a process that itself remains in a state of continuous interactive change. The weather is only ever actual in the passing instant of a present moment, but what determines every such actuality is the dynamic motion of atmospheric forces as a whole. This motion or force itself cannot be grasped simply by measuring a series of actual states of affairs to which it gives rise: as motion or energy, it exists in intensive rather than extensive form. (2006: 38)

What is important to my approach is Deleuze’s argument that the process of actualization is indeed genuine (differential) creation, and not just a causal extrapolation or the reproduction of a pre-given order, logic or system. Furthermore, Deleuze’s claim that what is often perceived as ‘identities’ are in fact effects of ‘difference’ and processes of differentiation – that is, ‘identity’ is not somehow prior to ‘difference’ – fits well with my understanding of figuration work as the unstable and continuous process of producing figures that, entangled with other figures, themselves consist of endless series of differences. As figurations they are internally differentiated. If the ‘event’ in general is to be perceived as an emergent, productive or vitalizing phenomenon, in this book, I use it in a particular sense to convey a moment of differentiation, in that it produces the articulated and assembled wholes I call figures. I argue that competing figures of the student emerge and are most visible in ‘frictional events’ – that is, in situations conveying ambiguity, misrecognition or even conflict. Friction thus addresses a process of vibrating differentiation, productivity, potential change and creativity through which diverse student figures take form as part of different and often conflicting wholes. It involves what Marilyn Strathern (2004) has described as ‘cut/extension’ in the sense that a figure emerges as different from but therefore also in relation and comparison to other figures. Let me sum up the analytical framework developed so far, in this chapter and in the introduction: the book explores how ‘the student’ and ‘student participation’ is enacted and given figure (i.e., differentiated in the actual) in and through different frictional events. These processes of articulated or assembled differentiation is called figuration, since the figure – even though it appears as an absolute entity – is relative to other figures and to its intrinsic components. Furthermore, a frictional event can be understood as a co-production of ‘figures’ and ‘worlds’ (i.e., the tentative arrangements of different

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‘wholes’ in/of which students can take/be ‘part’). The figure therefore holds its own ground; the ground is integral (and not external) to the figure. Across time and place, the virtual grounds on which different figures take form can be understood as differential intensity and as what I, inspired by Hall (quoted in Grossberg 1996), call differential or tendential lines of participation. These lines are thus an analytical implication of my historical and ethnographic explorations, and one aim is to address and explore their movement and shifting intensity across time and place. Let me develop these points further by returning to the notions of figures/figurations (presented in the book’s introduction) and give an example of how I conceive of the relationship between figures/figuration, frictional events and lines of participation.

Figuring ‘Anders’ and ‘Gregers’ A discussion between Anders and Gregers,8 two third-year students, on their way to a weekend seminar with their department is a good example of what I take to be a frictional event through which the student is figured in particular ways. Gregers is criticizing Anders for only following one course when in fact, in order to study full-time, he should have followed two: Gregers: I really think it is too lackadaisical [slapt] that you are not taking 100 per cent of courses. I don’t understand why you downgrade your studies in this way. Anders: Well, I’m not. In fact, I am giving an even higher priority to my studies because I’m choosing to spend more time on a single course. I need the time for absorption [fordybelse] and to find out if I should choose [subject X] as my other subject. I am studying full-time, you know. I just want to be sure of my choice. Gregers: I think you’re squandering the state’s money by postponing your studies in this way. You have to try it and see if [subject X] is something for you.

This conversation is an event in the sense that it reveals points of friction, negotiation and potentiality: different problems and solutions of student participation are put into vibration and oscillation that may (or may not) lead to changed patterns of conduct on the part of different actors. It is not an event of great amplitude in social life (unlike the ‘1968 student revolts’, for example), but it nevertheless tells

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us something about divergent tendential lines through which student participation is negotiated, problems are identified and solutions are proposed. It also shows how an event may articulate certain problems and solutions through a process of differentiation in which particular elements are assembled into figurations – in this case, especially revolving around the dimension of time and speed. On the one side, in Gregers’s statements, the notion of studying full-time is linked to the number of courses taken and the state’s expenditure on public university education. On the other side, in Anders’s response, fulltime study is linked to a sense of absorption and to the actual hours spent on studying rather than the number of courses passed. To Anders, absorption is a necessity for his subsequent choice of course. To Gregers, official definitions of full-time studies (here, two courses and not one) are and should be the norm for a student’s course of education. In one figuration, experiential time and subjective speed are emphasized as prerequisites for the desired student participation (i.e., absorption). In the other figuration, by contrast, standardized policy time and official prescribed speed and quantity are seen as the measure of good and active participatory conduct. (I return to this discussion of time and speed in chapter 4.) In my example above, two different and opposing student figurations are articulated and generated through particular constellations of key words revolving around speed and depth. Through the frictional event, ‘Anders’ and ‘Gregers’, as figures and assembled wholes, acquire certain dispositions or capacities for acting. As the event always points beyond its actuality in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, it is crucial that Anders’s and Gregers’s identifications of certain problems and solutions should not be understood to be solely subjective or individual, but can be seen as actualizations and productions of competing lines of participation. Whereas Gregers’s statement echoes the government’s emphasis on educational speed, Anders’s focus on absorption and subjective speed is analogous to, for example, the arguments of certain professors that to study (and do research) is an unpredictable and individual process that cannot be planned in advance – a point already put forward by, for example, the German university reformer Humboldt in the early nineteenth century. In this way, any friction or conflicting problems and solutions – like the ones evoked by Anders and Gregers – may find resonance with problems and solutions evoked in other frictional events by students, teachers and leaders or through a particular law or policy. One challenge, then, is to explore if and how

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there are certain streams or tendencies in the lines of participation so that some figurations and ways of enacting ‘the student’ and ‘student participation’ are more prominent than others and are actualized in relatively isomorphic ways in diverse events – across time and space.

Diachronic and Synchronic Explorations of Frictional Events One of the difficulties of a study of change processes is, as Sally Falk Moore points out (1987), that it implies a curiosity about not only how the present was produced but also what the present seems to be producing, here and now – that is, how the present is always already turned into a certain history while simultaneously pointing to a certain future. Therefore, as stated in the introduction, I have used a twofold approach to the exploration of ‘evental’ figurations of the student, namely, a combination of historical exploration of how the student as a participatory figure has been assembled in different ways in different moments of friction over the past century with an exploration of frictional events that I encountered throughout my ethnographic enquiries into contemporary negotiations. My historical approach is inspired by Foucault’s notion of the ‘history of the present’ (Foucault [1971] 1998, [1975] 2002: 45; Roth 1981). The genealogical approach of the ‘history of the present’ has been developed and practiced in diverse ways by different researchers (Walters 2012: 110ff; see also Colwell 1997; Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982: 104ff.). A common denominator of genealogical studies, however, is an attempt to denaturalize ‘objects and subjects, identities and practices that otherwise appear given to us’ (Walters 2012: 118). The aim is to uncover the historical conditions of possibilities of given phenomena of the present by ‘rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on, that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being selfevident, universal, and necessary’ (Foucault [1978] 1994: 226–27). Attention is paid also to micro-political contestations and subtle shifts in power. In this way, taken-for-granted truths of the present, the implicit or explicit figures through which we experience the world, can be put in a new light and questioned as ‘natural’. ‘History’, in this view, does not obey destiny, regulation or intention but is an effect of ‘the luck of the battle’, as Foucault says. He works in the direction of ‘causal multiplication’ or ‘eventalization’, that is, of ‘making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical

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constant’ (ibid.: 226). This approach is my main source of inspiration in the historical explorations of chapter 3. The exploration of events, historically and ethnographically, raises the question of when it is relevant to call attention to particular incidents while ignoring others. Sally Falk Moore (1987) has suggested that, by taking certain kinds of events, namely, ‘diagnostic events’, as its point of departure, anthropology can engage in what she calls ‘current history’. Not unlike Max Gluckman (1940), she claims that it is because some incidents or situations in the present display the emergence and combination of multiple meanings (i.e., friction) that they are worth paying attention to. They are ‘diagnostic’ because they disclose particular dynamics and reveal central ongoing contests and conflicts. The juxtaposition in events of competing and contrary ideas, and of actions having contradictory consequences, is the circumstance that requires inspection and analysis. It is through that contiguity of contraries that ongoing struggles to control persons, things, and meanings often can be detected. Those struggles to construct orders and the actions that undo them may be the principal subject matter of ethnography as current history. (Moore 1987: 735, emphasis in original)

Here, one question, of course, arises: how can one know if a situation is indeed a ‘diagnostic event’, which, more than other situations, points to central conflicts and a coming future? As Hastrup (1990, 1992) has argued, there is no way to be sure. Seemingly mundane or irrelevant situations may turn out to give us just as important insights about different lines of figuration as so-called large-scale events like international demonstrations or political meetings. I do not believe in the ‘privileged or golden moment’ that can reveal to us the ‘real’ workings of current time and what the present is producing. As there is no single privileged level or scale of enquiry, there is no privileged knower either (Haraway 1991b). One could argue, as does Hastrup (1990, 1992), that all situations are therefore to a certain degree diagnostic in relation to history, and that mundane everyday life and apparently routine activities are also players in the production of history and the pointing to future worlds. As I see it, it is the mutual form-shaping and figuration work of the anthropologist and other involved actors that turns ‘the happening’ into ‘event’. On one point I therefore disagree with Moore’s and Gluckman’s understandings of conflictual or deviant events, since they emphasize them as a kind of ‘raw data’ (Moore 1987: 730) or ‘raw material’ (Gluckman 1940: 2). The anthropologist is in no way ‘innocent’, ‘objective’ or ‘external’

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to events and figures. The ‘temporality’ and ‘spatiality’ of events, however, may differ with the friction that is integral to them. Therefore, I am in agreement with Foucault when he argues: The important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure. It’s not a matter of locating everything on one level, that of the event, but of realising that there are actually a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects. The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another. (Foucault 1980: 114)

If change processes do not belong to only one temporal/spatial scale or to one form or one vibration, our anthropological task seems to be to acknowledge these differences and to explore them in their very specificity and singularity. Rather than identifying change on one scale and relating it to a perceived collective consciousness, one is led to explore the refractions of diverse events – the connections that at one and the same time they enter into and differentiate themselves from, the figurations that take form, the worlds and lines of participation they elicit and actualize. Where a ‘history of the present’ points to the contingency of the present, a ‘current history’, as proposed by Falk Moore, explores the process of how the present is turned into the past while simultaneously pointing to a particular future. By combining a (genealogical) serializing of frictional events over longer periods of time with a (topological) patterning of the friction within current events, I hope to be able to explore the competing lines of student participation in a way that allows me to grasp the diversities and complexities of contemporary life, as well as some larger tendencies or patterns in the ways student participation is given form and figure today.

Policy and Higher Education Studies In addition to making a contribution to anthropological enquiries of policy processes, this book also speaks to a growing field of higher education research that revolves around reform processes, governance and student participation. The field of policy and governance-related studies has traditionally been dominated by disciplines like law, political science, economics and public and business administration. These disciplines mainly make use of methods like documentary and

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conceptual analysis, surveys and interviews. In the case of higher education studies, such approaches tend to focus on relatively large or general levels of policy processes (Teichler 1996; Tight 2003). Based on a review of all the articles published in English-language higher education journals outside North America during the year 2000, Tight (2003) argues that policy processes are most often dealt with at the level of the ‘nation’ or the ‘system’. But whereas the former is concerned with the aims and consequences of a higher education policy in a particular country, the latter adopts a more conceptual, philosophical or critical tone, focusing on ideal systems of higher education and grand topics or concepts like, for example, ‘globalization’, ‘internationalization’ or ‘marketization’ (ibid.: 121ff.). In many studies of higher education and universities, change is conceived of in terms of a policy process that is discussed and evaluated either at a general conceptual level, or at an international, national (this being the most frequent) or institutional level, leaving the level of the individual as the least explored (ibid.: 203ff.). In parallel with the increased political focus on the importance of higher education to the development of a competitive knowledge society, higher education research has grown over the past two decades (Sadlak & Altbach 1997; Teichler 2005; Tight 2003, 2004). This body of higher education research – which is still a minor element of educational research as a whole – often borders on consultancy work, evaluations or other kinds of ‘information- and evidence-based pondering of policy-makers and practitioners’, as Teichler (2005: 447) argues. Practical concerns seem to be of high priority in large parts of higher education research, where, it has been argued, the two most common genres are ‘the essentially descriptive policy critique’ and ‘the small-scale, evaluative case study’ (Tight 2003: 6). These research projects are often characterized by a low degree of explicit engagement with theory and often have as their primary concern the dissemination of practical, evaluative knowledge of how to improve different services and practices so as to make students’ lives, for example, more satisfactory (Teichler & Sadlak 2000). According to Tight’s review (2003: 137ff.), the literature on government issues and institutional management in higher education journals is mainly concentrated on management practices (e.g., describing the ‘best practice’ or analyzing why management today takes certain forms), institutional leadership (e.g., exploring different styles of leadership) and governance (e.g., focusing on the work of the governing bodies within the institution) (see, e.g., Carney 2006, 2007). However, in recent years there seems to have been a growing

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interest in academics’ changing working conditions, the relationship between leaders and academics and how new government structures and practices are influencing the work, the degree of influence and the self-perceptions of the academic (see, e.g., Davies, Gottsche & Bansel 2006; Davies & Petersen 2005; Hayden & Parry 1997; Henkel 2000; Krejsler 2006, 2007; Larner & Le Heron 2005; Tight 2003: 153ff.). Research on students’ changing opportunities for participation and influence seems to be somewhat sparser, especially when it comes to ethnographically informed studies based on fieldwork. When more ethnographic interviews and participatory approaches are used, the study often aims at recording the ‘student experience’ or ‘student satisfaction’ (Haselgrove 1994; Tight 2003), access, accommodation, study environment and so forth so that the university may improve its offers and services, attract more students and increase student throughput. Often this research is conducted by designated educational or evaluation units or centres within the university. At first sight, my study could be argued to be a response to Tight’s (2003: 135) request for more research, within higher education reform processes, of local reactions and adaptations to system policy and more smaller-scale and inter-institutional research. However, as already shown, it would be more accurate to see my study as an exploration of the very premises of conceptualizing policy and change processes in terms of ‘local reactions’ to some external and identifiable policy force (be it ‘global’, ‘national’ or ‘institutional’). I hope to contribute to the literature on university reform and governance by focusing on the least explored aspect within this field: the student side of participation. However, I am not solely interested in the students’ point of view or ‘the student experience’. Students’ own perspectives and experiences are important, but they are only one aspect of the continual figurations of what it means and should mean to be a student. My study, contrary to a lot of current higher education research, is not evaluative in the sense of aiming at improving students’ satisfaction and developing university practices by providing a well-defined toolbox of solutions to problems of failing student applications or low throughput at any particular university. Rather, by engaging theoretically with the field of university reform and conflicting figurations of the student, I want to lift the everyday practices and perceptions of students into a much wider debate about the role of universities and of participation and democracy in today’s society. In order to do this, the following two chapters will address and explore, first, central aspects of the contemporary reform process and

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how students’ participation have figured in particular ways in the political negotiations over the 2003 Danish University Act (chapter 2), and, second, how students’ participation and role within university and larger society in Denmark have changed in a historical light (chapter 3). The aim is to analyze central and conflicting student figures and explore what lines of participation these figures elicit and actualize.

Notes 1. Dean ([1999] 2006: 240), for example, describes neoliberalism as a general and currently dominant mentality of rule in competition with, for example, neoconservative or communitarian mentalities, whereas advanced liberalism addresses the wider assemblages of these diverse rationalities, technologies and institutions that are characteristic of modern government. See also Rose (2000) for a discussion of ‘advanced liberalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. 2. Technology here becomes an element of translation or realization of thought/rationality into practice – that is, a technology could be seen as the materialization of rationality in technique with the aim of influencing the conduct of the governed in particular desirable ways (see, e.g., A. F. Jensen 2006: 60). Furthermore, a technology could be seen as a model for solving, and in the same vein also defining, particular problems by working on the relation between the self and a sociality (for discussion of different kinds of social/governmental technologies, see, e.g., Dean [1999] 2006: 266; Foucault 1988; A. F. Jensen 2006: 43; Jöhncke, Svendsen & Whyte 2004; Moos 2007; Rose 1999: 51ff.). 3. As Foucault points out, ‘subject’ has the double meaning of being subjected to someone or something through control or dependence (a social side of ‘subject’, e.g., the U.K. citizen as a ‘subject of the Crown’) and of constituting an internal, private sense of self and individuality (a private side of ‘subject’) (Foucault 1982). 4. In addressing O’Malley, Weir and Shearing’s (1997) critique, Rose (1999: 11) himself criticizes ‘quasi-philosophical meditation’ and asks for his book to be seen as ‘empirical’. In his work, however, people’s local and situated responses to or use of particular technologies of government are only rarely unfolded and discussed in-depth. In this sense he, like other governmentality studies, risks going against his own Foucauldian argument that power does not originate from, for example, the state as a centre but must be understood as a plurality. 5. Tsing (2005: xi) gives this as an example herself, and as Susan Wright (2005) has shown, policy processes often involve such instances where different actors attribute different meanings to particular key words

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without realizing they are doing so. Following Ohnuki-Tierney, Wright calls this phenomenon ‘misrecognition’. 6. The word ‘event’ stems from the Latin evenire, ‘to come out, happen, result’, while the French equivalent événement springs from the same roots as avènement, ‘emergence’, and avenir, ‘future’. 7. In this regard, Max Gluckman was a pioneer when he endorsed a more processual view than the structural functionalists of his time. However, it may be argued that he still stuck to a notion of an existing and uniform structure or system of which the events are ‘apt illustrations’ (Kapferer 2005). Gluckman stated that ‘[f]rom the flow of particular and unique social events, the sociologist abstracts types of social events as representative of the community he is studying’ (1940: 56). As was characteristic of his time, he perceived process in terms of function and, to some extent, still saw conflicts as the valves of societies, with conflictual events contributing to social cohesion by allowing steam to be let off and a social equilibrium to be maintained (see, e.g., Gluckman [1956] 1996). 8. All names in this book are pseudonyms, except where quotes and descriptions derive from publicly available sources.

2 University Reform in Denmark Negotiating Participation and Democracy

Participating in Universitas and a Race for Knowledge At the beginning of each year, every new student at the University of Copenhagen is invited to a solemn matriculation event in the university’s beautiful old ceremonial hall. For decades it has been a tradition that the rector makes a speech, presents the deans and welcomes the new students with a personal handshake. On the walls in the hall, a series of large paintings from the late nineteenth century introduce the freshmen to important features and events in the university’s more than five-hundred-year history. Behind the ornamented wooden rostrum, the inauguration of the university in 1479 is depicted, with its first chancellor being appointed by the king in Our Lady Church, a witness to the strong link between church and university in the first centuries of the university’s life. Another painting by the exit doors shows how students, having accepted the king’s request for help through the Senate, for a while became armed defenders of their country against Swedish attacks in 1658–59. The painting not only reminds any visitor that student involvement and participation at that time was not confined to reading books, it also points to some of the different ‘wholes’ in which the students were to take part. Legally, they were academic citizens of a university with its own jurisdiction. They were therefore the responsibility of the professors. But with the monarch at the top of the hierarchy these young male students were, as royal subjects, also expected to defend their country.

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Even though today university students are no longer under unique university jurisdiction or answerable to the Senate’s or monarch’s requests, the balance between what we might call their ‘dual citizenship’ of both a university community and a larger society still seems to be a key component in many current debates over their participation. In fact, there was a radical shift in the perception of students as part(icipant)s of certain ‘wholes’ between the two matriculation speeches by the rector of the University of Copenhagen in 2005 and 2006. In 2005, the rector evoked the ritual handshake as a symbolic welcome to a particular community: ‘By giving each of you a personal handshake I confirm that you are now a part of universitas – the community from the Middle Ages which has survived for 526 years.’ The rector saw the students as ‘new but already valid members’ of a particular universitas and as such expected them to actively participate in the shaping of the university and larger society. ‘Curiosity’ and ‘critical involvement’ were key terms in her speech. She likened the course of study to a voyage of discovery driven by curiosity through which the ‘traveller’ (the student) often ends up with other things in the backpack than had been planned at the start. She then linked this freedom of study to a particular moral and social responsibility: ‘With this knowledge comes responsibility’, she argued. ‘[Y]ou will acquire new knowledge and insights that are not only for your own benefit, but can contribute to promoting prosperity and welfare in our own society, as well as in countries that are not as privileged as we are.’ Therefore, as she pointed out at another freshman event that year, students should help protect and maintain what she perceived to be the very soul of the university, namely, the search for truth, a truth not dictated by political, commercial or other forms of pressure. The year after, in 2006, a new rector articulated a completely different set of metaphors and a different rationale about how, why and in what the students should participate and engage themselves. He started his speech by quoting a story from Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat, a 2005 best seller about globalization and what it takes to remain competitive in a global market with increasingly blurred geographical and historical divisions (see Friedman 2005): Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better start running.

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The analogical power of the ‘globalization’ story, the rector made clear, is that everything today takes place at high speed and in global competition. China and India are producing not only cheap products but also billions of highly educated people. Therefore, he said to the students, ‘We’d better take to our heels; and that is precisely what you are doing by starting here today. You begin to run so that you – and the rest of the country – are able to keep up in the race for knowledge.’ And, in this vein, he ended his speech with a radical re-interpretation of the symbolic and ritual welcoming handshake: ‘In a moment I start the race – your studies. Not with a pistol but with a handshake … Ready, steady, go!’ Rather than a welcome to a critically thinking academic community with extensive moral responsibilities, the handshake had become a starting signal for the freshmen’s enrolment and participation in a worldwide competition for knowledge.

Conflicting Lines of Participation These two matriculation speeches are not only interesting because they seem to actualize two conflicting and ostensibly central lines of participation. Importantly, the speeches were given by two different rectors who due to the 2003 governance reform enjoyed quite different positions within the university. As mentioned earlier, with the 2003 Danish University Act previous traditions of workplace democracy and elected leaders were replaced with appointed leaders, growing external influence and ideals of strong strategic leadership. The 2005 speech was held by the last elected rector, the latter by her successor, the first rector to be appointed by the newly established board of governors that had replaced the former Senate. The speeches do not present a frictional event, in the sense of a physical contestation at one particular time and place, in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. But they do point to a central (virtual) tension and to prominent lines of participation that, as we shall see in this and later chapters, seem to be re-enacted and re-articulated in various ways in different situations. The speeches draw on two very different – and today almost stereotypical – rationales about the workings and values of a university, and thus also articulate two different perceptions of students as part(icipant)s of different ‘wholes’. In both speeches, one can detect a notion of students’ participation in relation to the three interrelated participatory areas mentioned earlier: namely, student participation in their own education and learning process, in the

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governance and development of their university and in the development of wider society. The 2005 speech evokes what in Denmark is often described as ‘traditional’ academic values. These values are linked to a Humboldtian notion of Bildung, which puts emphasis on independence and freedom in education and research as well as education as general formation (rather than a question of obtaining pre-defined and instrumental qualifications) (see, e.g., Krejsler 2006). In the 2005 speech, students figure as a part of an academic community or universitas in which they have the right but also the obligation to involve themselves. Moreover, the students have a moral responsibility to involve themselves in the development of larger society, not just Denmark but also other less fortunate countries. In contrast, the 2006 matriculation speech draws on more recent rationales, which, as noted above, are often described as ‘neoliberal’ in that this rector put emphasis on competitiveness, freedom of choice and efficiency in and relevance of education. In his speech, the rector drifted between the three participatory areas and made them interdependent in a new manner. He started by talking about the students’ internal and individual competition to obtain excellent and relevant qualifications and how the University of Copenhagen is a perfect choice if they want to win this race, since it can offer excellent ‘coaches’ (i.e., researchers) and ‘training facilities’ (a good study environment), as well as the opportunity to ‘train with the best in the world’ (the University of Copenhagen is a member of a star alliance with, among others, Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University). The sentence ‘what to do if one wants to win the race’, with which the rector started, gradually shifted to ‘what to do if we want to win the race’ – the ‘we’ referring to both an institutional university whole and a national one. The students, in other words, were not only seen as each other’s competitors but also combatants in a race where universities compete with each other and nations do likewise. With his race analogy, the 2006 rector enacted three analogically structured figures/wholes – the individual student, the university and the nation-state – which are all to work together as enterprising units (see Masschelein & Simons 2002). The individual student needs to invest in his or her education so as to outdistance the other students, find a good job and contribute to the growth and welfare of society. As for the universities, they need, as the 2006 rector put it, ‘to attract fast runners among students and researchers’ in order to survive in the competition with other universities. Finally, the country as a whole

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needs to prioritize research and university education so as to enable success at the former two levels, generate growth and welfare and not lose out to other countries. The endeavour of science and education was thereby construed as a zero-sum game that you can either win or lose. It is, of course, too simplistic to conclude that the 2003 Danish University Act and the introduction of a new structure of governance is the cause or source of the 2006 rector’s figuration of the student, the university and the nation-state – and former policies the cause of the 2005 rector’s evocation of particular rationales of participation. The ‘author’ of the 2006 speech lies somewhere in the in-betweens of the rector and a larger network of partially connected elements – not just in the sense that his pro-rector (as I was told) was an important source of ideas for the speech, but because the possibility, relevance and legitimacy of the student figuration that was evoked are conditioned by a resonance chamber of a range of other events, policies, technologies, persons and so forth in which a line of participation connected to the notion of a competitive knowledge economy is also promoted. In fact, the following year, in 2007, the same rector emphasized in the matriculation speech that in this period, when everything has to take place at high speed, it is necessary to hold on to ‘classical academic values’ like ‘quality, professionalism, absorption, curiosity and a critical attitude’. This statement is more in line with his predecessor’s speech in 2005 than his own from 2006, showing us how no single person or moment in time is necessarily locked into any one organizing logic of education and tendential line of participation. However, as will become clear in the following, the 2006 speech’s enactment of the student as a participant in a worldwide race for knowledge has a clear resonance with the (knowledge) economic rationale that has been so central to Danish university politics in past decades. This chapter explores the initial negotiations of and rationales behind the 2003 Danish University Act and discusses in more detail the various meanings of the concepts of participation and democracy as these were actualized in the debate over the new law. When, in the following, I freeze-frame the process of reform and make a kind of ‘map’ of different initiatives, I do it in order to acquaint the reader with the political rationales and negotiations of some of the recent policy initiatives. More precisely, perhaps, the following presentation of the 2003 Danish University Act and attendant political debates – like the two rectors’ speeches – should be read as an initial exploration of the key and dominant frictions intrinsic to the negotiations

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surrounding the passage of the 2003 act. It thus works as a ‘mapping’ (Ingold 2000a: 232) for the coming explorations in this book. I start by providing a brief introduction to the Danish education system. I then move on to explore the rationales behind the 2003 Danish University Act and how the central debates revolved around conflicting notions of participation and democracy. Here I also point to how in Denmark the notions of participation and democracy has a unique history, where some link them to formal participation in representative democracy, while others – with the notion of co-citizenship – emphasize democracy as a way of life more generally. These notions seem to form two distinct and conflicting tendential lines of participation that play a crucial role in contemporary university and education politics in Denmark.

A Few Facts about Danish University Education Out of the total of eight universities in Denmark, the University of Copenhagen (1479) and Aarhus University (1928) are the oldest and largest (around forty thousand students each) ‘traditional’ universities in Denmark, with faculties covering the traditional broad areas of the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Other broadly oriented poly-faculty and in that sense ‘traditional’ universities were established in Odense (1966) – after a merger in 1998 re-named the University of Southern Denmark – and, in the wake of the student revolts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Roskilde (1972) and Aalborg (1974). The two latter put a particular emphasis on students’ participation in their learning, and both introduced new pedagogical approaches like problem-based learning and project work in groups. Lastly, there are three more specialized or ‘mono-faculty’ universities, the IT University of Copenhagen (1999), the Copenhagen Business School (established as a business college, 1917) and the Technical University of Denmark (established as a polytechnic school, 1829). Generally speaking, and as a consequence of the development of a relatively strong welfare state, Danish education politics up through the second half of the twentieth century have been characterized by an understanding of university education as a common good and a social investment. Consequently, the Danish budget for public education is relatively high. Indeed, according to the OECD’s report Education at a Glance (2013), in 2010 Denmark was the OECD country investing the highest proportion, namely, 8 per cent, of its gross domestic product (GDP) in education. All Danish universities are pub-

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lic, private universities are prohibited by law and no tuition fees are charged for domestic students on ordinary full-time bachelor’s or master’s programmes. These students, as described previously, can receive study grants from the state for a maximum of six years. In 2015 the study grant was equivalent to around *790 or US$865 per month before tax. In order to qualify for university, the student needs to complete the ten years of compulsory education1 (one pre-school year, grade 0, followed by grades 1 to 9 – an additional grade 10 is voluntary) and an upper secondary education (often the three-year gymnasium or, for more mature students, the so-called higher preparatory exams, which take two years). Since 2008 there has been continuous growth in the enrolment numbers at the Danish universities (Danske Universiteter 2012, 2013). All academic areas have grown, but relatively more have applied for subjects within science and technology. It has been the government’s aim that 60 per cent of a youth cohort obtains a higher education degree, and that 25 per cent complete a so-called long-cycle higher education programme (typically a two-year master’s degree from the university). In 2012, it was estimated that 23.8 per cent of the 2010 youth cohort is likely to complete a long-cycle higher education programme within twenty-five years after finishing secondary school (grade 9). This number was 11 per cent in 1990 (Danske Universiteter 2012). As noted previously, the Danish university degrees, in accordance with the Bologna model, consist of a three-year bachelor’s degree (introduced in 1993, prior to the Bologna Process), a two-year master’s degree and a three-year Ph.D. degree. Over the past decades it has become usual for many students to take one or two years ‘off’ (travelling, working or going to the so-called folk high schools2) between upper secondary school and university. In 2009, the average bachelor’s degree student enrolment age was 21.9 years (dropped from 22.8 in 2002), and in 2008, the average age of the bachelor’s degree graduate was 25.9 years (dropped from 26.4 in 2006), whereas the average age of the two year master’s degree (called candidate) graduate in 2007 was 29.3 years (UBST 2009). On average, in 2012 a Danish university graduate had spent around thirty-eight months to complete the bachelor’s programme and thirty-three months to complete the master’s programme (Danske Universiteter 2013). Even though the average period of study between 2001 and 2011 have been reduced by three months for bachelor’s students and six months for master’s students (Danske Universiteter 2012), the numbers are relatively higher than in most other European countries. Accordingly, as we shall see

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in the following, quite a few of the reform initiatives introduced over the past decades have been targeted at speeding up students’ course of education and lowering the average completion and enrolment age. Indeed, creating more ‘efficient’ and ‘cost-effective’ universities were prime reasons behind the introduction of the 2003 Danish University Act.

The 2003 Danish University Act The arguments for the passing of a new university act in 2003 revolved around the notions of ‘the global knowledge economy’, ‘globalization’ and increased worldwide competition (Regeringen 2002a, 2002c, 2002d, 2005, 2006a). Grounded in a constant fear logic of ‘falling behind in the race for education’ (see, e.g., Regeringen 2005: 18– 19), this view of university education sees it as a necessary investment for both the individual and the society at large. As the government argued: In the future too, education of high international standard and quality will be the key for Denmark to do well in an increasingly globalized world. Education is one of our most central competition parameters and a precondition for an increased and highly qualified workforce with upto-date competences. (Regeringen 2002a: 3)

As one of the government’s high-priority areas, therefore, the universities should be able to prioritize their use of state funding in a responsible and professionally effective way. Using strategic leadership and accounting technologies, universities are expected to drive up quality and relevance and respond more quickly to market needs in teaching and research. An institutional reform made the universities ‘self-owning’ institutions (cf. Wright & Ørberg 2008). In the image of a private corporation, the democratically elected governing body of the universities, the Senate (Konsistorium), was abolished and replaced by a board of governors chaired and dominated by external appointees with experience of running large organizations in the private and state sectors. The democratically elected new ‘academic councils’ were given advisory status. Furthermore, this governance reform established a new set of ‘strong’ leaders from the rector down to heads of department, who were to be appointed in a topdown process and no longer elected by the university community. Students lost their vote in electing the rector, as well as their seats on the now abolished department boards. However, to secure relevant

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student participation in decision making, the government argued, the study boards on which students have half of the seats were to be retained and students were granted a minimum of two seats on the new boards of governors (compared to one seat each for the academic and administrative staff, respectively). In line with the government’s general ‘modernization programme’ for the public sector, which advocated putting ‘citizens at the wheel’ (Regeringen 2002b), Danish universities were to be more flexible and responsive to students’ wishes and choices, as well as to the demands of the job market. Choice is seen as the solution to the problem of paternalism and powerlessness, which, in the government’s view, citizens at times experience when confronted with the public sector (Regeringen 2002e). Choice is to empower the citizens – and especially those with a ‘weak voice’ – against the ‘professional’ employees of the public sector. The ‘user’ of public services is, like the customer, to be given freedom of choice in a market of competing public providers. In terms of university education, this preoccupation with freedom of choice in the public sector is to a large degree linked to notions of speed and efficiency. As the minister of science said: It is the aim of the government to bring the individual student more to the centre of the education system. It is the student who is a customer in the education shop. For it is the government’s view that greater freedom and more flexibility in everyday life gives better study experiences and encourages a faster completion of the study. This is of benefit for the individual student and for society as a whole. (Sander 2006: 12, emphases added)

While students’ freedom of choice and mobility, both nationally and internationally, were to be increased, their dropout rates, age when starting their studies and average time of completion were to be lowered so as to increase Danish competitiveness. A further essential educational policy target was to ensure that the academic standard of educational programmes and their relevance, planning and structure ‘reflect the knowledge society’s wide needs for competencies’ (Regeringen 2002c: 1; see also Nielsen and Sarauw 2012; Regeringen 2002a, 2002d; VTU 2003). Universities are now required to make the progression and relevance of their programmes more visible to the students, who in turn are to use their freedom of choice to piece together a more ‘relevant’ course of education. In short, as the government argued, ‘[t]he education system should be able to meet the job market’s [aftagernes] expectations of flexible employees with relevant qualifications and competences’ (Regeringen 2002a: 65). In this

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vein, the reforms require universities to shift the focus from ‘input’ to ‘outcomes’ in their programme regulations and teaching, a shift from internal academic demands and ‘content descriptions’ to the kinds of ‘competences’ for thinking and acting that each course will provide to the student. To promote and endorse the speed and relevance of students’ course of education, a range of different governmental technologies has been suggested and put into play in different ways and at different speeds in Danish universities. These initiatives include a modular structure of courses and programmes to enhance students’ freedom of choice and mobility, increased supervision and guidance of students, the introduction of student dissertation contracts and student appraisal interviews, state bonuses to the universities for students’ fast completion, increased quality assurance through evaluation, the establishment of an independent accreditation council to evaluate existing programmes and approve new ones, the introduction of tuition fees for certain foreign students, and the introduction of a new grading scale in the name of international compatibility. Danish educators and politicians often emphasize ‘active participation’ and ‘independent thinking’ as unique features of the Danish education system, including university education. As we shall see in the following sections, these features have particular historical roots in Denmark and are today renegotiated in light of the reforms and the promotion of new rationales for university education.

Education in Denmark: A Unique Form of Participation and Democracy A visit to the official Study in Denmark website3 – a site for prospective higher education students from other countries – shows how Danish higher education presents itself to the outside world. At the top of the page it says: ‘THINK, PLAY, PARTICIPATE. Studying in Denmark is all about you – Pushing the boundaries, expressing yourself, working with others, applying critical thinking and turning new learning into innovative solutions. Be ambitious. Study in Denmark.’ With the recurring slogan ‘Think, Play, Participate’, the site conveys to the reader a sense of a unique and high-quality education system that puts a strong focus on the individual student and allows for the student to develop in independent, creative and ambitious ways. The Danish education system, it says under the rubrics ‘It’s all about you’ and ‘Excellence in Education’, is characterized by ‘[s]tudent-centred

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learning and open debate during class; close collaboration between students and teachers; active participation and problem solving rather than passive listening’. Traditional lectures, it is explained, are therefore often ‘combined with project work with the teacher as a consultant’. Student participation in the teaching and learning processes, in other words, is a core pedagogical concept and at the very heart of the Danish education system, as presented here. The overall aim with these pedagogical approaches, the reader is told, is to promote creativity, self-expression and analytical and critical thinking, with the student taking responsibility for his/her own learning. Studying in Denmark, in other words, requires and promotes personal initiative and independent, creative thinking. Ostensibly, all of these characteristics are summed up in the slogan ‘Think, Play, Participate’. This emphasis on student participation and independent thinking as something unique for Danish education can be seen in relation to particular post–Second World War developments, which I will discuss in some detail in the following. The experience of the German occupation of Denmark (1939–45) gave rise to a renewed emphasis on the benefits and necessity of democracy, and in Denmark, as well as internationally, democracy was increasingly seen as the positive counterpart to and remedy against totalitarian Nazi or fascist systems. Important and continuous discussions were had about the very notion of democracy; about what democracy is and should be; and, in particular, whether democracy and participation is to be understood as a form of life and thus as a goal in itself or as a form of government (or governance4) and a means to a particular end. The conflicting understandings of democracy-as-goal and democracy-as-means in the post–Second World War democracy debate is perhaps best exemplified by the dispute between the folk high school5 theologian Hal Koch ([1945] 1981) and the lawyer Alf Ross (1946). Koch’s and Ross’s conflicting viewpoints are not only relevant to nation-state democracy, they also point to much more profound negotiations between democracy as a goal and democracy as a means that are essential to the current debate about the workings of Danish universities and the role of student participation in them. For Hal Koch, democracy was a form of life oriented towards the creation of consensus and community through reasoned debate. Democracy is therefore a (potential) trait in all human relations that is to be awoken through upbringing and enlightenment and should be reflected from the private sphere on to the wider social circles of fellow citizens and other nations. The ideal in Koch’s participatory democracy is for participation to support democratic governing as well as its participants’

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formation and development. The ‘good citizen’ – or co-citizen, as Koch called it (Korsgaard 1997: 348ff.) – is to participate actively in his or her everyday life in a variety of ways. In Danish, a distinction is made between medborgerskab (in direct translation, co-citizenship) and statsborgerskab (state citizenship). Whereas the latter has to do with the legal requirements, duties and rights of being a Danish citizen, the former is often described in terms of identity, sense of belonging (Haas & Korsgaard 2003) and modes of civic engagement, ‘civil society’ or ‘empowerment’ (Schwartz 2002). Hal Koch saw co-citizenship as a particular human community with which the individual should be connected through revival, enlightenment and upbringing. Co-citizenship is therefore a question of attitude or mentality rather than merely of laws and procedures (Koch [1945] 1981: 13; Korsgaard 1997: 52–53). The integrative dimensions of democracy were emphasized, and participation became a goal in itself in that people should learn democracy through democracy (Koch [1945] 1981: 20). Democratic involvement in all aspects of one’s everyday life could and should then provide the force for coherence in society. Alf Ross, on the other hand, had a more procedure-oriented view of democracy and criticized Koch for neglecting the importance of formal democratic ground rules. To Ross, democracy is a means or principle for organizing the processes of decision making. It is a form of government, a way of organizing the political system so as to aggregate the plurality of competitive viewpoints according to the principle of majority. Ross primarily thinks of citizenship in terms of rights and duties in a representative democracy: the ‘good citizen’ is mainly expected to keep her- or himself informed about political issues and to vote at elections. Participation is seen in instrumental terms, as the election of representatives through which political decision making can be influenced ( J. G. Andersen 2008). Whereas Koch emphasizes the integrative dimensions of democracy (conflicts are dissolved and integrated into a common whole through reasoned debate – the ‘people’ becomes a collective unit), Ross emphasizes an aggregative aspect of democracy, in that democracy becomes a method for aggregating a plurality of viewpoints, and this is not necessarily tied to a sense of belonging to a particular collective whole. During this period after the Second World War, democracy also became an important pedagogical concept, not only a political one (Henningsen [1946] 2003; Korsgaard 2013), and a growing optimism and belief in the benefits of education developed. University education, for example, was increasingly seen as an important contribu-

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tor to national prosperity, and access accordingly widened (see also chapter 3). At the time, the creation of social equality was seen as a prerequisite (and not a hindrance, as some would have it today) to economic growth, and accordingly, as Korsgaard (2003) emphasizes, the education system was to be built on ideals of collaboration and solidarity, whereas elements of competition should be reduced (e.g., through the abolition of exams and grades). More particularly, according to the Danish political scientist Ove K. Pedersen (2011: 177ff.), the development of a strong Danish welfare state in the post–Second World War period played a key role in promoting an ideal about education as a question of broad formation for life (and not only for work) and as a question of educating democratically engaged co-citizens (medborgere) who actively participate in and take responsibility for the development of society. In this way, the individual was to see him- or herself as playing a role in the shaping and realization of larger integrated ‘wholes’ and communities, in which people were to have equal opportunities. From being a question of individual rights of freedom and of the majority’s right to decide who should take office in Parliament, the notion of democracy, Pedersen argues, was now increasingly linked to a notion of a community that could only be realized through people’s participation and commitment. Internationally, the American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey had already in 1916 written his important book Education and Democracy (Dewey [1916] 2005), in which he highlighted democracy as a pedagogical concept and as more than a form of government. Like Hal Koch, he argued that democracy should be understood as primarily a form of life – something you live and do in collaboration with others and a kind of jointly communicated experience. To Dewey, education was not only about gaining content knowledge, but also about learning how to live in a more general sense. Clearly located within American pragmatism, he emphasized that learning is dependent on the integration of theory with practice, and that students should draw on their own experience in the learning process. He thus promoted learning by doing, student participation/ deliberative democracy and project work as fruitful and beneficial pedagogical approaches and became an influential figure within socalled progressive education. As noted earlier, and as we shall see in more detail later (chapter 5), similar pedagogical and democratic ideals (however, originally in a more Marxist and critical pedagogical version) have played a crucial role in Denmark, especially at the two universities that were established in the early 1970s in Roskilde and

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Aalborg. While Dewey undoubtedly has played a significant role for the development of ‘progressive education’ and reformpædagogik in Denmark, it remains unknown if or to what extent Hal Koch had read and was inspired by Dewey’s thoughts. In any case, their ideas about democracy resonate in several ways and testify to the fact that in the twentieth century democracy and students’ participation in their learning and in the shaping of university and larger society was re-thought and promoted in new ways, in Denmark and elsewhere. The discussions about whether democracy is best understood and promoted as a form of life or a form of government are still present today and, as we shall see in the following, conflicting notions of democracy and participation as a means or a goal played a key role in the debate over the 2003 Danish University Act.

University Reform and Shifting Notions of Democracy and Student Participation As already mentioned, the Danish reform initiatives opened up new relations and spaces of power between students, teachers, university leaders and the Ministry of Science. Therefore, notions of university democracy, academic freedom and student participation were much discussed before, during and after the passage of the 2003 Danish University Act. Students and academic staff complained that the act increased the power of the leadership at the expense of the democratic influence of the different groups of the university. Now, responsibility for governance at universities in the Western world has always reflected a subtle balance between membership and competence (see, e.g., McGrath 1970), that is, between those who are seen as legitimate university members or stakeholders and those who are seen as competent governors or participants in decision making. For centuries the academic staff (and especially the professors) have been seen as the most competent and as having the main responsibility for the key missions (research and teaching) of the university. Despite changes in the 1970s in favour of increased workplace democracy and present-day arguments for ‘re-establishing’ democracy, the democratic principle of one person, one vote has never existed at Danish (or other Western) universities. When all membership groups of the university have been included in the system of governance, representation has always been weighted according to their respective functions and competences within the university community.

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When reading through international and national policy documents, surveys and reports, the different arguments for student participation seem to revolve around two overall understandings of democracy and participation. While one argument emphasizes participation and democracy as a means, the other argument revolves around democracy as a goal in itself, that is, for promoting active citizenship – or put differently, one argument emphasizes democracy as a form of governance, the other as a form of life. However, today, in the international political and academic literature, student participation is mostly emphasized as a means to improve the quality, relevance and efficiency of university education and is mainly understood in terms of the procedural aspects of governance.6 Students are often perceived of as creative and more reform-minded than other groups and as such as invaluable to the constant renewal of academic practices (Persson 2003: 40–41). Only the students experience the teaching and the overall course of education. They are, therefore, essential to the enhancement of educational quality and relevance, whether through participation in governing bodies, freedom of choice or evaluations, or by complaining (see, e.g., VTU 2006). This argument revolves around an instrumentalist understanding of participation, and, like Alf Ross, focuses on the formal rules and procedures, on visibility and clarity about the structure of governance. However, because the promotion of democratic civic involvement has been a growing concern in many Western countries in recent decades, democracy as a goal seems to be receiving growing attention, not least because the education system is seen as having an important role in encouraging and qualifying students to becoming democratic and active citizens (see, e.g., Bologna 2007; Plantan 2002; UNESCO 1998). While a growing body of academic literature is now arguing for a more active and reflexive role for universities in the formation of the young person’s ‘character’ as an active, democratic or socially responsible person (see, e.g., Ahier, Beck & Moore 2003; Arthur 2005; Bergan 2004; Huber & Harkavy 2007; McIlrath & Labrhrainn 2007; Plantan 2002), such a formative role for university democracy has not been prominent on the national Danish political agenda since the late 1990s (see Forskningsministeriet 1999; Forskningsudvalget 1999; UVM 1997, 2000). Even though Denmark has signed several declarations in which education for active citizenship is emphasized as an important task for higher education,7 ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic skills’ are only mentioned as important aspects of educational institutions in the laws on education from primary school until medium-cycle higher education (Law no. 207, 31 March 2008, and Law

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no. 590, 24 June 2006). At the university level, therefore, it seems as if students are presumed to possess such democratic skills already. In the publication ‘Towards a Danish “Qualifications Framework” for Higher Education’ (2003), for example, the Ministry of Science writes: The Danish education system aims to give its graduates ‘democratic competency’. For example, this is stated in the Danish Act on Medium-cycle Education Programmes as follows: ‘Furthermore, education programmes should contribute to developing the student’s interest in and ability to take an active part in a democratic society.’ Because this is not a competency isolated to any single degree, it is not included as a separate item [in the framework]. (VTU 2003b: 14–15, quoted in Sarauw 2012)

A closer look at the debates of the 2003 Danish University Act in Parliament shows how in general the Danish debate about democracy and the 2003 act mainly revolved around democracy as a means and participation as a question of procedures for formal decision making (e.g., voting possibilities and number of seats on boards and councils). The parliamentary debate, however, also reflects how several conflicting understandings of democracy were evoked by the opposition and the government, respectively. Now, as I shall show further in chapter 3, the word ‘democratization’ in the context of the universities can and has referred to several things: first, widening access, that is, the inclusion of new kinds of students (for example, ‘working-class students’ in the 1970s; in an English context, this is often referred to as ‘widening participation’); second, internal university (workplace) democracy, where the different member groups of the university population are represented on governing bodies and involved in decision-making processes; and third, the notion that, as a state institution, so-called external voices – that is, non-members of the university community, most often the democratically elected Parliament and government, but also the ‘surrounding society’ in terms of, for example, the corporate world or regional and local authorities – must have a say in university governance for the university to be truly democratically governed. In the current Danish debate, the notion of democracy has mainly revolved around the two latter principles. It is worth noting that all parties in Parliament were in favour of democracy and student participation. However, no qualified or indepth discussion was undertaken concerning why and what kind of student participation is essential and for what reasons. The opposition emphasized that the act deprived students of influence, since previously they had been represented at all levels of decision making

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with a guarantee of influence, whereas now they are no longer represented on any departmental board, the academic council has mainly the power to recommend only and the study boards’ influence has been reduced in favour of strong leaders (Homann 2003). The Social Democrats, who supported the act put forward by the LiberalConservative government, were criticized by other leftist parties for contributing to removing some of the same democratic elements that they otherwise claimed to support in their own programme of principles. These included participation and co-determination in one’s own workplace and in the local community. In defence the Social Democrat spokesperson stated that one should not idealize democracy uncritically and that democracy is not just one thing. Students and employees will still have influence, but in new ways, she said. I admit that the form of democracy which is about direct authority [direkte magtbeføjelse], where one puts up one’s hand and gets something out of it or not, has become smaller. In return, I believe that the form of influence gained through participating in places where the decisions are made and throwing around awfully good arguments has become greater. (L. Jensen 2003)

The social democratic notion of democracy, she argued, includes the process of putting forward excellent arguments. Democracy is not just a question of direct voting power. So, even though the students’ direct decision-making power had been reduced on some levels (e.g., by turning the academic councils into advisory boards and strengthening the power of the leadership in general), they could still assert influence through ‘good arguments’. At the end of the parliamentary debates, the minister of science put forward the third democratization argument mentioned above. He stated that the Danish University Act could also be seen as an initiative whereby ‘we now in earnest … introduce democracy by establishing open boards. We ensure that more people are included in the governance of universities. We ensure that universities are not becoming closed enclaves but become open parts of society’ (Sander 2003). In terms of student participation in particular, he supported the spokesperson from his own party, the Danish Liberal Party (the main party in the government at the time), who had argued earlier in the debate that the act did not decrease student influence. She stated that the act’s guarantee of a minimum of two students on the board of governors and retaining equal representation of students and teachers on the study boards indeed provided students with increased influence in (according to her) the most relevant student areas: on the

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board of governors they could influence strategic priorities, while at the programme level they were now given better security that bad course evaluations would be followed up on. In addition, the spokesperson said, students also gain in influence due to the growing degrees of freedom they had to put together their own courses of education (Severinsen 2003). These last sentences point to a shift in the character and understanding of democracy, student influence and participation, one I also pointed out in the introductory chapter, in which participation is increasingly linked to issues of ‘free choice’ and visible ‘accountability’. The intertwining of student ‘voice’ with student ‘choice’, as presented by the spokesperson for the Danish Liberal Party, should be seen in relation to the increased political focus on transparency in leadership, accountability and students’ right to complain. This connection was also elicited by the then minister of education8 (also from the Danish Liberal Party) at a public election meeting9 in 2007. When asked about the issue of decreased student participation, he stated that, in order to guarantee their influence, the government had made the ‘chain of command’ clearer. He felt that students in general put up with too much at university, but under the new governance structure, with its ‘strong’ leaders, students could now know exactly where to complain. In other words, student participation increasingly seems to become a question of the ability to identify the responsible persons or authority and having the knowledge regarding how and where to direct any dissatisfaction.

Conflicting Lines of Participation: From Welfare State to Competition State? Danish university education is often promoted and branded as unique in the sense of students’ participation. Democratic governance and democratically oriented teaching approaches are often seen as core features that enable and encourage students to become active participants in the shaping of their own education as well as the larger communities of which they are a part. At the university level, however, emphasis today seems to be on the procedural aspects of democracy as a form of governance rather than on the broader concept of democracy as a form of life (i.e., a way of participating in one’s everyday life that is built on integrative and dialogic ideals). Furthermore, today the procedural aspects of student participation are not only about students’ representative rights on governing bodies. Rather, in

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the political debate, participation and democracy is increasingly conceptualized in terms of freedom of choice, transparent leadership and complaint procedures. The two rectors’ speeches with which I opened this chapter pointed to articulations of conflicting lines of participation that were central to the negotiations over the 2003 Danish University Act. One line of participation I provisionally call a line of integrative participation. Here, emphasis is put on students’ participation as part of larger integrated wholes and communities. Participation and democracy is seen as a question of general democratic formation and the cultivation of a critical, socially and politically engaged student figure. This line of participation, as we have seen in this chapter, is tightly linked to the particular Danish figure of the ‘co-citizen’ and to democracy as a form of life, that is, an everyday curiosity and critical involvement in all aspects of one’s life. Participation is related to democratic governance, as well as to the participants’ general formation and development, and the individual is seen as part of and morally obligated towards larger communities. This line of participation was actualized in a particularly powerful way in the wake of the Second World War and, in different versions, still plays a central role in contemporary discussions over university reform. The 2005 rector’s matriculation speech in many ways articulates and actualizes this line of participation. The other line of participation we could call a line of aggregative participation. Here emphasis is put on democracy as a means of aggregating different people’s desires or points of view. This line was actualized in a particular manner with the 2006 matriculation speech, where it was linked to issues of (economic) competitiveness – in order to survive in the knowledge economy, individuals and countries are encouraged to ‘run fast’ and be strategic in their educational efforts. A certain instrumentalism, combined with a focus on economic growth, therefore seems to be a characteristic element of this line of participation. Unlike in the 2005 matriculation speech, there is no talk of any integrative community (universitas) built on collaboration, democratic participation and a common search for knowledge. Conceived of as lions and gazelles, some players win at the expense of others. However, by striving to win, each participatory figure (be it the student, the university or the country) ends up contributing to the competitiveness of the aggregated (rather than integrated) ‘whole’ at the next level. Such a ‘whole’ can therefore be described as what Masschelein and Simons (2002) call a ‘unity of units’. If seen in relation to the reforms of not only the university system but the Danish state more generally, the two conflicting lines

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of participation fit remarkably well with what the political scientist Ove K. Pedersen (2011: 177ff.) has described as a transition from a ‘welfare state’ (from 1950 to 1990) to a ‘competition state’ (from 1990 to today). Pedersen focuses on basic schooling and argues that in the welfare state, participation and democracy were linked to ideals of collaboration and the formation of active co-citizenship, that is, of involved persons who through participation realize democracy. Democracy was not defined in advance; it was understood as something that was realized through participation. In contrast, in the competition state, Pedersen argues, democracy is seen as something that is already realized and is therefore pre-defined and prepared for the individual in terms of political institutions and formal procedures. Welfare state ideas about democracy as something that builds upon/is realized through collaboration and consensus making are now being increasingly replaced by notions of competition and conflict as core features of a democracy. Furthermore, participation is increasingly seen as a tool for economic competitiveness in a globalized world. While this epochal account seems persuading, clear-cut and somewhat in accordance with the rationales promoted with the new university law in 2003, the two matriculation speeches and the heavy debates over the law also show that there are many more rationales in play today – there are many more lines of participation that oscillate and are articulated in different ways. It is indeed noticeable that the student as ‘fast runner’ and ‘knowledge combatant’ has become thinkable and sayable at this particular moment in time. However, rather than staying only with an epochal and clear-cut account, what seems important – from an anthropological point of view – is to explore the amplitude and interconnectedness of different figurations and lines of participation. In the following chapters I will do this by exploring the emergence, negotiation and intertwinement of particular figurations and lines of participation historically (chapter 3) and ethnographically (chapters 4, 5 and 6). By putting contemporary reform initiatives, described in this chapter, into a historical light, I aim to provide a wider space of resonance for the ethnographic explorations of chapters 4, 5 and 6.

Notes 1. The vast majority of the pupils are enrolled in municipal basic schools, which are free to parents. A minority enters private schools of differ-

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

ent kinds. These are financed by state subsidies and pupil contributions (UVM 2010). The Danish folk high schools provide non-formal adult education. There are no academic requirements for admittance, no exams and they do not grant academic degrees. Rather, they offer a range of classes (creative, physical, musical, etc., as well as more traditional classes like philosophy or language) for students to choose from in order to learn about themselves and the society they live in. Most students are between eighteen and twenty-four years old and they typically stay at the school for four months. See http://www.danishfolkhighschools.com/ (accessed 25 March 2015) See http://studyindenmark.dk. (accessed 25 March 2015) The word ‘governance’ became increasingly popular up through the 1990s and often refers to the change in the functioning of states introduced with new public management. This, among other things, has been characterized as a shift from hierarchical and bureaucratic government based primarily on representative democracy to a new form of network governance. Whereas the former has a relatively clear distinction between state and civil society, in the latter, the state, private businesses and civil society interact in new ways, for example, through partnerships or outsourcing. In this sense, governance involves a more indistinct or unclear form of governing, based on representative democracy as well as more activist-oriented forms of participation in local communities (Bogason 2001; Rhodes 1997). Due to a more profound state and public sector (than in, for example, the Anglo-Saxon countries), governance in Denmark has been characterized as ‘governance in the shade of the hierarchy’ (Sehested 2003, quoted in Agger 2005: 15). Danish folk high schools offer so-called non-formal adult education. With the Danish philosopher, poet, educational thinker and clergyman N. F. S Grundtvig (1783–1872) as the driving force, the first school was established in 1844. Inspired by thoughts of enlightenment and an emerging national romanticism, Grundtvig wanted to provide the uneducated peasantry with the opportunity to learn about society in general in order to become active and engaged members of society. The spoken word, active democratic participation and public education (as against the university elite) were central to these schools, where exams were prohibited and the main aim was to empower ordinary people to become active citizens (see Korsgaard 1997). For example, in a 2003 Council of Europe Survey on Student Participation in the Governance of Higher Education in Europe (Persson 2003), the three respondent groups – students, academic representatives of the higher education institution and ministries responsible for higher education – were all in favour of increased student participation. They all emphasized that, as the largest group and as important stakeholders, student influence enhances the quality and effectiveness of the higher education system. When asked how to increase student participation, all

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three respondent groups focused on the formal and procedural aspects of governance (e.g., higher number of student seats, stronger voting rights and regulated rights to participate in evaluation procedures). 7. For example, the World Declaration on Higher Education for the TwentyFirst Century (UNESCO 1998) (adopted by the World Conference on Higher Education in October 1998) affirms that one of the core missions and values of higher education is ‘to educate for citizenship and for active participation in society, with a worldwide vision, for endogenous capacity-building, and for the consolidation of human rights, sustainable development, democracy and peace, in a context of justice’. In a European context, this statement is echoed in the London Communiqué (Bologna 2007) of the Bologna Process, in which ‘the preparation of students as active citizens in democratic societies’ was emphasized as a core mission of higher education institutions. 8. The areas of university education and research have been located within the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (in everyday conversation, the Ministry of Science) from 2001 to 2011, and since then in the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education. Primary, secondary and a wide range of so-called medium-cycle higher education (including professional bachelor programmes like teacher training for primary school and kindergarten) come under the Ministry of Education. 9. Election meeting, the Copenhagen Business School, 6 November 2007.

3 A History of Student Participation in Denmark

In this chapter I perform a ‘genealogical’ exploration of the emergence, contestation and (dis)appearance of different student figurations and the forms of participation they present, from the early nineteenth century to today. In a Foucauldian vein, I explore the ‘connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces’ (Foucault [1978] 1994: 226–27) that have made possible the enactment of the conflicting student figurations we see today. I therefore ask how students at different times have been enabled, requested or desired to take part in and influence their everyday lives as students at university, as well as in wider society. What modes of participation have students maintained, and which ‘wholes’ have they taken part in and/ or helped to conjure up through their participation? In order to explore the shifting wholes and processes made available and desirable for the student to participate in, I analyze university policies in relation to diverse historical accounts of the development of student organizations, as well as newspaper articles and statements from students, professors and leaders in letters and speeches. The University of Copenhagen is the focal point of my analysis, since it was the only Danish university from 1479 to 1928, when Aarhus University was established. Because different enactments of and developments in student participation have often become visible in quarrels or negotiations between student organizations (here especially the University of Copenhagen Student Council) and other students, professors or ministers, the work and positions of these student organizations form a red thread running through this chapter.

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I start the account in the nineteenth century, when a distinct student self-consciousness emerged. I then analyze a range of larger and smaller frictional events and debates with which a change in student participation and the negotiation of particular problems and solutions can be detected, some long-lasting, others more transient. Finally, I sum up the findings of the chapter by sketching how, at different times, different figurative components have been assembled, how the three areas of student participation are interrelated and how the student has thus come to be conjured up as a participatory figure in different and often conflicting ways.

An Emerging Student Class: Distantly Elevated or Socially Engaged? In the first decades of the nineteenth century, a distinction between the ‘academic man’ and the ‘ordinary man’ seemed to be essential to the formation of a new kind of student identity. Students began to appear and perceive of themselves as a more unified, self-conscious and relatively wealthy and well-regarded group in society than in previous generations. To study at a university was no longer a matter of low prestige, and as the historians Hellesen and Tuxen point out, the students – in 1847, newly matriculated students numbered 128 (Hellesen & Tuxen 1986: 394) – now saw themselves as ‘the most important social class,1 because it provided society with public officers, because all scientific thoughts emanated from it and because it guided morality’ (ibid. 1993: 182). ‘Powerful professionalism’, ‘scientific knowledge‘ and ‘moral conduct’ became the new key components of a student body that looked down on previous generations of students, whom they depicted as poor and shabby (ibid.) – an image further reinforced by the fact that previously certain students had been privileged to earn an income by carrying corpses for a living. The growing student consciousness fertilized the ground for the establishment of an organized association in 1820. The Students’ Association, as it was called, was established as a social, cultural and initially non-political club (though nevertheless implicitly system preserving and conservative) where students could socialize and discuss academic issues without direct professorial interference. Its aim was to distinguish the class of students from, and elevate them above, non-academic persons (L. R. Andersen 1970; Koch-Olsen & Stybe 1970) – a distinction that later, in the 1850s, also came to be symboli-

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cally marked when students began to wear a particular cap to distinguish themselves from other young people.2 Over the following decades this initial demarcation of a professionally, scientifically and morally elevated/superior student figure as opposed to the ‘ordinary man’ was followed by new attempts and requests for student participation in society as well as within the university – but also by increased internal friction within the student body. The Students’ Association was relatively conservative and opposed to explicit political activity. However, in the 1830s some students became more politically active and tried to influence discussions in the Senate, as well as other authorities like the king, by collecting signatures for petitions. As a sign of the emergence of a new and more critical, socially and politically engaged student figure, in 1840 some of these students, who were in favour of more politically active discussions, broke away from the Students’ Association and established the Student Society. The goal was to gather the students as an interest group vis-à-vis the university and the state. Due to opposition from the police, the government and the professors, who did not want to recognize and even feared the potential subversive power of the students,3 this first Student Society only lasted four months. However, the quest for a student organization that would engage in critical, social and political involvement and debate had re-emerged by the end of the nineteenth century. As part of a general current of liberal and democratic thinking,4 a growing group of students questioned the distinction between the ‘academic man’ and the ‘ordinary man’ that was still maintained by the majority of students in the Students’ Association. In 1882, a new Student Society was therefore established that despised the intellectual arrogance and conservatism of the Students’ Association and wanted to build bridges to the worker or the ‘ordinary man’, to whom they therefore offered evening classes and legal aid. Based on the premise that without political and cultural affiliation the ‘academic man’ could not make a proper contribution to society, they also organized political speeches and discussions (Winther 1970). Even though the majority of students at the time seemed relatively conservative and even reactionary, the existence of these first two Student Society organizations point to a kind of critical and later even revolutionary student figure that at intervals of around thirty to forty years – in the 1840s, 1880s–90s, 1920s–30s and 1960s–70s – seems momentarily to have gained a footing and played an active and at times radical role in the development of the university and wider society. This recurrent renewal and emergence of a more publicly

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critical student figure, of course, leads us to ask whether today, forty years after the student revolts of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new and more revolutionary student generation has entered the Danish universities. I address this question in chapter 6.

First Formal Student Participation: A Tool for Professorial Government? The emergence of a particular student consciousness not only caused friction within the student body as to whether students should be critically, socially and politically involved, or should keep their distance from political life while at university, concentrate on their studies and prepare themselves for the offices they had been trained for (and most likely reproduce existing power structures). Many professors were also critical of the students’ diverse attempts to organize. Students should concentrate on their studies, the argument seemed to be, and not spoil this by too much social or political activity. In response to some of the students’ claims to be a unique social class, the professors stated that only after ending their studies, that is, joining the life of work, could students be said to belong to a social class (stand) and, one might add, thus have a ‘voice’ of their own (Hellesen & Tuxen 1993: 176–77). In this vein, the professors would not recognize any student organization as representative of students’ views in general. While at university – the logic of the professors seemed to be – the students were a part of a particular university whole, as formed and defined by the professors, and thus should be loyal and dedicated to it. In being admitted, the student received an academic ‘citizen letter’ (borgerbrev) that confirmed that he (all students at the University of Copenhagen were men until 1877, when the first woman was admitted) was now a member of the university, and it informed him of his duties to behave properly, show respect to the rector and the professors and industriously prepare himself for the offices of state (Hellesen & Tuxen 1993: 136ff.). Most university teaching aimed at educating and examining future officials and civil servants. Whenever possible, the students had the freedom to choose between the different professors who were offering the relevant teaching, but freedom in terms of self-directed learning and independent studies was not evoked. Even though the Enlightenment ideals of the free search for truth and knowledge and of the value of independent studies in this period were reaching the Danish university scene, in most subjects the students were still to a large extent learning a syllabus by heart.

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With ‘science’ being the common whole to which both students and academic staff should dedicate themselves, the understanding of students as having particular interests – independently of or in opposition to the professors – seemed completely out of order. Therefore, whereas the growing tendency for democratization within the university and in society at large had led to the establishment in 1850 of the Teachers’ Assembly, in which all teachers met four times a year,5 the students had to wait until the beginning of the twentieth century to have an official organization with the legitimacy to represent the students’ interests in university matters recognized by the academic staff. In 1912 the first Student Council was established at the University of Copenhagen on the initiative of the Student Society, which – still in opposition to and critical of the conservatism and dominance of the Students’ Association – felt a need for a more official student link to the university, which, in their view, was not sufficiently in touch with the students, their wishes or their conditions (H. K. Larsen 1993; N. P. Sørensen 1962). It was initially proposed that the Student Council should have a ‘right to recommend’ certain initiatives to the professors. A request for decision-making powers was apparently not a thinkable option at all – either for the teachers or for the students – and, tellingly, many of the concrete concerns raised by the students at the time were not academic issues. They asked for a toilet, mirrors for the female students, a lunchroom and a cycle shed. In this light, it is no great surprise that the rector could maintain that no real opposition existed between the students and the professors. In fact, it seemed to be the university’s problematic financial situation6 rather than a democratic wish to include students in the governance of the university that led the rector to agree to the students’ suggestion of a Student Council. He argued that, since both groups were dissatisfied with the current conditions, a ‘representative’ student voice would give added weight to the advice the Teachers’ Assembly gave to the state (Erslev 1910). Nevertheless, for many decades to come, the students’ formal voice was to remain rather restricted and mainly given a place in the Senate as long as they helped put pressure on the state and shared the views of the professors (N. P. Sørensen 1962: 57).7 In time, the Student Council became the most important and influential student organization at the University of Copenhagen. Since this was at the expense of the Student Society and the Students’ Association, I will not pursue the historical development of the latter any further here. When once in a while student representatives proved too critical, the

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rector or other professors were likely to question the Student Council’s legitimacy as representative of all students. For example, this was the case in 1931–33, when a new leftist student faction called the Social Gathering won the Student Council election. Inspired by critical and radical intellectuals8 of the time, the Social Gathering saw the academic’s job as being critical – not just to fulfil pre-defined jobs as civil servants. They criticized the existing Student Council for being a conservative professorial service provider and wanted to transform the council into a ‘combat organization’ or a ‘union’ that would defend students’ interests vis-à-vis the professors more vigorously (Gottschau 1987: 10). They demanded student participation in decision making in all cases concerning the students, and wanted the teaching revised to fit more modern principles. However, the aggressive attitude of the Social Gathering apparently antagonized the rector of the time, and their wishes were not granted. Despite the 1921 Royal Declaration, which had granted the Student Council representative power, on certain occasions the rector refused to negotiate with the council unless it could show him that all students supported it in their requests (ibid.). Just like the first Student Society in 1840, this new political, critical and combat-oriented domination of the Student Council did not last long. In 1933, two years after their successful election, a more ‘apolitical’ group took over the Student Council. And by the mid-1930s the general and widespread conception among professors and politicians was that the student had ‘undergone a happy change and become such a hard-working, honest and sensible creature’ (N. Thomsen 1986: 180). Once again the pendulum had swung back in favour of a more conservative student figure. The student was again perceived in general as contributing to society as a hardworking professional rather than a socially critical and potentially revolutionary figure.

Student Independence and Quests for Freedom and Efficiency Throughout history, the figuration of the student as ‘free’ and ‘critical’ has balanced on a difficult knife-edge between being a source of destruction and subversion and a source of hope and prosperity – a ‘saviour’ of the nation or of the university. (As I shall explore later, today too both academic staff and politicians – in very different ways – make appeals to or put faith in the idea that students, with their ‘freedom’ and ‘critical attitude’, may help promote a better university

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and society.) However, during the Second World War the students’ latent revolutionary potential, their independence to critically reflect upon and not least react to the politics of the established powers, came to widely appreciated fruition. The internal rivalry between the conservative and left-wing factions within the student body were gradually erased9 when they were both faced with a common enemy, the Germans, and many students took active part in the resistance – contrary to the government’s, and accordingly the university’s and professors’, advocacy of peaceful collaboration with the Germans. As state employees, the academic staff members were expected to follow the official Danish government’s collaborative policy. But the students (now as then) did not have the same formal obligations. They were no longer, as in the university’s first three centuries, under a unique university jurisdiction, and many openly criticized the Danish government. The students often had no children or family to support and were, in other words, freer to become morally and politically involved. Even though in 1945 the rector said that the always latent ‘tension between the active and “rebellious” student’s mentality and the Senate’s greater sense of the formally right and sober’ had been turned into an unseen, intimate and successful collaboration during the war (Rector Nørregaard, quoted in N. P. Sørensen 1962: 79), the students had shown a critical drive and energy that the academic staff had not been in a position to maintain. After the war, therefore, ‘the student’ became a heroic figure, a symbol of freedom, independence, youthful daring and brave patriotic resistance for the whole nation. In the post-war period, the Student Council used the newly gained heroic status of the student to ask for better financial student aid so as to reduce the increase in dropout rates, long study periods and socially unequal recruitment (Gottschau 1987). The Second World War had left the universities and the students in an impoverished condition, and the latter now formed a visible alliance with the professors in a quest for better economic conditions for both students and the university. By the early 1950s university finances had hit rock bottom. Therefore, and on the initiative of the now increasingly influential National Union of Students,10 in February 1951 a total of around seven to ten thousand students and academics, with six rectors in front, walked from the old university building in Copenhagen to the Danish Parliament. Not only did the active approach of the National Union of Students signal that the students were united as a common group, the demonstration also showed the professors and students as a united population, a ‘whole’ with a common goal. However, as a

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token of the then still dominant role of the students as the professors’ aides-de-camp, a smaller group of professors and rectors, without students, were invited inside the Parliament to discuss the situation (Gade-Rasmussen 1975; N. P. Sørensen 1962: 91; N. Thomsen 1986: 236). Importantly, the event shows how university politics was gradually moving out into a larger public space as universities were increasingly valued as an important and dynamic generator of wealth and growth. The students’ and universities’ miserable conditions were depicted in a radio programme entitled ‘Alma Mater Is Crying’. The demonstration was the first time in Danish history that so many students and teachers had joined forces on the streets in order to put public pressure on politicians. They succeeded in winning the sympathy of the people and of the politicians. University research and teaching was increasingly seen as important for promoting social growth and development, and in the years 1957–63 politicians doubled the funding for buildings, teaching positions, salary bonuses and study grants. In 1960 all education and examination fees were abolished11 (N. Thomsen 1986: 74ff.). Whereas the students in this period joined forces with the professors to ask for better economic conditions, there seemed to be a potential alignment between the students and contemporary politicians in their quest for better educational planning and more efficient studies (E. Hansen 2005, 2008). Both students and politicians were frustrated at high student dropout rates and what they perceived as time being wasted during the course of studies. Indeed, the notion of efficiency seemed to present itself as a point of resonance between students and politicians. However, as an example of what Wright (2005; see also chapter 1) has called ‘misrecognition’, their respective motives and understandings of the notion of efficiency also entailed important differences. As the historian Else Hansen (2005) shows, the political notion of efficiency was grounded in a wish for the universities – in light of the post-war development of industry – to contribute to the economic growth of the nation. The universities should efficiently educate students for relevant jobs and the functions needed in society. The highly educated student was seen as an investment providing important economic returns to the nation. For their part, the students asked for more professorial contact and more modern and participatory teaching methods to replace what they saw as ‘pacifying’ lectures. They wanted to screen out outdated parts of the curriculum, since many course programmes were criticized as old-fashioned, useless

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and inefficient, and a realistic time frame for the different course of studies was called for. One question became essential (as it still is today): to what extent is a desire for efficiency compatible with or alternatively a threat to the aim of educating students to become independent and critical thinkers. Here, the opposed notions of academic freedom and efficiency became the main components around which divergent ideals and understandings of student participation were put forward. In this period in the 1950s, ideals of broad basic research and academic freedom were essential to the working of the university. Most professors at the time had a Humboldt-inspired ideal of university education as a process of broad academic formation (Bildung) through independent studies. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian privy councillor in charge of culture and education from 1809–10, has become a symbol for the reform of the German university from an increasingly insignificant teaching institution to a ‘modern’ – and in Denmark and other countries today often conceived as ‘classical’ – institution that encompassed and combined both teaching and research (see, e.g., Ash 2006). In the spirit of the so-called new humanism – which included thinkers like F. Schelling, F. Schleiermacher and J. G. Fichte – Humboldt argued that the university should provide research-based and also dialogue-based teaching and thereby awaken the students’ scientific spirit and turn them into independently thinking and morally judging creatures. Therefore, even though the state should own and pay for the universities, it should have a clear and rather narrow framework for interfering in the life and priorities of universities, teachers and students: its role should be to guarantee the governmental autonomy of the university and the academic freedom of both scholars (Lehrfreiheit) and students (Lernfreiheit) (see Helmholtz [1877] 2007; Humboldt [1809] 2007). General training (Bildung) was to create independently thinking individuals who would be able to renew and improve science, as well as the positions in the state and society that they would later occupy. In other words, even though the university should pursue science for science’s own sake and not for narrow utilitarian concerns, this would be for the benefit of the nation, Humboldt argued. The fundamental idea was that free and liberally educated citizens would automatically work for and be of most benefit to the common good – here meaning the ‘nation’s spiritual and moral formation’ (Kjærgaard & Kristensen 2003: 94, emphasis added ). The Danish universities of the 1950s drew on this Humboldtian educational tradition. Universities were seen as educating the future

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elites of society and introducing them to critical thinking and the questioning of research (N. Thomsen 1986). Therefore, the ideal was for students to have the freedom to find their own ways through their subject areas and to work independently and in-depth on topics of interest. However, the debates surrounding the work of the so-called Study Time Committee12 in the late 1950s show that there seems to have been quite a gap between the ideal of students’ academic freedom and how teaching and learning was practised at the time. When, in the name of improving the pace of students’ courses of study, the Study Time Committee proposed, among other things, compulsory and more ‘school-like’ teaching, as well as increased control over students’ work, many professors and some students feared that it would lead to a wiping out of students’ freedom of study and independent in-depth explorations. However, others, like the student Hans Hertel, later a professor himself, argued in a feature article that the student’s academic freedom (the Humboldtian Lernfreiheit) was not threatened by better-planned and more socially relevant courses – efficiency and students’ academic freedom could go hand in hand. The real threat to students’ freedom, Hertel argued, was the ‘soft tyranny’ or ‘opinion dictatorship’ of professors who showed intolerance of other academic perspectives than their own (E. Hansen 2005; Hertel 1959). Most students wanted more professorial contact, but not in the sense that the professors should decide their studies for them. They indeed wanted the freedom to reflect on and participate critically and independently in a particular subject area, a kind of independence they did not feel they always had. The response to Hertel by Professor Hjelmslev (1960) clearly marks the dilemma of the notions of freedom and independence that were so essential to the Humboldtian student figure. Hjelmslev, like many other professors at the time, regarded the freedom of study (Lernfreiheit) as secondary to the far more fundamental academic freedoms of the university’s right to self-determination and autonomy and the professors’ freedom to teach (Lehrfreiheit). Once a professor has qualified and been appointed, Hjelmslev argued, no other authority could or should interfere with the way he/she attends to his/her research and teaching. Therefore, Hjelmslev stated, since the individual professor is responsible for his own teaching and research, students who were dissatisfied should not (as Hertel had done) go public in an attempt to make it a more general concern of the university and society. Instead, the student should talk to the professor or use the normal chain of command and take the matter to the Student Council.

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This frictional event is interesting in many ways. Not only does it reflect, like the 1951 demonstration, how university politics was increasingly situated in the public sphere and argued to be of relevance to wider society (here to the regret of Professor Hjelmslev, who upheld the ideal of an autonomous university institution governed mainly by the professors), it also points to the emergence of new ideals of educative efficiency and to a growing questioning of professorial authority, which came to full fruition by the end of the 1960s. Indeed, as the historian Else Hansen (2005) has shown, in this period a more oppositional and independent student figure emerged – a student who not only made demands about changes in both the form and content of university education, but also adopted new methods to win this influence. The Student Council started to contact and enter into a direct dialogue with politicians. As a symbol of the emerging alliance between students and politicians (ibid. 2008) against the professors and their advocacy of university autonomy and professorial academic freedom, in 1966 the chairperson of the National Union of Students thanked the minister of education for a ‘unique interest in the students’, but did not offer the same gratitude to the universities, which had not met the students’ demands for more democratic conditions (N. Thomsen 1986: 280). At this point, the democratization of education was no longer just a question of equal access or widening participation/access, as had been the case for almost a century. It was a question of student participation in decision making and more socially relevant and better-planned studies. Science for science’s own sake – hitherto meaning science as prioritized by the professors – was gradually questioned as the relevant ‘whole’ in which the student could and should see him- or herself as taking part. Education should not just be an internal issue of the university and defined by the professors. It was increasingly seen as an issue of concern to a wider social whole.

Student Revolts and New Forms of Participation The notion of students as a particular ‘social class’ and the distinction between the ‘academic man’ and the ‘ordinary man’ had already been gradually dissolved in the first part of the twentieth century due to a minor increase in students from non-academic homes and especially the general tendency to make other institutions of higher education more academic (H. K. Larsen 1993: 586ff.). However, in the 1960s political initiatives resulted in much greater access for so-called middle-

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class students. A policy of headlong increases in student numbers had begun so as to realize the expected potential of higher education. In only ten years student numbers at the University of Copenhagen tripled from seven thousand in 1958 to twenty-one thousand in 1968, and from 1963 the university was once again confronted with vast and growing problems of poor finances and shortages of space and teachers (N. Thomsen 1986: 4–5).13 It was in this atmosphere of financial and educational despair that students started protesting in earnest, thereby helping to promote changes to the very notions of what a university and a university student is and should be. As in many other Western countries, the year 1968 became a historical turning point in student revolt in Danish history. In Denmark the students’ protests and demands culminated in a series of ‘rebellious’ actions against ‘professorial rule’, as they called it. The protests were started by psychology students, who, in the democratic spirit of the time, had been fighting for several years for more formal student participation and student-lead teaching forms and to get rid of what they saw, in line with students in the early 1960s, as obsolete teaching methods, dogmatic scientific approaches and inefficient study planning. Even though several teachers had agreed to the psychology students’ initial proposal of a student ‘spokesperson arrangement’, in 1966 this was denied any formal status by the professorial leaders of the psychology laboratory – again with the argument that it would be a potential ‘attack on the professors’ academic freedom’ (Jensen & Jørgensen 2001: 440).14 By 21 March 1968 the psychology students had had enough. They organized a party in a central university yard, and when other students in the afternoon came out from their lectures they were met with live music, draft beer and the following words painted in large letters on a central wall of the university: ‘Demolish Professorial Rule – Participation NOW’ (Bryd professorvældet – Medbestemmelse NU). In Danish, the slogan emphasizes the aspect of students’ co-determination (as noted, in Danish ‘participation’ is translated to deltagelse [participation] as well as medbestemmelse [participation in decision making or co-determination]; see introduction), and in opposition to the professors’ remarks on academic freedom, the students put up other slogans like ‘Academic freedom also for the students’ and ‘Democracy in the workplace’.15 They complained that ‘the programme planning sucks’ (studie-planlægningen er lige til rotterne) and argued in favour of ‘abolishing lectures’ (afskaf forelæsninger) as a teaching method (Jensen & Jørgensen 2001, 2008: 93–94). A draft for a study board arrangement was made. But the

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students were not satisfied, and a month later they occupied the psychology laboratory. Now, it only makes sense to talk of ‘occupation’ if the thing being occupied is not experienced as belonging to the so-called occupiers in the first place. By physically taking over the buildings, the university students not only obstructed the traditional power hierarchy and claimed ownership of the university, they also made more publicly known the problems they were experiencing there. Therefore, when they finally reached their goal and obtained a formal right to student participation on a study board, the struggle for student influence had already spread to other departments within the university. Action meetings, debate weeks, student strikes, demonstrations and occupations occurred across Danish universities, by which time a more general student revolt and activist movement had started to emerge (Jensen & Jørgensen 1999). However, friction also occurred at this time between activism and parliamentarianism as two different modes of student participation (the latter being advocated by the more pragmatic student politicians from the Student Council and the National Union of Students). This rift in respect to the forms and goals of student participation was not least instigated by student involvement in the second report of the so-called University Administration Committee (the UAU II).16 In line with the general acceptance of greater student participation, the University Administration Committee recommended obligatory advisory study boards and student representatives in all governing organs except the department council (where research is the main theme). Several notes of dissent were made by committee members who felt that professorial power was still too great (Fog 1968: 19, 46ff.; E. Hansen 2008). However, to the great dissatisfaction of the more radical students, the committee’s student representative from the National Union of Students did not specifically criticize the UAU II for not giving students enough representation and the right to vote, on the grounds that such demands would never have succeeded but might instead have reduced the students’ chances to exert further influence on the proposals (Jensen & Jørgensen 2008: 86–87). This incident added fuel to the fire of the first wave of activist and radical student revolts in 1968, in which both the professors and what the activists called the student ‘careerists’ (pampere) from the student organizations were the targets of criticism. To the activist students, the ‘student politician’ became a symbol and a mere extension of existing social power structures – structures and hierarchies that the more radical students wanted to subvert. However, by the autumn

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of 1968 the Student Council had joined forces with the radical students, and in 1970, when a second wave of revolts arose against a new Law on Governance, the Student Council was an important player in the organization, coordination and planning of demonstrations and other activities. In 1968 the Student Council was still a moderately leftist organization, and students’ strategies for influence in the late 1960s had included elements of dialogue and negotiation in the wake of demonstrations and protests. Now, during the passage of the 1970 law, a more extreme and confrontational left-wing orientation developed, primarily directed against and in opposition to the politics of the government and no longer just the professors.

The 1970 Law: Promoting an Efficient and Democratic Universitas? The 1970 Law on Governance has often been called ‘the students’ law’ (Jensen & Jørgensen 2001). It gave Danish students more formal power in decision-making bodies than students in other countries (see, e.g., Goldschmidt 1975) and accordingly has been seen as the result of the students’ revolts. However, this has to be qualified in light of the fact that to a large extent the students seemed to be knocking down doors that had already been opened (E. Hansen 2008; Jensen & Jørgensen 2008: 205ff). Due to the increased belief in the benefits of better planning, the politicians, the public, the non-professorial teachers and an increasing number of professors were sympathetic to a democratization and reform of the university in terms of governance as well as teaching. In fact, it was with the rector of the University of Copenhagen, Mogens Fog, as the moving spirit that the University of Copenhagen recommended an even more extensive democratization than that suggested by the UAU II – a recommendation that became the foundation for the new law in 1970.17 Rector Fog’s argument for increasing student participation in decision making was not simply based on a wish to increase democracy for democracy’s own sake. In his view, greater inclusion of the students would make the universities more efficient. Democracy became a means to promote efficiency. The better the communication across the different groups of teachers and students, he suggested, the greater the opportunities for continuously updating the university’s efficiency (Fog 1968). In short, democratization would be a return to the old idea of the university as a particular harmonious academic community or universitas. ‘The idea of the university does not lie in an authoritarian power

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structure but in a community of students and teachers, a universitas’, he argued (ibid.: 24), and he emphasized that the percentage of seats on governing bodies was not the main aspect of such a universitas, since this can never in itself create a harmonious community. However, not all professors supported this understanding of efficiency as being dependent on continuous democratic communication. For example, in 1969 a chemistry professor put forward the following argument against the students’ demands for ‘democratic votes’ and ‘student co-determination’: The university is not a state within a state in which the students should have the right to vote for the second time [the first time being for Parliament]. Rather the university institutions can be compared to a series of state-owned shops in which the professors are the managers, the younger teachers the shop assistants and the students the customers. The owners decide which goods to have, the manager and the shop assistants have significant influence on the forms of wrapping and distribution, even though the owner (in casu) the state has the last word – whereby all the demands of democracy are fulfilled. We are of course prepared to render the best possible customer service and are happy to listen to advice from the customer. But the demand for customer participation in decision making [medbestemmelse] has nothing to do with democracy. It is not likely to benefit efficiency in a supermarket. (K. A. Jensen, quoted in Gottschau 1987: 71)

While they both speak in favour of democracy and efficiency, the democratic wholes in which the student is to participate are fundamentally different in the rector’s and the professor’s statements. Whereas the rector promoted universitas in the sense of a democratic community of university staff and students (i.e., a workplace democracy for academic ‘citizens’), the professor argued that the state should be the relevant whole for the student to be a democratic participant in. Democracy is seen here in terms of electing representatives to Parliament rather than participating in everyday life situations and decision making. (In this sense we see here a similar difference in the understanding of democracy and participation to the one presented in the previous chapter between Hal Koch, who emphasized democracy as a form of life, and Alf Ross, who emphasized the procedural aspects of representative democracy.) In other words, to this chemistry professor, relevant student participation at university is understood in terms of the customer’s choice, wishes and advice. The influence thus becomes indirect in the sense that in time the university may choose to change certain things according to student choice and advice.

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However, the market logic invoked by the professor was not predominant at the time, and the students’ demands for and opinions regarding increased student participation in decision making and participatory teaching methods seemed to enjoy broad support – in the name of efficiency. Despite providing broader workplace democracy, the law was an important signal that the university regulations were not to be set solely by either the professors or the students, but by ‘wider society’ – in practice, Parliament. This was, as the then minister of education put it, ‘the actual democratic guarantee for the conditions at the universities’ (E. Hansen 2008: 113). And, to support the desire for stronger social regulation of universities, a Directorate for Higher Education was established in 1974. As we have seen with the 2003 law, this rationale of opening up the university to be shaped by ‘wider society’ was developed even further. Now ‘wider society’ was no longer just a question of giving stronger powers to Parliament, but rather the new board of governors was to have a majority of members from outside the university community, mainly from large organizations and businesses. With the 1970 law, the universities became state institutions under the purview of the Ministry of Education. The students obtained a third of the seats in the Senate and the faculty council and half of the seats on the now obligatory study boards.18 The former Teachers’ Assembly was abolished and all full-time employed teaching staff (professors and assistants) were included as a single group in the decision-making structure. The students obtained the right to vote in all the bodies, and as members of the Senate and faculty councils they also voted for the rector. So, whereas earlier legislation assumed that the university was one body in which the students had the same interest as the governing professors, the new law – and the later 1973 law19 whereby the administrative staff were also included on some of the governing bodies – clearly established the university as a community of different structural interest groups (see also Betænkning no.1055 1985). The university was established as a kind of assembly of three estates (academics, students and administrative staff) in which the different categories were assumed to have conflicting and sectional interests and therefore should be given a ‘voice’ of their own – something the student revolts had clearly proved to be true for this period. The student organizations, however, were not satisfied with the 1970 law. Throughout the process they had, in increasingly radical ways, attempted to put pressure on the Ministry of Education to comply with their demands to allocate students half of the seats on

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all governing bodies (whereas the law only gave them one-third of the seats in the Senate and the faculty councils). They also believed that the Ministry of Education had attempted to fragment the student body and reduce the influence of and student engagement in the student organizations by, on the one hand, proposing indirect student elections and thus playing off different student groupings against each other, and on the other hand, demanding that the Student Council’s statutes should be approved by the minister of education (see, e.g., Busk 1971; St.bl. 1971). In protest more than one thousand students raided – or in their terminology, ‘freed’ – the university and occupied the administration and the rector’s office. The students answered external phone calls with the words, ‘This is the liberated university’ or ‘The people’s university’ and claimed that it was ‘our university’. A new social ‘whole’ was enacted for the student figure to be identified with: inspired by Marx, the student was promoted as part of ‘the people’, in opposition to the ministry and the professors. Any gap between the ‘academic man’ and the ‘ordinary man’ that might have been explicit previously was now thoroughly criticized and attempts made to bridge it. In the end, the radicalism of the Student Council made them increasingly unpopular not only with politicians and the wider population, but also with some of the students. The ministry was therefore convinced that student minorities should be legally protected (see, e.g., Olsen 1975), and the former privilege of the Student Council in representing all the students on the governing bodies was therefore abolished in the final 1970 law. The students at the University of Copenhagen were no longer assumed – or encouraged – to act as one body with one voice. Protests followed from the Student Council, which now attempted to disrupt the Senate meetings and boycotted the first elections. But another group of students established a more negotiation-oriented association, the Moderate Students, who won all the student seats at the first formal elections to the Senate.

The Little and the Big Revolt: The Student as a ‘Transformative Force’ Even though the Student Council felt they had lost the battle over the 1970 Law of Governance, many things had nevertheless changed in favour of greater student participation in the university. The students’ demands for new and more ‘activating’ participatory teaching methods and more socially relevant teaching were now increasingly

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being met. In general, learning by heart was devalued and replaced by more dialogue-based examination. Group work, the abolition of examinations, residential courses and students’ independent definitions of topics were especially institutionalized with the two Danish ‘reform’ universities – or university centres, as they were called, in order to indicate the strength of collaboration with medium-cycle institutions of higher education (e.g., the teacher training colleges) and the surrounding regional society in Roskilde (1972) and Aalborg (1974). Student representatives from the National Union of Students played an important role, particularly in the establishment of Roskilde University, and, as I shall explore further in chapter 5, at this university the student figure has explicitly been associated with a notion of ‘co-ownership’. In fact, equality and workplace collaboration seemed to be key notions of the (ideal) student-academic relationship in these years, where the distance between students and teachers became smaller and smaller.20 This change is clearly indicated in the rectors’ speeches at matriculation in the early 1970s (see Bak 1972, 1973; Fog 1971; Pihl 1970). Now, the university is described as a common ‘workplace’ for students and staff, and the rectors acknowledged the students’ criticism of ‘traditional’ hierarchies and norms. In this vein, the ritual matriculation handshake given by the rector to the students (see chapter 2) was abolished in 1971, and the in the years that followed it was explicitly emphasized to be entirely voluntarily. When offered, the handshake was promoted as a desire for good collaboration between the students and the university staff (however, with the request that the freshmen should not be too confrontational or prejudiced in their view of the university and society – a clear criticism of students’ at times dogmatic Marxist analyses). In this spirit of ‘workplace democracy’, the different student organizations were invited to speak at the University of Copenhagen matriculation event in the early 1970s. In 1970, the Student Council’s speech reflected a new understanding of student participation – or more specifically, of what it means to ‘revolt’ and generate changes within university and wider society (Gregersen & Klemmensen 1970). A revolt, the student representatives argued, is not just about the activities that make the headlines in the media; this is the ‘external side’ of the revolt, or ‘the revolt with big letters’. ‘The little revolt’, as they called it, is a fundamental attitude in which nothing is taken for granted. All statements or assessments must be questioned and explored. In this form, the revolt takes place in everyday life by constantly questioning and reflecting about one’s own situation: ‘[I]t is

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out of the discussions and subsequent suggestions of the little revolt that another and more just university shall emerge … the revolt is therefore permanent’, they argued (ibid., emphasis added). By now a broader student movement had emerged in which strategies and moves were coordinated nationally, and a central idea arose that a revolution in society could be obtained by influencing the institutions from within – an approach that the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, with an overt reference to Mao, called ‘the long march through the institutions’ (Jauert 2007; M. Larsen 2007: 121). Participation in universitas as a whole was thus seen explicitly as related to participation in a social whole. The student movement believed in the transformation of society – that ‘history is feasible’, as Dutschke put it (quoted in Jensen & Jørgensen 2008: 176) – and that they, along with the workers, could be the motive power overthrowing capitalism and revolutionizing society, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse had suggested (1964).21 The key word for this promotion of social change became the so-called subject criticism (fagkritik) (see, e.g., M. Larsen 1978; Jensen & Jørgensen 2008: 280ff.). Subject criticism took two directions: ‘internally’, it concentrated on the content of study programmes, subject area discussions and the Marxist critique of science; ‘externally’, it focused on the use of science in society and practical explorations of different social conditions. So, in contrast to the event-based mobilization of the earlier youth and student revolts, subject criticism engaged students in their everyday environment through study groups and debates and linked the critical effort in everyday life with wider social changes. In this vein, the main struggles for students centred around more socially relevant studies and research, such as ‘studies in the interests of the working class’ and ‘research for the people, not for profit’, in the words of two of their slogans (Gottschau 1987: 94). A series of student-produced reports in Denmark was meant to reveal the exploitation and poor working conditions of different workers (e.g., the Painter Report of 1971), and in this spirit of Marxism, students in some programmes (e.g., sociology) even tried to get workers hired as associate professors (Høst-Madsen 1974). Class struggle, rather than the division between students and teachers that was the focus in 1968, was now the key issue in the students’ struggle. However, as early as 1973 the chairmen of the student councils in Aarhus and Copenhagen announced that the Marcusian theory of the students as the ‘avant-garde of the class struggle’ had been proved wrong and that ‘the student councils are not and cannot be a revolutionary party’ (Høst-Madsen 1973). These student councils

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increasingly prioritized parliamentarian methods and a more unionlike profile, which was not compatible with a radical and general mission to transform society. By the late 1980s, the Marxist-inspired ‘subject criticism’ had gradually ebbed away. In the end it became too dogmatic and radical, apparently resulting in a growth in student disengagement from political issues as a reaction. Demonstrations, occupations and other forms of collective manifestations lost the support and involvement of the wider student body, and the student organizations now returned in earnest to the pursuit of a more parliamentarian and ‘technocratic’ approach (Fransen & Harnow 1996: 232–33; B. K. Sørensen 2007). Some argued that this more technocratic profile on the part of the student organizations was the reason why the University of Copenhagen Student Council was faced with falling attendance at meetings and a decrease in the number of student members (from 5,500 in 1980 to 1,300 in 1994) (S. S. Jørgensen 1994). However, another explanation, often provided by the student organizations themselves in the 1990s, was that the students had no time for political involvement because they were exposed to growing time pressures through a series of reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s (ibid.). Efficiency was once again at the top of the political agenda – but this time not with the support of the students, as had been the case in the 1960s.

The Student as ‘User’, ‘Consumer’ and ‘Future Knowledge Worker’ In the wake of two oil crises (1973 and 1979), recession and growing unemployment rates, the conservative coalition criticized the Keynesian idea that state control over the economy could ensure constant growth. Instead, the public sector should be ‘modernized’ so that state institutions could become more independent ‘service providers’ and be able to prioritize and strategize their efforts (Wright & Ørberg 2008). A Danish perestrojka (Haarder 1988) was called for, freeing the universities to compete with each other in more strategic ways. In this respect, the ‘extended workplace democracy’ and collegial governance – introduced with the 1970 and 1973 laws and a cornerstone of social democracy – was criticized for leaving the leaders inactive. Furthermore, in a 1988 report the OECD recommended greater collaboration between Danish universities and trades and industries, as well as a new organizational structure that would produce stronger leadership (Mejlgaard et al. 2002: 51).

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In this process, the student was conceptualized as a ‘user’ of public service offers (see, e.g., Betænkning no. 1055 1985). Students, therefore, lost influence and opportunities to participate in some respects but won them in others. On the one hand, under the new University Act of 1992, their democratic voice in university governance was reduced and a move was made towards better-defined and more powerful roles by leaders (who were still internally elected among the academics).22 Fewer and smaller collegial organs and greater autonomy with regard to financial arrangements were intended to provide the universities with a better framework for more efficient management (Aagaard 2000: 63). On the other hand, the students gained in influence in the sense that the universities were now forced to be more alive to students’ wishes and choices. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s voucher model – in which money flows through the consumer, who can then assess the services and freely choose between them – a so-called taximeter system was introduced with the 1992 law and implemented at universities in 1994 (Haarder, Nilsson & Severinsen 1982; Ørberg 2006). In this system, the universities received state funding according to the number of students who pass exams equivalent to the full-time course of study (today measured as 60 ECTS). The taximeter system was intended to encourage the universities to achieve higher student throughputs and to adjust their ‘services’ according to student ‘users’. A vision of a more flexible system with greater freedom of choice for students was gaining hold. A distinction between a three-year bachelor’s degree and a two-year master’s degree was established (so students could choose to enter the job market after three years instead of five), and highly defined modules were increasingly introduced for the students to choose and combine in individual ways. The rationale was that ‘the increased mobility will give the students the opportunity to vote with their feet and move between institutions. If they do not get the products and the quality they wish, they should be able to turn to institutions with a better offer’ (Haarder 1991b). This aim of promoting flexibility, however, went hand in hand with a growing demand for efficiency, and the freedom of choice was accompanied by different kinds of activity control (this resonates with the double move towards the ‘autonomization’ and ‘responsibilization’ of citizens, described in chapter 2, as a common trait of many current public sector reforms). In 1993 a screening examination (the ‘first-year test’) was introduced, which the student had to pass within the first twelve months (some years later extended to eighteen months) in order to be allowed to continue to study. Likewise, a 1988 reform of

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the State Educational Grant and Loan Scheme (called the SU), which improved students’ lending terms, was conditioned by an increase in activity pressure.23 Many students saw the 1992 law as the end of the celebrated ‘workplace democracy’ and criticized the reforms for turning the university into a ‘sausage factory’, which an increasing number of students should pass through uncritically and be processed as quickly as possible (see Fransen & Harnow 1996: 224–25; C. Jørgensen 1992; Rønsted & Ranum 1992; B. K. Sørensen 2007). In response to the criticism of a new lack of democracy, the minister of education, Bertel Haarder, argued that the law was in fact even more democratic than the old one: the leaders were still democratically elected but now were given a greater responsibility, and this, he argued, made it clearer to the students who, for example, they should address in cases of complaint (Rytkønen 1992). Democracy in this framework became a question of the transparency of management powers rather than direct democratic participation in decision making. The student now increasingly figured in the political vocabulary as individuals with rights and freedoms rather than, for example, subjects with duties and obligations. Both the university ‘whole’ and the student figure within it were thereby changed. One student wrote, in response to the law proposal: Suddenly the students are no longer regarded as part of the university world but as customers in a shop that sells education. We pay for the commodity with some years of our lives and a miserable economy and receive for this price an education. … If students are seen as the buyers of a product, their changed conditions as suggested in the bill are logical enough. As customers in a shop, we do not bother to discuss with the owner his employment policy or the conditions under which the products are produced. As consumers we are interested in the complaints department (read: study leader) and in the fact that the product is exchangeable if defective. If things really get crazy, we also like there to be a consumers’ ombudsman (read: rector and/or minister) to whom we can turn. (P. Jensen 1992)

Even though not formally paying for their own education as would a ‘customer’ in the strict sense, this student argues that students are put in the position of a customer in that they are no longer a part of the university community but stand outside it. The ‘student user’ figure, in this perspective, has become equivalent to a ‘public consumer/ customer’. A key question in this debate – which was also asked by the student quoted above – became what happens to the important task of gener-

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ating involved and critical citizens if students during their course of study are pressured for time and pacified and excluded from having influence in the governing bodies? This question and the 1992 criticism of reduced democracy and promotion of a student user or even student customer mentality have been almost identically repeated with the passage of the 2003 Danish University Act. A more ‘open market for education’ has long been a part of the political mind-set (see, e.g., Haarder 1991a), but when the right-wing government took office in 2001, knowledge and education were promoted more explicitly and narrowly as essential to the competitive powers of the nation. As described in chapter 2, the key argument for the university reforms in the new millennium has revolved around notions of ‘the knowledge economy’, ‘globalization’ and increased worldwide competition. In this thinking, the student has become crucial as a mobile and flexible future knowledge worker who will use the vast freedom of choice in a qualified way so as to enhance his or her own ‘employability’ to the benefit of him- or herself and also the nation. Indeed, it was exactly this kind of economic and competitive logic that the first appointed rector articulated in his 2006 matriculation speech (see chapter 2), when he turned the ritual welcoming handshake into a starting signal for students’ participation in a race for knowledge.

The Student as Participatory Figure: A Recapitulation Let me now recapitulate the chapter and sum up the various historical participatory developments and key frictional components that at different times have conjured up particular participatory student figures. If we look at the three participatory areas central to the figuring of students, that is, the students’ participatory role (1) in their own course of education and learning, (2) in the governance and development of their university and (3) in the shaping of national educational policy and ‘wider society’ (which, as this chapter has shown, also takes on different meanings at different times), all three areas have been in play in different ways since the establishment of the University of Copenhagen under the Catholic Church in 1479. However, different participatory areas seem to have been the main object of friction and negotiation at different historical times. In other words, when student participation is explored diachronically over the course of centuries past, there seems to be a clustering or a pattern in the main frictional events in the sense that they tend to revolve around one of the three areas at different points in time. At this general an-

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alytical scale it seems as if friction and changes in one participatory area paved the way for friction and changes in another area, such that a change in student participation in ‘society’ was followed by new forms of student participation in university governance, which was ultimately reflected in stronger student participation in teaching and their own learning at university. First, from the early nineteenth century came changes to students’ self-understandings and their claim for a particular position in society. A distinction between the ‘academic man’ and the ‘ordinary man’ was emphasized and discussions held about whether or not students could or should act as a ‘social class’ in society. The internal discussions in the student body mainly revolved around whether the role of students in society should be that of elevated and morally superior creatures who study to fulfil particular and well-defined jobs, or that of critical, socially and politically engaged students who see it as an important value to build bridges between the ‘academic man’ and the ‘ordinary man’ and to some extent also to question existing traditions and power regimes. Second, at the beginning of the twentieth century, changes to the role of students in the governance of the university came to the fore. The students wanted and gradually obtained a formal ‘student voice’ through the establishment of a representative Student Council. But even though students were then formally recognized as a group with particular interests, for decades the rector and the Senate only allowed and listened to the ‘student voice’ if this was in accord with the professors’ own wishes and aims. Students’ participation, therefore, could best be characterized as what Chambers (1994: 2) called a ‘cosmetic label’ or a ‘co-opting practice’. As student numbers increased in the 1960s and a general democratization of society gained a hold, students’ voices became more powerful and were also recognized by the professors and politicians as essential for promoting efficient universities. Therefore, and third, the students’ independence, academic freedom and participation in their own learning processes and in the planning and carrying out of classes and programmes were increased. Whereas previously the professors had been the professional authorities on what and how students should learn, by the 1970s the students had been given a greater role and responsibility. Critical and independent scientific thinking was no longer just a largely unrealized Humboldtian ideal. Now, students’ academic freedom – and not solely the professors’ – had been put on the agenda in earnest. In this period the notions of efficiency and freedom were key elements in the debates

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about students’ participation in society and university and their own course of education. Both terms, however, were contested, and they shifted in meaning over time. In the late 1960s efficient studies were of growing concern to both politicians and students. To the students, efficiency was linked to a better logistic planning of courses and programmes, but also to a shift towards a more socially relevant educational content as a critique of existing and unequal power structures. To the governing politicians, efficiency equally meant shorter study periods, but also – and in the subsequent decades increasingly so – economically relevant and useful education in the sense of providing students with knowledge that promotes economic growth. Whereas the focus on workplace democracy in the 1960s and 1970s to a large extent linked efficiency to the development of democratic and critically reflexive citizens, efficiency in recent decades has increasingly been linked to the notion of employability and the national economic relevance of education. Therefore, the notion of freedom seems to have shifted from connoting mainly a ‘classic’ (Humboldtian) critical independence and academic freedom of study and learning to increasingly addressing freedom of choice between educational service providers. Furthermore, with the gradual decrease in workplace democracy in the 1992 and 2003 laws, students have complained that they are now no longer ‘a part of the university world’, as one student put it in 1992, but that they increasingly figure as external users or consumers of a more or less predefined product delivered by the university. Participation and influence on university matters, they assert, are increasingly directed towards voting with their feet and improved opportunities to complain. This linear account of students’ shifting forms of participation, however, can be supplemented with a different reading that conveys a sort of entangled circularity in the ways that particular lines of participation emerge, are eclipsed and re-appear throughout the period under examination. Rather than merely focusing on how one student figure comes to replace another as students obtain new possibilities for participation over (linear) time, students’ participation can also be seen to figure and take place in what Law and Mol (2002: 12–13) have called ‘tidal time’. Here particular lines of participation can be understood as coming to surface at some points while, at other points, being eclipsed by – but still being formative for – other lines of participation. A line of participation, therefore, may be momentarily deferred or eclipsed, but it leaves traces and comes back in new ways at later points.

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In particular, one can see the historical explorations as a continuous combat between especially two approaches to students’ participation that have articulated different elements in the three participatory areas and are articulated differently at different times. Roughly put, one line emphasizes transformation or even subversion as a central dimension (or outcome) of participation, whereas the other emphasizes continuity or preservation. For example, in terms of students’ participation in society, there has been a constant movement back and forth, or up and down, between, on the one hand, those who believe that students and student unions shall engage in critical, social and political (or even revolutionary) involvement and debate; and on the other hand, those who believe that students should focus on their studies and prepare themselves for a future work-life (today called ‘employability’). Whereas the former line puts emphasis on the need to transform and reform society and the university, in the latter students are also expected to help develop both society and the university, but not, however, fundamentally question or contest existing academic, social and political frameworks. Similarly, one could argue that in terms of students’ learning and ‘pedagogical’ participation, there has been a constant negotiation of the kind of independence and critical thinking students should develop and to what extent, roughly put, students are to engage in rote learning or define and work independently and creatively with a subject of their own choice – thereby contributing to the development and transformation of a discipline or area of study/research. In addition to these different oscillations between a transformative line of participation and a more preserving one, among the politically active students over the past two centuries, there seems to be a constant friction and oscillation between, on the one hand, those who argue for a pragmatic approach, a more narrow focus on student-related issues (in the literature and by students today, this is often referred to as a ‘student-as-such’ approach – see chapter 6) and an emphasis on parliamentarian methods; and on the other hand, those students who tend to have greater confidence in activist and extra-parliamentarian methods and advocate a more critical, subversive approach, in which students (as individuals, networks or organizations) should and can become involved in various kinds of political discussions. Overall, the historical explorations show how different participatory elements are articulated and take dominance at different moments. At different moments, different conditions and possibilities have influenced the way individual students have produced, related

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to and taken part in larger wholes like ‘the student body’, ‘the discipline’, the ‘academic community’/universitas and larger society (which has variously included a relation to the king, the [welfare] state and a knowledge economy). If the line of transformative or subversive participation in this way is best understood as being in an entangled relation with a line of preserving participation, the same could be said about the lines of integrative and aggregative participation I pointed to previously. The different ‘wholes’ that students have participated in and been a part of over centuries past are at different moments generated through different kinds of integrative and aggregative participation. A more comprehensive historical analysis could therefore show to what extent students at particular moments in history are integrated into a larger ‘whole’ of, for example, ‘students’, ‘a discipline/education programme’, ‘the university’, ‘the nation-state’ and so forth through participatory activities in their everyday lives that provide them with a sense of belonging and of responsibility, obligation or ownership towards these various ‘wholes’; and to what extent these ‘wholes’ are aggregated through, for example, elections, freedom of choice, complaints and so forth, and how notions of belonging, responsibility or ownership in relation to these different ‘wholes’ play a role here (if any). In the second part of the book, I will explore these questions ethnographically. I focus on particular frictional events that in different ways point to how and why students today become part of/participants in various integrated and aggregated wholes, and if/how they convey any sense of belonging, obligation and ownership to any such wholes. In these chapters, therefore, I address and explore more indepth students’ participation in relation to the three interconnected areas, that is, students’ participation in (1) their own course of study, (2) the governance and development of their university and (3) the development of wider society. Ethnographically, as noted in the introduction, the areas overlap in different ways. Nevertheless, in particular frictional events certain participatory areas are conjured up as more central than others, and in this light the chapters move from focusing mainly on issues of students’ participation in their own course of study and in the governance of their university (chapters 4 and 5) to exploring how politically active students seek to participate in and influence education politics and the shaping of society more generally (chapter 6).

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Notes 1. The Danish word here is stand, which refers to a certain group (e.g., based on occupation, wealth or descent) with a certain status or rank in society. I therefore use the English term ‘social class’, which can refer to different groupings or estates represented in an assembly of the estates, as has been the case in the university’s governing system after 1970. 2. Tellingly, the students had stopped wearing the cap by the late 1960s – the distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘ordinary’ (wo)man was at the time heavily criticized, as more students from ‘working-class’ families were attending university, and increasingly the radical and revolting students began to sympathize with the workers. Today the cap is worn by high school students from the day of their last examination and for a few weeks thereafter. 3. The police and government feared that the Student Society would instigate the same revolutionary and sometimes violent events as had occurred in Germany, where the students’ associations or Burschenschaften had shown themselves to be a powerful and revolutionary force against the authoritarian and conservative German government (Hellesen & Tuxen 1993: 181). 4. They supported and were inspired by radical thinkers like Georg Brandes, who, because of his atheist, socialist views and support for female emancipation, was passed over several times by the Senate when professorships, for which in the eyes of many people he was the obvious candidate, fell vacant. Only decades later was he recognized with the title of professor and a salary. 5. Previously, the Senate, in which professors were members by seniority, had governed the university. The new Teachers’ Assembly consisted of all full-time teachers. They elected a Senate member as rector, as well as five out of the sixteen members in the Senate. The Teachers’ Assembly officially had the last word over the Senate, which was turned into its executive committee (Nielsen & Brichet 2007). 6. The financial independence the university had benefitted from due to land and properties given to it at its founding was significantly reduced in the period up to the 1830s. In 1836–38 a government official was appointed to make the financial arrangements for the university, which had formerly been in the hands of the Senate. Gradually the university had changed its position from being a kind of state within the state (which had its own jurisdiction until 1771) to a state institution for education (Nielsen & Brichet 2007: 70–71). 7. The Student Council was on probation for ten years and was only declared to be an official part of the university’s organization through the Royal Declaration of 11 May 1921, when it was recognized by the university as representing the matriculated students. In the draft to the new foundation in 1921, it was for the first time stated that ‘the university

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8.

9.

10.

11.

consists of its teachers and students’ (H. K. Larsen 1993: 528). The sentence does point towards a growing democratic tendency towards the greater integration of the students in the university. However, it was deleted in the final version, and it was not until the 1960s that the students in earnest started to speak against the wishes and norms of the professors. The so-called Danish cultural radicalism blossomed in the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. It is often described as a renewal of Georg Brandes’s radicalism from the 1880s. Like Brandes, the new radicalism was connected to socialism and left-wing thinking and, as in the late nineteenth century, the Student Society was the rendezvous for these radical intellectuals (e.g., famous Danes like Otto Gelsted, Hans Kirk and Poul Henningsen, who became members of the Student Society in 1924). In 1931 Poul Henningsen, a famous Danish public debater and architect, stated that too many students, when finishing their studies, take the jobs as civil servants they had been trained for and uncritically reproduce the existing society. The student, he argued, should rather obtain and maintain a critical scientific and revolutionary attitude to society (Gottschau 1987: 8–9), thus providing ammunition for the radical students of the time. During the 1930s, the gap between the conservative and to some extent fascist Students’ Association and the communist and left-wing Student Society grew (Gottschau 1987: 16). In 1930 the Students’ Association invited first Hitler and then, when he could not make it, Goebbels to give a speech to the association. However, the event was cancelled by the chief superintendent on the official grounds that riots between communist and fascist students might erupt. These extreme student factions gradually declined, and when Denmark was occupied in 1940 the students seemed more united in their criticism of the German invasion, though also of the Danish government’s compliance with the German demands. The National Union of Students in Denmark (NUS) was established in 1932 in the same leftist and critical spirit as the Social Gathering. It was established by students from seven different universities, colleges and higher education schools in order to unite all higher education students in a purely student political and union-like organization in which the conservative Students’ Association would not be an a priori dominant member. The Danish Students’ National Council from 1918 – later re-organized as the Danish Academics’ National Council (1928) – of which the Students’ Association had been part, was thereby replaced by the National Union of Students. However, until the end of the German occupation in 1945 the National Union was either closed or relatively inactive (A. L. Hansen 2008). From the very beginning the university students in Copenhagen had been asked to pay various fees to matriculate, to attend lectures and exams, and not least to obtain the at times very expensive private coaches

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

(which were a necessity, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Study grants for needy students had been introduced in 1569 when Frederik II gave kommunitet to 120 students. From 1623 free lodging was also included. The Study Time Committee was set up by the minister of education in 1958 in order to explore how to reduce the length of the then six- to eight-year university education programmes and decrease student dropout rates. As a result, possibilities for combining different subjects were extended and courses became more structured and well-defined (E. Hansen 2005). This quest for better planning and more efficient studies was already evident in 1912 when the so-called University Commission supported greater control of student progress through progressive study plans. They also established the first lists of enrolled students to obtain an overview of the student body and its movements (H. K. Larsen 1993: 516–17). The universities did not want and had not asked for the boom in student numbers. Other institutions of higher education had long introduced restricted admission, which consequently directed more students to the universities. The increased intake had been a political priority that was grounded in a firm belief in the benefits of higher education for the national economy. The politicians had hoped for more students in the natural sciences, but a majority of the students chose the humanities. Finally, in 1976 restricted admission was introduced in medicine, and a year later in all programmes. In terms of research, the 1968 Danish student revolt and the following years of protests are remarkably poorly covered. Most books and articles are eyewitness accounts or politically motivated. The most indepth academic discussion of the emergence and development of Danish student revolts and the different phases is the unpublished thesis by S. L. B. Jensen and T. E. Jørgensen (1999) and their subsequent publications (2001, 2008). Their demand for workplace democracy was clearly inspired by and in line with the general demands for workplace democracy in society, which were put forward especially by The Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the central organization of different workers’ unions. In the early 1960s, a range of coordinating and planning committees were set up in order to promote collaboration across higher education institutions and to guide the ministry and politicians in terms of, for example, student numbers. One of these committees was the University Administration Committee (UAU), which was set up in 1962 by the minister of education, who found that new forms of governance and better long-term planning would be necessary if the growing expectations about universities as motive powers of prosperity were to be fulfilled. The University Administration Committee had been given the freedom to suggest a completely new governance structure.

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17. This was the first common framework law for Danish universities and institutions of higher education. Previously each university and institutions of higher education had its own regulative laws and statutory instruments and deferred to different ministries according to its field of education and research. 18. The first study boards with student members had been established at the Faculty of Medicine in 1953 and in 1960 at mathematics (N. Thomsen 1986: 162). At this point they only had an advisory status and their establishment was dependent on the professors’ positive attitude towards listening to the students. 19. In accordance with general societal demands for ‘workplace democracy’, the 1973 law included the technical administrative staff in the faculty councils and the Senate. The students approved of this inclusion but wanted an equal representation of the three groups. The result, however, was that the students’ seats in the Senate and the faculty councils were reduced from 33 per cent to 25 per cent, such that the teachers obtained 50 per cent and the students and support staff each 25 per cent of the seats. 20. Photographs of the 1956 and 1977 matriculations (see Hellesen & Tuxen 1986: 364–65) clearly show the move from a solemn matriculation atmosphere, with students and the rector dressed in their finest outfits, to a more relaxed atmosphere in which both students and the rector and deans are wearing everyday clothes. In 1971 the rector explained in his speech that when students with good reason began to wear more relaxed clothing ‘then only I was loaded down with the weight of the [rector’s] chain and the heavy robes. Therefore, in recent years, the rector comes without vestments [uden ornat]. Then we are once again in similar clothing – as our predecessors were’ (Fog 1971). A new kind of ‘ordinary’ equality was promoted, as opposed to the elevated ‘academic man’ of former times. Today, the rector and deans are in full vestments, but the atmosphere is still casual. The students, who are in their everyday clothing, have in past decades built up a tradition of interrupting the rector’s first words, loudly singing songs in which they tease students from other subject areas and celebrate their own respective deans. 21. Herbert Marcuse became one of the main sources of inspiration for the 1960s student revolts around the Western world, and the establishments of the time, like the then president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, accused him of corrupting young minds and encouraging rebellion. To Marcuse ‘the student’ became an exemplary figure of social change and revolution (see Marcuse 1968). In 1967, he stated: ‘I regard the student opposition of today as one of the most crucial factors in the world … which maybe someday can become a revolutionary force. To establish connections between student oppositions in different countries is therefore one of the most important strategic demands of our time’ (Marcuse, quoted in Hansen & Jacobsen 1968: 27).

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22. With the 1992 law, the students lost their decision-making powers on the department boards where issues of finance and research profiles were prioritized. They did retain half the seats on the study boards, which in fact were given more autonomous power to, for example, commission teaching. But the study boards were now to be led by a study leader (a member of the academic staff) in charge of the financial dispensations. Likewise, the student share of the seats on the faculty councils and in the Senate was reduced. The rector and the deans were given more powerful positions, including more executive power, and they held the casting vote in cases of parity (see Ørberg 2007 for a discussion of the changing roles of university leaders from 1970 to 2003). To signal a stronger orientation to the wider society, external members were now included in the Senate and on the faculty councils. The leaders were to be approved and, if their performance was unsatisfactory, removed by leaders above them in the hierarchy, and since they were now elected by all students and employees – and no longer only by the governing committees – the democratically elected organs had no direct ways of sanctioning the leaders. 23. In the wake of the economic crisis in 1973, a new regulation had made it possible for the banks to issue student loans at a high interest rate, with no risk to the banks due to a state guarantee. The result was that in the 1970s and 1980s a great many students ended up with extremely high levels of debt. The 1988 reform abolished earlier expensive stateguaranteed bank loans, introduced cheaper state loans and gave the students larger study grants. However, the students could now only receive the monthly state education grant for the prescribed period of study with one year in addition. The total period in which the student could receive grants was thereby shortened by one year to eighteen months. Similarly, in 1996, a total of six years of a monthly state education grant was introduced, which made it easier for students to shift between different programmes, but also introduced further controls in that the grant would be stopped if the student was delayed in finishing by more than a year.

Part II Events and Figurations

4 Time and Freedom

Independent Thinking and the Timing of Students’ Freedom This chapter explores how students – as learners – are offered and/or claim a particular space for participation in their teaching and learning, and how this space may be changing as demands for efficiency, flexibility and student-centred education converge and intersect in new ways. Taking as my point of departure a particular reform that introduced shorter and more intensive modules and put more emphasis on students’ participation in class and in their own learning, I ask what notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘time’ are articulated and activated as important for the student and by whom? How, in this process, is the (in)dependence and accountability between teacher and student negotiated and balanced? And is the student thereby encouraged to become a particular kind of learner? In 2004, the Faculty of Science in the University of Copenhagen (KU) reformed its education programmes, and the next year the then Danish Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (KVL) adopted the same reforms. The intention was to reduce student dropout rates, speed up completion rates, increase collaboration with the relevant job market and in general make the programmes more attractive by securing ‘greater transparency, coherence, relevance and flexibility’ (see, e.g., Holm & Laursen 2007: 2). With the reforms, fewer but broader bachelor’s degree programmes leading to more master’s degree programmes were introduced so that students could

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gradually specialize and shift more easily between different subject areas. In conformity with the general Bologna goals of harmonizing degrees across the European Higher Education Area and promoting flexibility and freedom of choice, a new standardized ‘block and module structure’ was introduced. Instead of two semesters, the year was now split up into four blocks of nine weeks each with either two 7½ ECTS modules or, more rarely, one 15 ECTS module. In order to help the students combine modules in a relevant manner, a series of subject packages or subject lines were proposed. The courses were then placed in a standardized schedule of A, B and C modules so that courses that belonged in the same ‘subject package’ did not overlap each other. In line with the 2003 Danish University Act and the 2004 Ministerial Regulation on Education (see, e.g., Kvalifikationsnøgle 2003; VTU 2004: §67, 2005), the reforms also included a shift from content descriptions to competence descriptions of each module and programme. Now the student’s learning outcomes – that is, how a course or programme will provide the student with the relevant competences to think and act – rather than the tutor’s teaching input (syllabus, content descriptions) was to be at the centre. The reforms thus followed the widespread tendency to shift from a so-called teaching-based system to a learning-based system (cf. Hermann & Kristensen 2004; Hutters & Mogensen 2006). To promote greater student participation in class and in their own learning, teachers were encouraged to replace lectures with more ‘activating’ teaching methods like group and project work and to introduce more differentiated forms of examination (e.g., continuous assessment instead of one single fourhour written test, the dominant examination form previously). These convergent reform initiatives – from now on simply referred to as the Education Reforms – actualize an often-stated ambition to put ‘the student at the centre’ of the education system. This ambition had been foregrounded in political as well as pedagogical debates for several decades, though in slightly different and potentially conflicting ways. To a great extent, the differences in interpretation revolve around divergent notions of time and freedom – around students’ independent work, freedom of choice and efficiency in teaching and learning. As explained in the previous chapter, inspired by the new German humanism of the early nineteenth century, the notions of independent thinking and academic freedom have long been a central constitutive feature of what Danish university education is and should be. In Humboldt’s new humanism, the introduction of new pedagogies

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like research-based teaching, dialogue-based seminars and closer student-teacher contact was meant to awaken the students’ ‘scientific spirit’ and turn them into independently thinking and morally judging persons. The ‘liberated individual’ – researcher as well as student – was to find his or her own independent itineraries, which would be to the benefit of the explored subject itself, as well as to the moral development of the wider society. Teachers should have Lehrfreihet (freedom to decide what and how to teach), and students should have Lernfreiheit (freedom to organize their own course of study, choose which seminars and lectures to follow, which books to read, etc.) (cf. Helmholtz [1877] 2007; Humboldt [1809] 2007; Kjærgaard & Kristensen 2003; Kristensen 2007). The previously described 1960 debate between the student Hertel and the professor Hjelmslev (see chapter 3), in which the latter argued that the teachers’ Lehrfreiheit was more important than the students’ Lernfreiheit, clearly shows how the relation of (in)dependence between teacher and student is not easily balanced. Not only does their debate show students’ freedom being balanced against notions of expertise and accountability, it also points to the balancing between educational freedom and efficiency (through better planning and modularization) that took centre stage from the 1960s onwards. In a debate over the introduction of two- or three-year ‘basic education’ in the late 1960s, two different solutions to the problem then identified of inefficiency in university education became apparent. Crucially, in emphasizing different kinds of student freedom, these competing approaches point to two different and potentially conflicting ways of placing the student ‘at the centre’ of the education system. On the one hand, the so-called Planning Council (Planlægningsrådet) for higher education aired the idea of a two- to three-year ‘basic education’, with discipline-grounded modules that the students could combine in new ways that were more relevant for the job market. Such flexible programmes, it was argued, could reduce dropout rates, enable easier shifts between long- and medium-cycle higher education and gradually lead to specialization in which students gained a broad knowledge of a main general area before choosing a discipline (E. Hansen 1997: 33–34). On the other hand, ‘progressive’ students who had gained in influence after the student revolts of the late 1960s criticized the proposal for being too ‘technocratic’, for upholding what they perceived to be an authoritarian, teacher-led and competitive education tradition, and for focusing too narrowly on economic calculation (J. F. Jensen 1971; Olesen 1971; Wivel 1971). They too were in favour of introducing ‘basic education’, but they

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wanted it to be based on problem orientation rather than disciplinary and teacher-led modules. In their version, student participation, independent project work in groups and the development of (Marxist-inspired) critical consciousness were key words. This model, as noted, became the dominant one when the new Roskilde University opened in 1972 (see chapter 5). Whereas students’ freedom in the former modular proposal seemed to be linked mainly to notions of flexibility and freedom of choice and combination between distinct (and mainly teacher-led) modules, freedom in the students’ proposal was more related to the development of students’ independence to undertake innovative and critical thinking through particular problem-oriented pedagogies. Today, in the name of efficiency and flexibility, it seems that reforms like the Education Reforms at KU and KVL are trying to make new combinations of both modularized education and freedom of choice and student-centred learning, independent project work and more ‘active’ participation of students in their own learning process. This chapter explores how these reforms were enacted and negotiated by students and teachers, and how – in these processes – conflicting student figures were conjured up. I start the chapter by unfolding the first of two different but interrelated frictional events at one of the reformed education courses. This was one of the three courses I followed in fall/winter 2005–6, a 15 ECTS third-year course at KVL that I call the ‘nature course’. These events work as starting points for more general explorations of the Education Reforms and how these may work to encourage new forms of student participation and student-teacher (in)dependence and accountability. In these wider explorations I also draw on ethnographic material from the other two third-year courses I followed at KU and Roskilde University (RUC), respectively. In line with the widespread ideals about university education and student participation in Denmark (see the self-representation on the Study in Denmark website discussed in chapter 2), the teachers responsible for the three courses all presented their courses as problem-oriented and emphasized as a goal the promotion of independence and critical thinking among the students. In different ways they all made the students engage with research-like practices of problem definition and problem solving. The 7½ ECTS course at KU followed the new block and module structure and, like the nature course at KVL, only lasted nine weeks. Whereas the nature course, as I shall describe later, had twelve students and combined varied teaching and learning methods, the course

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at KU had about seventy students (who followed another 7½ ECTS course in parallel with this one) and was based on a combination of two weekly common lectures for all and a weekly two-hour maths lesson where the students were divided into three groups with three different teachers. In sharp contrast to the tightly planned block and module courses at KVL and KU, the pace of the 18 ECTS course at RUC was regulated through ‘rolling planning’ (rullende planlægning), as the teacher explained. The course was known as a very ‘classic’ RUC course and was thoroughly thought through on the basis of pedagogical ideals of problem-based learning and student participation. There was no distinct syllabus, since the aim of the course, the teacher explained to me and the students, was to give them the competences to think in a manner that is characteristic of the particular subject and provide them with the ability to bring this knowledge into use (the teacher therefore argued that RUC had introduced ‘competence thinking’ long before this notion became the mantra in contemporary university education reforms [see also Niss 1999]). I will now turn to the nature course at KVL. In order to explore the students’ and teachers’ experiences with the new block structure and ‘activating’ pedagogies – and how in this process students’ spaces for participation and (in)dependence were formed – I start by unfolding a frictional event that took place one day in the nature course.

First Friction in the Nature Course: Negotiating Independence Like many of the other newly prepared modules in the new block structure, the nature course seemed extremely ambitious in terms of the workload and teaching/learning methods. The teacher team had introduced more varied teaching methods and demands for independent and active student involvement: throughout seven intensive weeks, the students in the nature course were to follow sixteen double lectures; participate in ten so-called journal clubs, where they were to act in turn as the presenters and discussants of scientific articles; and finally, in parallel, carry out an independent experimental project in groups ending in a methodologically reflexive report of the project process. The final examination was placed nine weeks after the first course day and consisted of each group’s defence of their report and an individual examination based on some of the articles discussed in the journal clubs. In all, fourteen students, who were mostly around twenty-two to twenty-three years old, had registered for the course,

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though two of them never showed up. The main teaching team consisted of six teachers, with Niels, a professor, having overall responsibility. In addition, seven more loosely connected teachers came once or twice to give a lecture or two. On the first day of the course, Niels explained to the twelve students present that the combination of lectures, journal clubs and independent experimental work was intended to provide them with an ‘independent critical attitude’, making them capable of evaluating the pros and cons of different methods and of established researchers’ and their own scientific work. ‘The approach is problem-oriented and based on students’ independent work’, he said, but then explained that, due to the short period available with the new blocks, and because the projects were to be based on experimental laboratory work, the teacher group had had to decide a handful of possible projects in advance and prepare the material for them, which students now could choose between. ‘We have made a rough outline which you have to fill out yourself and formulate a problem’, Niels told the students. As soon as Niels had ended his introductory presentation, Thomas, one of the students, said: ‘I am really disappointed that we can’t define our projects ourselves. I had looked forward to deciding more freely on the topic and experiments. But okay, I do see that it’s difficult with the time pressure and all.’ The other students seemed to agree with Thomas, and some felt that the teachers should have contacted them as soon as they had signed up for the module to involve them in the initial process of selecting projects. But like Thomas, they seemed to accept the conditions now that they had been given what they felt was a reasonable explanation. As one of them later said to me: ‘There’s simply no time for us to spend time discussing back and forth what we feel like doing and considering back and forth. The blocks are too brief for that.’ A few weeks into the course, student dissatisfaction with the partially predetermined projects was aired again. The students had now formed their project groups, distributed the projects and were to present their interpretations of the projects and plans for how to carry out the research. Each group collected comments, suggestions and criticism from the other students and the teachers who were supervising the three groups. When the third group began their presentation, Kathrine – the most active and outspoken person during the group’s presentation – started out by saying that their project was part of a larger existing research project at the university and that therefore many things had been determined beforehand. ‘We have chosen a ready-made package – this we found out when we started

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the project’, she said in a rather dissatisfied voice. ‘Is that good or bad?’ Kenneth, a fellow student, wanted to know straightaway. Kathrine answered: It’s both good and bad, I guess. It’s good because we get through a whole lot of stuff, we can see why it’s important and we know that we get something out of it. We get some results to analyze. But on the other hand, it’s really bad because we haven’t had that phase where we have to consider which paths to choose and which direction to go in. (Kathrine, third-year student, KVL, 2005)

Bodil, a teacher, responded that the students should put these reflections in their report, where they could critically discuss the choices that had been made on their behalf. Kathrine was twenty-five years old, and thus some years older than most of the other students. She had experience of another vocational education programme prior to this one, and in some sense seemed more mature than some of the others. She lived with her boyfriend in a small house in a provincial town outside Copenhagen. She studied many hours a day, she said, and had prioritized not to work alongside her studies in order to get enough time to read. Also, she had a horse that took up a good deal of her spare time. Though reading and studying did not come as easy to her as she would like it to, she was determined to work hard in order to follow this course of education, which she described as her ‘dream subject’. She often got average grades, and was satisfied with this. Kathrine, however, was clearly not satisfied with the pedagogical process in this particular module and also complained that their group had been given an extremely tight schedule for the laboratory work, leaving them with little time to read and study the relevant literature. Then Niels, the teacher responsible for the module and the supervisor of Kathrine’s group, intervened. Addressing Kathrine, he said in a firm voice: ‘Now it sounds as if an ugly schedule has been imposed on you. But it is after all you who decide. You get some offers, which you can accept or not. Nobody can decide what you should do. It is your project! Not your supervisors’!’ (Niels, teacher, KVL, 2005). Kathrine made one last critical comment about the tight schedule and the fact that students’ decision making was reduced to a choice between pre-formulated projects. Then the discussion faded away. ‘Do you feel safe about it all and the further process?’ Niels then asked all the students in a more gentle tone. Some students nodded, while others just looked down on their tables. ‘Well, we’ll evaluate along the way as well’, Niels concluded, and they agreed to take a break.

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Independence and Efficiency in Learning The friction on this day in class seemed to a large extent to relate to the difficult balancing of students’ dependence on the teachers (their intentions with and framework for the course) and the ideal of promoting and making room for students’ independent work, an ideal that is not only promoted by the teachers, but here also desired by the students themselves. In this balancing act, the structural incompatibility between the growing time pressure in the new block module and the outcome-oriented (rather than input-oriented) ideal of student participation is crucial. The situation clearly shows how the definition of educational ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ is often no simple affair. Kathrine’s ambivalence about the teacher-led elements of the project conveys how a given feature may well be perceived as both a problem and a benefit at the same time. On the one hand, the fact that the project had been prepared by the teachers, Kathrine says, has the advantage that students have some ‘results to analyze’, can ‘get through a whole lot of stuff’ and can ‘get something out of it’. On the other hand, she emphasizes the educational value of students being able to make their own independent decisions. Friction not only emerges between Kathrine and the teacher Niels but also in Kathrine’s personal reasoning and ambivalent evaluation of the pedagogical approaches. When Kathrine talks about the value of ‘having that phase where we have to consider which paths to choose and in which direction to go’, she evokes an often used metaphor for the process of learning and knowing, namely, that of a journey or voyage (cf. Gustavsson 1998; Ingold 2000a; Salmond 1982). In chapter 2, we saw how, in her matriculation speech in 2005, the rector of the University of Copenhagen encouraged the freshmen to be ‘explorers’ and to engage in their studies as if it was a ‘voyage of discovery’ – a voyage where the student, driven by curiosity, takes unexpected knowledge with him or her back home and, as she said, ‘flies high, dives deep and restlessly walks around in the curriculum’s deserts before coming to the springs and stretching out in the oases’. Uncertainty, frustration and independent exploration, in other words, are here seen as necessary and productive elements of the students’ education. Tellingly, similar travel and topographic metaphors were also prevalent when in 2003 a colleague and I interviewed thirty university researchers from the humanities about their notions of ‘freedom of research’ and their understandings of the process of doing research (Nielsen & Brichet 2004: 62ff.). They talked of research as a process of ‘exploring new areas where you can meet impediments on the way’ or ‘following a

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track which may lead to a dead end’. The good researcher, one said, has to have ‘the guts to leave the surface, get up and fly, with the risk that you flop down to the earth again’. Therefore, the researcher, most of them argued, should have and assume the freedom to explore unexpected and unknown roads, as well as the risks in doing so. In this sense, students’ independent projects have research-like qualities. However, their knowledge landscape of exploration is necessarily to some extent demarcated, pointed out and imagined beforehand by the teachers of the given course. The students are therefore dependent on some degree of guidance from the researcher/teacher (cf. Humboldt’s notion of the student as geleitet Forschende [guided researcher] and the teacher/researcher as selbständig Forschende [independent researcher]). Klaus, another member of Kathrine’s project group, had also hoped for more student participation in the planning and deciding of the projects. However, in addition to his feeling of security in the process that was also emphasized by Kathrine, Klaus pointed to another positive element of participating in a pre-planned and larger research project: Klaus:

It means a lot for motivation. Several times I have said that ‘now I’m part of science’ [del af videnskaben] [laughs loudly]. When I have found it a bit boring with the pipettes – then it does something for the motivation.

Author: ‘A part of science’, you say, and laugh? Klaus:

Yes, but I mean it. It gives a sense of taking part in doing research [være med til at forske], and it’s great to know that our results are being used in a larger project. Only right now I don’t know what comes out of it. We just do the experiments as they were planned. But I think that everything will fall into place when we start to analyze the results and read some theory.

His inclusion in an existing field of research is a great motivating factor for Klaus. He feels that he is a part of something larger than his own individual studies and project group, namely, ‘science’ as a whole. The question is, however, how can the student be part of such a whole? Is the student to participate as a kind of ‘pipette holder’ for the researchers’ projects (which seems to be the role Klaus finds himself in at the moment), or as an explorative and independently thinking student? The answer to some extent depends on the level of the students’ qualifications and the character of the research projects, but – due to the general ideal of promoting independence – it is something that is constantly being negotiated and debated at all levels of university education.

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In the three third-year courses I followed, different attitudes towards the degree of freedom that students should have in their project work existed among students as well as teachers. Whereas Kathrine and her fellow students at KVL had only a few experiences with project work – which made most of them rather unsettled about this form of teaching – about half of the students’ workload at RUC consisted of independent problem-oriented project work. They therefore had other experiences and often stronger attitudes towards this kind of independent work. When I asked these students about their perceptions of a ‘good project’, a ‘good course’ or ‘good teaching’, many of them – like Kathrine – described it in terms of ‘getting something out of it’. The feeling of ‘getting something out of it’ is, of course, highly subjective, and many students found it difficult to explain it in greater depth when I asked them about it. One RUC student politician, Morten, who we shall learn more about in the following chapter, identified himself as a ‘co-owner’ of Roskilde University. He explained that to him ‘getting something out of it’ meant learning to participate and take a stand in a democracy, learning to reflect critically on his own situation and the society he lives in, and simply becoming a better citizen. To Morten, it was the very process of doing independent work, not so much the particular product in terms of the results and grades that came out of it, that was important. He was therefore furious that at RUC the tendency over the past decades had been to introduce more teacher-led courses at the expense of independent and problem-oriented project work in groups. Other RUC students, like Henrik, one of the third-year students in the RUC course I followed, were happy about this development. To Henrik, ‘good education’ was to a great degree a question of efficiency. He described himself as not being a ‘super RUCian’ since he did not – like Morten, for example – find the main educational value in the collaborative, independent and participatory process in itself, nor in reflecting about it. He explained that, even though he appreciated the maturing and motivating benefits of independent project work in groups, he was in favour of much more teacher guidance in the process. In negotiating learning as a balance between process and product, Henrik, like Kathrine, weighed students’ freedom against notions of efficiency and measurability: With project work, you don’t always feel that you get as efficient learning, or, how should I put it, I mean if you look at it syllabus-wise … you can spend an incredibly long time on discussions where you can’t really measure whether you are getting something out of it. The problem is that

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you can easily spend 1½ months finding out what you want to explore, where you look to the east and west. … On the other hand, one time we were able to construct a model ourselves, and that was, that’s that ‘kick’ … that’s the great thing about independent project work, you don’t know if there is a solution, and when you find one then it’s just so much cooler than if you had just been given the assignment. … I can see the value of the process in itself more now than in the beginning [of his studies]. But it’s really a question of me wanting to be efficient with my time. I’m engaged in many different things, and therefore I want to feel that when I do something I want to spend my time fully in the period I do it. And I want to be able to see that I get something out of it. And sometimes that’s difficult if you’ve spent five hours discussing in which direction to take the project. (Henrik, third-year student, RUC, 2005)

Henrik’s understanding of efficient learning is linked not only to notions of quantification and measurability (syllabus, number of pages, a product), but also to a particular understanding of time, namely, time parcelled out in spaces of time. The independent exploration ‘to the east and west’ may be frustrating, but it may also give you a ‘kick’ if you reach a new and exciting solution to a self-defined problem. However, in Henrik’s view – and here he echoes one aspect of Kathrine’s ambivalence towards the ‘ready-made package’ project – more teacher-led processes will lead to the acquisition of larger amounts of ‘relevant stuff’. In other words, each period of time seems to work as a container into which can be fitted smaller or, if the process is efficient, larger amounts of relevant knowledge or learning. Crucially, the very notion of a syllabus, evoked by Henrik as a measure of efficiency, exactly links together both spatial and temporal measures. The syllabus outlines a certain quantity of pages and content to be acquired within a given time period. Likewise, pensum, the Danish word for syllabus or examination requirements, means ‘to weigh’, and in its original Latin sense referred to the daily quantity of wool a slave should produce. Only by identifying learning through both spatially and temporally quantifiable measures does it make sense to argue – as Henrik did when I asked him what he meant by ‘getting something out of it’ – that the time spent on reading something that you do not use directly becomes ‘wasted time’: Well, it’s … ehm … you do find, of course, that you’ve learned more than what’s written in the final report, and that’s fine enough, so I don’t mean in that sense ‘getting out of’. But it’s in relation to, well, again, it’s that some things are difficult to measure and I like it when you somehow

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are able to measure things. … I mean you can spend a lot of time reading something that you in the end don’t quite understand and then do not use. Then it’s wasted time. (Henrik, third-year student, RUC, 2005)

On the one hand, Henrik emphasizes that in itself the written product is not representative for what he has ‘gotten out of’ a course or project. On the other hand, to him it is indeed the tangible, visible and measurable features of a learning process – like the number of pages read, understood and actively used or the construction of a particular mathematical model – that count. The main issue, therefore, seems to be to reduce any ‘waste of time’.

‘Free Studies’ between ‘Subject-Oriented Time’ and ‘Standardized Policy Time’ The concepts of time and efficiency evoked by Henrik are clearly related to what Tim Ingold (2000b) has described as mechanical and standardized clock time. This temporal understanding became a crucial management technology with the industrialization of the Western world in that standardized clock time was introduced as the measure against which labour could be controlled in the name of efficiency and productivity (see also Thompson 1967).1 Ingold argues that clock time often is understood in contrast to what he calls task-oriented time – that is, activity where time is intrinsic to the task undertaken. Contrary to industrialized societies, the argument goes, people in socalled traditional societies ‘retain a large measure of control over the rhythms of their everyday lives’ (ibid.: 323). No ‘external’ measures are imposed on their tasks. The milking of cows has its own time, as does the preparation of food. Task-oriented time, therefore, is a social and qualitative time in the sense that, in this definition, tasks are socially embedded activities that mark no strict distinction between work and leisure. This is a time with an ‘inherent rhythmicity and … embeddedness in activities that are indexical of a person’s belonging to locality and community’ (ibid.: 325). This inherent and communal temporality Ingold associates with ‘dwelling’, a qualitative time embedded in moral and social relations that persists, especially at places where we come to feel ‘at home’. Ingold’s point, however, is that task-oriented time has not been lost with industrialization and capitalist quests for efficiency. Rather, standardized clock time, which supposedly serves to distinguish labour production from leisure time, is in practice negotiated and re-appropriated by people through

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task orientation and as part of the production of their own personal and social identities. Here, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s book Rhythmanalysis (2004) provides an excellent vocabulary for exploring such interaction between different kinds of temporalities in people’s everyday lives. Lefebvre argues that our bodies are polyrhythmic in the sense that several rhythms intersect and intertwine in our everyday lives. Most often, however, we only become aware of the rhythms when we feel we are in a pathological state of disorder or unbalance (e.g., stressed) – that is, when the rhythms are discordant and combine in what he calls ‘arrhythmia’ (ibid.: 16, 67–68). Objective rhythms of clock time, in other words, may both interfere with or contradict and be in some kind of resonance with something we recognize as ‘our own’ rhythms. This qualitative time of ‘one’s own’ Lefebvre calls ‘appropriated time’, which resembles Ingold’s task orientation in the sense that it is ‘a time that forgets time, during which time no longer counts (and is no longer counted)’ (ibid.: 76). As the political desire to increase students’ pace of study seems to have constantly grown in recent decades, the obvious question becomes how in their everyday lives students come to balance ‘the time of tasks’ with ‘the time of the clock’ – a time that we, in light of the Education Reforms and the growing political concern with prescribed time frames, could call ‘standardized policy time’. Obviously, the acceleration and timing – and thus a particular kind of taming – of students’ freedom were essential to the Education Reforms. In a way – as we shall see – the students on the block structure were incentivized to adopt a standardized time consciousness of efficiency more like the one that the RUC student Henrik invoked. The students’ time is broken down into smaller and smaller units against which they have to balance their work. One head of department who had been a leading motive power in the reforms described to me his pedagogical intentions and the students’ reactions to the block structure in the following manner: With shorter blocks we get more intensive and concentrated courses. The students are forced to be active all the time. The older students complained to me about the new block structure. I said, ‘I don’t want to be scolded for turning you into active students.’ They complained that they studied too much. In the old system you could leave your foot off the accelerator for a long time and wait to press it down in the last period. The old students realized that when a course is of a maximum of nine weeks duration, you have to press down the accelerator all the time. … The total activity throughout the course of education is driven up. I have

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helped advocate that they have to make an active effort every single day. Many did it already, but in the new structure it is almost a prerequisite. Those who just slumbered but were good at taking the exams, they are now forced to be active. (head of department, natural sciences, KU, 2005)

Not only do the education and structural reforms aim to make students’ activity more compatible and in accordance with the prescribed educational time frame, to this head of department they were also intended to address students’ self-management of their everyday study time. The ideal student evoked here seems to be a kind of ‘incessantly active student’, a figure that includes and combines several notions of activity in that the shorter blocks and more ‘activating’ teaching forms should: (1) make students more active and participatory in class; (2) make them more active in and responsible for their own learning (every single day throughout each module and during the whole year); and (3) increase their ‘active participation in studies’ so as to pass exams within the prescribed period of study. I return to explore the former two aspects in later sections. In terms of the latter aspect – that is, the wish to increase the students’ pace of study – the third-year students I talked to at the three universities were very critical. They all expressed awareness about this political quest; it seemed to be something most of them had actively reflected upon and that most of them did not support. When in a questionnaire, among other things, I asked students if it was important for them to finish their degree within the prescribed time frame, only a few of them answered yes. Most argued, both in the questionnaire and in my interviews, that they were not really concerned about whether or not they exceeded the prescribed time – as long as they stayed within the period in which they could obtain state education funding (see chapter 2) and avoid amassing a large debt. However, if we recall the brief dialogue presented in chapter 1 between the two students Anders and Gregers – who were in the third-year RUC course I followed – it is clear that students are constantly forced to balance their studies between the prescribed ‘standardized policy time’ and a more ‘qualitative’ or ‘experiential’ sense of taking their ‘own’ time. As described (see chapter 1), Gregers criticized Anders for downgrading his studies and wasting the state’s money since Anders was only following a single course instead of the prescribed two. As a result, he would most likely end up spending a longer period – and thus more state education grant money – to finish his studies. In Gregers’s account, time is understood with money as the model and yardstick.

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Anders, for his part, argued that he was in fact upgrading his studies because he prioritized concentrating all his efforts and time on a single course. Within the line of ‘standardized policy time’, Anders is taking time off, whereas he, within the line of a more ‘subjective time’, is studying full-time and allowing himself to explore particular subject areas more ‘in-depth’. Anders finds that the freedom of choice he is faced with requires for him to spend some time ‘absorbing’ or ‘immersing’ (fordybe) himself in only the one subject he is certain of. In this sense, he advocates a particular kind of freedom, namely, a freedom from time pressure, the freedom to pursue his studies in his own manner and at his own pace. The desire to appropriate time and make it one’s own while rejecting what are perceived as external impositions was also prevalent when Betina – a student in the nature course at KVL – argued against the political focus on increasing students’ pace of study. Interestingly, she used the notions of ‘flexibility’ and ‘individual freedom’ – so crucial to the government’s efficiency rationale – as an argument against the political preoccupation with educational speed. Betina:

I think it’s dangerous to attempt to push people so quickly through the system, because it’s not very flexible, or it reduces the flexibility of the university studies. And the flexibility, that’s really one of the advantages about the university.

Author: Yes? Betina:

Eehm, yeah, that people can adapt [their study] to their own temper … some people need to take it more slowly and calmly. Because of family or other private matters, if they’re in a crisis in their life. Some are just slow readers. And I think it’s a great thing about university that you don’t have a class to follow but that you’re responsible yourself for making things work and organizing your time according to your own needs. … That thing about ‘prescribed time’ [normeret tid], well, that’s something someone has determined, it’s not individually [individuelt]. And I think it’s more important that you, as I say, feel ‘fully educated’ [ færdiguddannet] and feel that you are in control [har styr på tingene], that you understand and have energy [in your everyday life]. … That kind of individual aspect, in relation to the prescribed time, I think that’s important.

Like Anders, Betina advocates freedom from time pressure. To her, flexibility is not just a question of ‘freedom of choice’ but also of having the individual flexibility to adapt the course of study to one’s own individual needs and temper.2 She wrote about her ideal of feel-

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ing ‘fully educated’ in her response to my questionnaire. When I asked her about it during the interview, she told me that, now and also when she had filled out the questionnaire, she was in a rather frustrating period. She was actually ahead of the prescribed time frame, but because she was so much in doubt about the topic of her bachelor’s thesis, she would probably have to postpone it and thereby delay her studies. The questionnaire had made her reflect on the issue of time in earnest, she said, and she had decided that obtaining the feeling of being ‘fully educated’ was most important, not finishing within the prescribed time. Like most of the other students in class, Betina was around twenty-two years old. She had moved away from her parent’s house after finishing gymnasium and had saved up some money to go to Asia for six months. She now lived with a friend in a small rented apartment and had a relevant study job for ten hours a week. She was a bright and ambitious student who usually obtained grades above the average. She explained that she did not feel any pressure from her parents or friends to finish at a particular time, but because of the general political emphasis on getting students to finish more quickly, she said, she constantly had to convince herself that it was all right to study in the manner and at the pace that suited her. Betina’s emphasis on the qualitative and individual sense of ‘feeling fully educated’ and Anders’s wish to obtain a sense of ‘absorption’ or ‘immersion’ in the subject seem to add something crucial to Ingold’s notion of task-oriented time – not least when we consider the quest to educate students as free and independent thinkers. Whereas the notion of a ‘task’ in Ingold’s usage seems to connote a more or less well-defined social activity – like cleaning the dishes or milking the cows – in independent or free studies the ‘task’ cannot and must not be completely outlined and defined in advance. Rather, it needs to be shaped and changed with the student’s own individual movement through the subject area. When Anders required time for ‘absorption’ and Betina for feeling certain about the topic of her bachelor’s thesis, it therefore seems more precise to call the time felt as ‘intrinsic’ to students’ independent studies ‘subject-oriented time’, that is, if we take the notion of ‘subject’ to convey the double meaning of the acting individual/group of exploration and the subject of study. Subject-oriented time, in other words, emerges at the intersection of the impediments, openings and challenges in the landscape of exploration and the individual student’s movement in and forming of this landscape. Betina’s and Anders’s quests for individual free time, therefore, can be seen as an expression of them feeling a discordance

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or arrhythmia – indeed, a friction – between the standardized policy time and their sense of subject-oriented time. In the following section, we shall see how the conveyance of a sense of ‘immersion’, ‘absorption’ or ‘depth’ – and thus of subject-oriented time – more generally seemed to be one of the greatest challenges with the new block and module structure. Indeed, it seems as if the aim of producing ‘incessantly active students’ in some cases works precisely to incentivize students into a particular kind of efficient and strategic study engagement in standardized policy time.

Absorption, Tuning and the Management of Time Whereas the students in the nature course at KVL had only taken a single nine-week module in the new block structure, most of the students in the third-year course at KU’s Faculty of Science had been in the block structure since they started their studies and therefore had more experiences and stronger attitudes towards it. Like the nature course students, these students conveyed both positive and negative experiences with the new structure (see also the KU reform evaluation from 2007 [Holm & Laursen 2007]). In line with the above quoted head of department’s goals, many of the students felt greater pressure in their everyday lives after the Education Reforms. Tina, a third-year student at KU, described the effects of the combination of the shorter modules, more ‘activating’ teaching methods and more varied examination forms in the following way: You need to be active and alert [være på] all the time. If you’re just sick for a single week you are lost. And now there’s more group work. It forces you to be more active. You can’t relax because others are dependent on you. Also, some students are really stressed about the many exams. I don’t mind so much. I’m good at handling exams. But some of the others are stressed. (Tina, third-year student, KU, 2005

The shorter modules, new ‘responsibilizing’ teaching forms and more exams of different kinds all work to promote pressures on the student, who is thereby incentivized to stay constantly ‘active’ and drive up and attune his/her own study rhythm in accordance with standardized policy time and with other students’ rhythms. Not all students, however, found this fruitful. Stine, a fellow third-year student, was one of the students who felt the examination pressures were now far too high. I talked to her and two other students, Pia

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and Karen, one day after class. Pia was in her fourth year except for this single third-year course, and in contrast to the other two she therefore had experience with the earlier semester structure. Karen was rather positive about the block structure. She liked to be able to concentrate on only one or two subjects at a time (instead of four as in the former structure) and felt this gave her time and room for more absorption. But both Stine and Pia were more sceptical. Stine:

You start and then it’s just exams straightaway and all the time, right. And if you, like, ehm, I’m kind of used to [feeling] that exams, they’re like, ‘Oh no, shit and long beforehand I’m just like, oh no.’ And [because of the brief modules] it’s like that from the very beginning now. Nine weeks and then the first exam. You are already under exam pressure from the very beginning and then all the time and that’s like totally hard.

Karen: Yes, but I also think now, eventually, you get used to it. And in terms of getting good grades the pressure is less on each exam now because you have more of them. … Pia:

I definitely also find it harder now. Because of the short periods. … And our teacher said that, ehm, it was the intention that one should concentrate and go into depth in a short time, right. And then one could work intensively, as he said, for seven weeks and then one week of break [before exams]. But nobody can keep that up [holde til det]. Nobody!

Karen: But I just think it’s because you’ve tried the old structure – we’re just used to it like this, I guess. … Stine:

But I’m just anxious to see, when we finish, because, well, I am really scared about going out afterwards to work because I don’t feel that you, you don’t really have it in your backbone [det sidder ikke på rygraden] … I just think that when you have more time you also remember it for a longer period afterwards. We only have seven weeks, and when we’re done with the exam, the week after we start a new course. I don’t think it sinks in in the same manner … it’s just like, ‘Move on, move on, move on, there needs to be space on the hard disc.’

The introduction of more exams and shorter periods has become a stress factor for both Pia and Stine. Pia argues that it is not feasible to work intensively for seven weeks, and therefore it is not possible to obtain the same ‘depth’ and ‘absorption’ in the block courses as she did in the semester structure, even though with semesters they often followed four courses at a time. Stine’s different metaphors for the learning process show how the very notions of ‘depth’ and ‘absorp-

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tion’ are not just a question of the total number of hours or weeks available, but more a question of obtaining the sense of an embodied knowledge. In line with the double meaning of subject-oriented time, she seems to characterize a good learning process as one in which the subject material somehow becomes one with the knowing subject – it ‘sinks in’ and comes to ‘sit on the backbone’. However, Stine describes her learning experiences with the block structure as a process of extremely fast movement, as one where you are bound to forget what has just been learned. Rather than being something teachers and students co-produce through a common exploration of a subject, knowledge is here described as something to be transferred to the student. Indeed, using the hard disc metaphor, she points to education as a process of storing a particular amount of knowledge in a particular and limited space/time. This understanding resonates with Paulo Freire’s (1996) notion of the ‘banking model’ of education. Here, the student is perceived as an empty account into which the teacher ‘deposits’ skills and information, so that the emphasis is placed on learning by heart rather than on critical thinking and understanding. In this vein, some students and teachers argued that the shorter blocks could be either good or bad depending on the type of courses they followed. If it was a course with a heavy emphasis on ‘learning by heart’, the short module was a benefit, many students said, since the amount of material to be learned was smaller and you only needed to remember it for a shorter period. On the other hand, if the course was based on independent project work, for example, or on more of a ‘comprehension’ subject, as the teacher at KU called his course, then the shorter blocks were perceived as a problem. They often do not allow the subject to become ‘established in the students’ minds’, he told me. The knowing subject and the subject of study do not, in other words, converge and become one in subject-oriented time. Stine seems to be left with the feeling of studying according to an externally imposed and stressful temporality that she cannot completely adapt as ‘her own’. She feels no time or space for dwelling or absorption – it is just ‘move on, move on, move on’, she says. Karen, on the other hand, argues that ‘you get used to it’ and that students, like herself, who have not tried anything but the block structure will just adapt to it. In other words, they will gradually attune themselves and form their study rhythm in relation to the block structure. In fact, Karen described to me how she could already see a pattern in her way of studying in the block modules:

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By now I’ve had so many blocks, that I, it’s kind of the same thing. First you try to keep up [følge med ], then you get a bad conscience that you’re falling too far behind, you can’t keep up, and then I have like a period, which I’m in at the moment, where I can’t really pull myself together to read, even though the course is almost finished, but then in half a week or a week, then I read many more pages a day than now. And then I make it. … When you first realize that you can’t keep up and you need to jump [in the course plan], then it’s a drag [træls]. But then I jump and now I’ve just kind of let go, I think, and now I’m already reading for the examination – I’ve started from the beginning again even though the block hasn’t finished yet. (Karen, third-year student, KU, 2005)

Karen makes her own room for dwelling, it seems. She tries to follow the prescribed pace of study, but gradually she lets go of it and finds her own rhythm. Her intensity throughout the module is shifting. She is not, as the head of department wanted, ‘pressing down the accelerator all the time’. It is as if she needs a breathing space to recuperate for the final reading period. In the end, however, Karen usually makes it and does well in terms of grades. In other words, she seems to be able to attune herself to the standardized policy rhythm while at the same time preserving a sense of living through her own subject time. If we now return to the nature course, one could argue that Kathrine’s complaints about the time pressures and pre-planned project work were a reaction to both a stripping of participation in decision making and – in terms of the dense schedule for the laboratory work – her not feeling in control of her own time. She was a slow reader, she told me, and the heavy ‘imposed’ laboratory schedule seemed to make it impossible for her to prioritize the articles, as she wanted and needed to in order to understand them. Since the laboratory work, the journal clubs and the lectures had to a great extent been planned beforehand, it seemed to be difficult for Kathrine to create her own room for dwelling. Kathrine was not the only one with this feeling – indeed, the majority of students felt that the course was too compressed and the workload too high. When one day during the first weeks they raised the time issue with Bodil, one of the permanent and very popular teachers, she responded as follows: You have to make a time schedule for the whole block and divide your time into hours. Mark out for every single day what you have to do and how long you can spend on it. It is also a good and necessary thing to learn – not to spend too long preparing a journal club presentation, for example. It shouldn’t take more than two to three hours. So make a plan and divide your time into hours. (Bodil, teacher, KVL, 2005)

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As a solution to the problem of time pressure they experienced, the students were encouraged to time and plan their everyday lives in a particularly detailed manner against the objective measures of clock time. Rather than merely being active students, the students are therefore encouraged to be incessantly efficient. Student participation, as an efficient activity, here becomes a question of tuning – of tuning (into and up) subject-oriented time in accordance with standardized policy time, of measuring a study task against a time schedule and of learning how to organize one’s efforts to manage it all in an efficient way in terms of the time available. Therefore, if the securing of the ‘greater transparency, coherence, relevance and flexibility’ of courses were some of the official objectives of the Education Reforms, one could argue that the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the block structure reforms – that is, the unofficial or less firmly intended outcomes of education – indeed seems to be students’ learning of efficient time management in their everyday lives. This preoccupation with efficiency and the encouragement of students to micromanage their study time prompt us to explore further how the student is thereby incentivized to become a particular kind of learner, and to what extent this encouragement agrees with teachers’ and students’ ideas about what good university education is and should be.

The Student as Inquisitive Learner or Acquisitive Learner? All the university teachers I interviewed at the three universities argued that the promotion of students’ independent exploration and thinking was the very essence of good university education. Not that all students should end up as researchers – for this, the university educates far too many students – but in the sense of giving the students the competences to reflect critically upon and explore different knowledge areas in an independent manner. As the head of studies of the programme at KU said, ‘the good student, that’s the involved, curious student … the independent student who can take knowledge and use it further out, bring it further out than where you [the teacher] were’. The head of studies, like many of his colleagues, complained that the students were not good enough at reflecting independently and approaching the teachers and the material with academically grounded criticism. Students can be critical, he said, but mostly what they crit-

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icize are the more ‘technical things’, as he called it, like the poor coordination of teaching schedules, unclear examination requirements, grades and so forth. It is difficult to get students to engage critically in academic discussions about the subject, research methods and results, he argued. He felt they simply lacked the kind of ‘subject criticism’ (fagkritik) – that is, discussions about methodology and the use, relevance and role of a subject in society (see chapter 3) – which he found had been so important when he himself had been a student in the early 1980s. Indeed, in line with many of his colleagues, this head of studies found that many of his students today were too narrowly focused on just passing their exams: They don’t take a position on the subject or discipline and how it should be used and through this reflection make demands about what the programme should look like. … In the 1980s we students made a framework proposal for a new study regulation, and the teacher group only joined in later. That’s unthinkable today. They simply have no political interest in this regard. … I guess it’s a general phenomenon, but it’s shocking that we find it here in the university as well. This should be a place where you bring up people to be independent and critical thinkers. It’s all about what you understand by being at a university. … Many of them are clever and do well. But it’s all within the examination requirements [pensumkrav]. It’s very difficult to make them learn stuff which goes beyond that … they do precisely what they have to in order to pass their exams. No more. (head of studies, natural sciences, KU, 2005)

The mismatch between the head of studies’ ideal of educating students to become critical and independent thinkers and his experiences with students’ actual approach to their learning processes could be described as a difference between what Philip Brown (2003, 2006) calls ‘inquisitive’ learning and ‘acquisitive’ learning: ‘Inquisitive learning is driven by an interest in knowledge and learning for its own sake, whereas acquisitive learning is consumer driven. It involves what is necessary to pass examinations. It is based on a model of individual rational calculation where the moral foundations of education have been lost’ (Brown 2006: 392). In previous chapters, I have pointed to how education policies worldwide are increasingly promoting university education as the individual student’s personal investment and property with which to improve his or her ‘employability’. Brown argues that this growing political focus on ‘employability’ too easily turns education into a merely utilitarian and strategic means and risks reducing education to a question of products (degrees, diplomas and grades) that the student needs to and is expected to strategically ac-

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quire in order to obtain an advantageous position and prosper in life. In Brown’s view, what he describes as the ‘moral educational foundations’, including aims to promote social coherence, equality and equity, are thereby threatened. Instead, the individual is expected to engage in ‘rational consumer calculation’ to prosper as an individual in a competitive global knowledge economy. In this sense, Brown argues, acquisitive learning becomes a token of a general tendency whereby people increasingly spend time, money and effort on what they perceive to be necessary rather than on what they perceive to have some kind of intrinsic value. In light of our former discussion of the divergent rhythms and temporalities of education, this sense of ‘intrinsic value’ is perhaps best described as a question of obtaining and living with a sense of ‘subject-oriented time’. Almost all of the third-year students I interviewed at KU and KVL (but not at RUC) talked about their university studies in terms of ‘going to school’ and ‘doing homework’, and described themselves as ‘pupils’ (elever), not ‘students’, which to some extent may seem to resonate with a notion of ‘non-independent’ and potentially ‘acquisitive’ education. However, the students’ ideals about what good university education, a good student and a good teacher are were in fact often not far from those of the head of studies. Betina, one of the students in the nature course, argued that the good student is someone who critically engages him- or herself in the subject and in the place of study, someone who not only prepares for and is active in class but is generally curious about and interested in seeking knowledge related to the subject of study, including following more general media debates relevant to the study. Likewise, Thomas, her fellow student in the nature course, argued that the ‘good teacher’ was someone who ‘allows for … a kind of open relation, or that curiosity, one could say, to blossom’. He mentioned Bodil as a good teacher because her enthusiasm and positive attitude were catching. She created a particular atmosphere in class in which the students felt free to ask questions, and personally he often felt inspired to explore the issues further. Despite these ideals, some students’ conduct did indeed resemble the ‘acquisitive learner’ described by Brown – and the block structure, apparently, played a crucial role here. In my conversation with the KU students Stine, Karen and Pia, Stine and Pia expressed how their efforts were strategically directed towards the next exam – towards what was needed of them in order to pass the examinations: Pia:

The teachers just get annoyed when you ask, you know, ‘What’s this to be used for?’ Because we have these short periods, you be-

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come more exam-minded, all the time you think ‘Okay, is this relevant? Do I need it for the exam?’ At least that’s what I think the teaching form does. … You know, in our, what was it, theory of science, they just kept on saying that you are not to think so much about the exam, not at all, you are to focus on the teaching. And that was just like, ehm, that’s not possible, we have to know what we have to do at the exam so we know how to run this race [køre det her løb], right? You have to plan according to the exams [planlægge ud fra eksamen] and not really according to the teaching because it’s so compressed that you have to know what’s necessary to know and what’s not. Stine: Yeah, and they really want, you know, you should just become absorbed in this and this [gå op i det her og det her], and this is sooo interesting for you. But it’s just like, hey, I have an exam in three weeks. [Pia, Karen and Stine all laugh]

Even though they are encouraged by the teachers to be explorative and absorb themselves in different subject areas, Stine and Pia, not least due to the intensive block modules, feel they need to manage and plan their time and efforts strictly and strategically according to what is expected of them at the examination. To return to the travel metaphors, these students come to see their learning process as a question of minimizing the risk of spending time going in useless directions. Indeed, they seem to want their precise destination to be pinpointed, their examination requirements fixed and to be given a good guide of how to get there – and not least get there in time. To Pia, her course of education, therefore, becomes a question of ‘planning and running a race’. In this way, she seems more in line with the notion of education evoked in the Copenhagen rector’s 2006 matriculation speech – that is, as the individual’s engagement in a race to knowledge – than that of his predecessor, the 2005 rector, whose understanding of the course of education was as a ‘voyage of unexpected discovery and exploration’. The ‘activity’ of the student is directed towards efficiency – for which following a ‘safe’ path is necessary – rather than independent and explorative risk taking.

Freedom of Choice: Education as a Guided Jigsaw Puzzle? That many students crave ‘safe’ pathfinding – not least in light of the growing freedom of choice and time pressure – became obvious when I asked them about their experiences with the kinds of ‘free-

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dom of choice’ they were offered with the new Education Reforms. In general, the students I talked to in the three courses were clearly in favour of freedom of choice. They found it great to be able to orient their course of education independently in the directions they themselves found most interesting. Most of them also described their course of study as accidental in the sense that most of them had only had a vague idea about what areas to specialize in when they started. And those who indeed had had a firm idea of what they wanted often had been inspired by something else during their first years and had therefore gone in a different direction than planned. In this regard, freedom of choice during their university education was important in order to find out gradually where they wanted to specialize. The subject packages made this narrowing down of choices easier, many of them felt. However, the act of choosing was quite a challenge for many of them. Betina, a student in the nature course, said: It’s very exciting that we can all end up with something different, and I think it’s an advantage in relation to later job possibilities that we have different profiles. But it is incredibly time-consuming to find out which optional subjects to choose in order to get it all out and make it fit together. It takes time and strengths. It can be a bit rough. Especially now, I’ve found, where we have to choose four times a year. … It can be rather confusing. The list is huge. You need to explore all modules, what pre-qualifications you need and where they can lead. … It’s a jigsaw puzzle that takes time. (Betina, third-year student, KVL, 2006)

Betina acknowledged the benefits of being able to construct her own unique course of education. However, like most of her fellow thirdyear students, she was not (yet?) too preoccupied with her job prospects and did not seem to be engaging with her studies in a merely strategically acquisitive manner. Her metaphor of university education as a jigsaw puzzle obviously alludes to the idea of each module as a well-defined ‘piece’. Rather than just being on one long voyage of discovery with no schedule and final or intermediate destinations, the students’ course trajectory is sliced up into ever-smaller pieces and intervals. The student’s movement in a subject area is thus rendered available to measurement – as distance and speed – and the student’s task is not only to make the pieces fit together, but also to assemble them in what they hope to be a right and relevant order and within the given time frame. This is very time-consuming, Betina says. Good planning and an overview is needed. In this respect, Betina, like most of her fellow students, was extremely positive about the new subject packages and the standardized structure introduced

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with the Education Reforms. Stine from the KU course described the difference between the former system and the new one: [Previously] it was just a jungle of courses. Some gave 3 ECTS, others 7 or 10, and it was extremely difficult to get an overview of relevant course combinations and what qualifications were needed for which courses. You were just left pretty much to do this all by yourself. It seems to be easier now with the new structure. Now a course is either 7½ or 15 ECTS, and they have, like, suggested beforehand which courses go well together and in which order. That’s great. I mean, they have the overview and knowledge about the different courses that we don’t – not before we have actually taken them, and then it’s a bit late, I mean, if you’ve already spent a semester or something on different courses and you just can’t see the red thread and you can’t find a relevant road or direction. (Stine, third-year student, KU, 2005)

Here Stine describes the dilemma of students’ choice – a dilemma that resonates with our former discussion of the pros and cons of students’ independent project work. On the one hand, the freedom to find and combine one’s own pieces is attractive and inspiring; on the other hand, they have to choose a trajectory in a relatively unknown landscape where they do not have a clear image of a final destination. They cannot, in other words, plan everything in advance. As Ingold (2000a) says, knowledge production and learning are processes where ‘you know as you go – not before you go’. The new subject packages, however, helped to point the students in particular directions, and this most students were very positive about. In line with Stine, Thomas, a student in the nature course at KVL, said: ‘The danger of picking the “wrong” course is, of course, always there, but there’s someone who knows better than the students in some sense, who has experiences which the student doesn’t. Therefore it’s great with the new “lines”.’ And as time pressures increase, it only seems to become more and more important to choose ‘right’ the first time. However, Klaus, a student member of a study board in the natural sciences and heavily engaged in student politics, described the new subject packages as a way of securing a guide to ‘weak-willed and passive students’. A lot of students are not very good at finding out, ehm, in that completely free market, they are not good at putting the pieces together in an interesting manner. You can go everywhere. And I think they’re really bad at that. Before it is written into the study guide [studiehåndbog] that these modules are pre-approved, then students don’t pick them. … I re-

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ally think they could be better at looking around and explore the offers. (Klaus, student member of study board, KU, 2005)

Klaus described his fellow students as ‘passive’ and as just going along with what ‘someone else had proposed’ to them, instead of taking responsibility for their course of study themselves. Klaus here touches upon the central issue of responsibility and empowerment, which is heavily debated in the education literature on modularization and freedom of choice. On the one hand, proponents argue that modularization is a means of empowering students by giving them increased freedom and making them more responsible for their learning. Furthermore, they argue, modularization provides students with valuable skills to manage their time and work. This time management I have already explored in the above. Critics, on the other hand, argue that modularization may lead to a fragmentation of knowledge, superficial studies, poor connections and progression between modules, as well as the alienation of students from their learning processes and places of study. That is, students might end up with no feeling of being part of either a particular university community or a particular discipline (see, e.g., Betts & Smith 1998; Bridges 2000; Jenkins & Walker 1994; Walker 1994). Furthermore, in line with Brown’s notion of the acquisitive learner, these critics argue that students may thereby be incentivized to take a passive, instrumental and consumerist attitude towards education. They might renounce responsibility for their own learning, conceive of education as a product rather than a process to engage in and place themselves in a position ‘external’ (customers or consumers) to the institution and academic community (Naidoo 2003; Naidoo & Jamieson 2006). To Klaus, freedom of choice indeed seemed to be empowering. He clearly took responsibility for the development of his own studies and had thoroughly explored the programmes and modules at different Danish and foreign universities. He had been abroad for a year to study and had taken courses at other Danish universities too, which had given him a unique combination of courses. He nonetheless had a strong sense of belonging to both the natural sciences department at KU and the discipline as such. Klaus spent far more than five years to acquire his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. But he did not really care. He loved to study and took it very seriously. Thomas, one of the students in the nature course at KVL, in line with the modularization critique outlined above, pointed out how the freedom of choice logic also could encourage a kind of pick-andchoose approach to education among some students:

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It also somehow makes it a bit non-committal [uforpligtende], this thing that you can pick and choose as you want to. You can become a bit spoiled, you know. Some of my fellow students, if they find a subject a bit tough, they just skip it and choose something else. But some subjects are really important. You also need some basic skills. It shouldn’t just be free, free, free. (Thomas, third-year student, KVL, 2006)

The value and workings of ‘freedom of choice’ obviously depend on how the students put it to use. Klaus seems quite capable of engaging himself in his freedom in a productive, explorative and inquisitive manner. Thomas, however, points to an essential and highly debated relationship between freedom of choice and ensuring academic quality and professionalism in education. Is students’ freedom of choice helping to drive up quality, or the opposite? And who is accountable, and in what ways, for generating good university education? Before ending this chapter, in the following, I want to shed further light on these questions by exploring how students’ freedom of choice and the growing emphasis on efficiency run parallel to new mechanisms and relations of accountability, and how potentially this may work to promote and support particular kinds of teaching and learning. In order to do this, I return to the nature course and explore another friction between the student Kathrine and the teacher Niels.

Second Friction in the Nature Course: Negotiating Accountability The day after the first friction in the nature course, when Kathrine complained that their project was a ‘ready-made package’, Kathrine and Eve – a quieter and more insecure student in the same project group as Kathrine – were scheduled to present an article to a journal club. Before Kathrine and Eve’s presentation, Niels, the teacher present, had given a lecture on the theme of the day, and then two other students, Thomas and Oda, made a journal club presentation of another article. Thomas and Oda’s presentation seemed convincing. They were good at enquiring into the preconditions of the article and asking critical questions. After their presentation, Niels said: ‘I think we should praise Oda and Thomas for their presentation; they have found the weaknesses in the article.’ Then it was Kathrine and Eve’s turn to present their assigned journal club article. Kathrine started by saying that they had found the article really difficult and that their schedule for the project work was

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so tight that they had only had the evening before – after being in the laboratory from 8 AM to 6 PM – to prepare the presentation. Their presentation came over muddled and badly organized. They jumped into explaining different figures and tables rather than presenting the article’s overall argument. Several times they asked the other students if they had understood and could help them on certain issues that they themselves found difficult. The others were silent – most of them had not read the article, and the few who had said that they did not understand it fully either. Gradually Kathrine and Eve’s presentation was turned into a kind of soft examination in which Niels, the teacher, made them reflect on the different elements of the text through his questions. Kathrine attempted to answer, while Eve just turned more and more silent. Eve obviously felt very uneasy about presenting in front of the rest of the class, and the fact that she did not understand the article only seemed to make things worse. In the end, Niels asked a Ph.D. student – who, as the primary author of the article, attended this particular journal club – to sum up the article for the students. The two students who were scheduled to act as discussants had a few insecure questions, which Niels and the Ph.D. student ended up answering rather than Kathrine and Eve. ‘Are there any criticisms of the presentation?’ Niels asked after the presentation. Several students seemed surprised and even embarrassed about the directness of the question. Usually at journal clubs the teachers both praised and (more gently) criticized different elements of the students’ presentation, but now Niels asked directly for negative criticism of Kathrine and Eve. Kenneth, who had neither read the article nor said a word during the presentation, answered that he had not got much out of the latter. Niels then spoke. He did not understand why Kathrine and Eve had chosen only to focus on the tables in their presentation, since these gave them no coherent account or insight into the article’s overall aim. Now, the following exchange of words took place: Kathrine: We tried to get an overview of the article. But we couldn’t. It’s on a very high level. Niels: It is not that complicated, I should think. Kathrine: No, you don’t think so. But that was our experience. Niels: But it wasn’t that difficult. You could have started by focusing on [mentions some themes]. There are, like, three lines in the article. I think one can hardly miss them. Kathrine: I’ve read the text four times, but I couldn’t find the line. Niels: Okay. That’s serious!

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Niels talked in a rather sharp and firm voice, and an uncomfortable silence spread over the class. Only when, after a while, a student suggested in a conciliatory tone that the journal club articles be provided electronically, so that the figures and tables could be converted more easily to PowerPoint presentations, did the otherwise heavy air clear a bit. Niels supported the proposal, and another student then asked to break for lunch. They all seemed a bit relieved to end the session at this point. As soon as the students broke up for lunch, Niels headed straight towards my seat in the classroom. He was obviously not at ease with, let alone proud of, the whole situation. He told me that he was the supervisor of the experimental project work conducted by Kathrine and Eve and two male students. ‘The two guys are okay’, he said, ‘but these two girls constantly complain that there is too much to read and that it is too difficult.’ Over the next five minutes or so he entered into a long negotiation, mainly with himself, about the course, the structure and whether the level was too high or not. He explained that in the teachers’ team, they had spent a lot of time discussing back and forth about the content and level and that they maybe had talked each other into a level that was too high and a course that was too dense and compressed for these third-year students. Due to the students’ vast freedom of choice, and since the block structure and the requirements of the different courses had only just been introduced, the students came with rather different qualifications, which made it difficult to know their exact level beforehand. Niels now regretted that in the teachers’ team they had chosen not to use a textbook, since that would have been easier for the students to follow. In general, he said, the students at the university and in this course were quite involved and enthusiastic, especially in relation to their own project work. He had, however, hoped for more dialogue and critical discussion in relation to both the lectures and the journal clubs. Here the students were a bit passive, and too many had not read the articles. ‘But maybe some of the texts are too difficult and the course too compressed’, he said once more. And then, as if he suddenly remembering the friction between himself and Kathrine, he ended by repeating, ‘The two girls think there is too much, but the two boys are okay.’

Student Voice, Choice and Satisfaction: New Forms of Accountability In his reflections after the friction with Kathrine, Niels constantly balanced the particular experiences of her and Eve with the other stu-

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dents’ experiences and with his general knowledge as a university teacher over several decades. He assessed the level of the course and appropriate student participation through a constant comparison between ‘particular students’ (e.g., ‘Kathrine’, ‘the two girls’, ‘the two boys’) and a kind of conjured-up ‘generalized student figure’ (‘in general the students are …’). In this situation a friction is articulated between what we could call the student’s experiential knowledge (‘the article is too difficult’) and the teacher’s professional knowledge (‘you should be able to understand the article’). However, like Kathrine’s ambivalence regarding the teacher-led project work in the first frictional event, Niels here seems unsettled about how to balance students’ experiential knowledge and his own expertise and professional assessment of the appropriate level of the course. His final comment – ‘That’s serious’ – could either imply that the two students, Kathrine and Eve, have a personal problem in the sense that they at this level should be able to understand the article and that they therefore may be unfit for this kind of university education, or that there were some structural problems with the planning and level of the course. Throughout his talk and also in my later interview with him, he made no clear identification of which of the two was true, perhaps because he felt that both were to some extent. With his statement, ‘The two girls think there is too much, but the two boys are okay’, Niels could potentially be seen to express or point to a more general difference in the way female and male students participate and involve themselves in their studies. However, the statement could also be read more literally, as a plain description of how in this particular group two students, who happened to be female, had a harder time in following the course than two other students who happened to be male. As discussed in the book’s introduction, I have not been convinced to follow the first reading, since the rest of my material did not point me in that direction – other kinds of differentiations figured more strongly. I was later told that after the class a handful of the students, including Kathrine, Eve and Betina, had discussed the incident. Betina felt that they should confront Niels about the incident and let him know that as students they did not support his public and, in their view, personal attack on Kathrine and Eve. Some of the other students, however, advised against this, since they could not see how it would be of any benefit to anybody. It would put Niels and themselves in a weird position – and they argued that there was nothing he could do now anyway. One of them also emphasized that she wanted to stay on good terms with Niels now that he was going to be examining them orally. In the end, the students decided not to say anything.

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Even though a student like Kathrine, for example, seemed to have no difficulties in voicing her dissatisfaction, she and Eve never talked with Niels about the incident afterwards. However, Betina told me that she and some of the others had expressed their dissatisfaction in the anonymous written course evaluation a few weeks later. Things between Niels and the students had been fine after the incident, Betina said, and she expected that Niels had just had a really bad day that day. Nevertheless, she somehow felt he should know that his conduct had not been acceptable. The students’ reluctance to talk to Niels about the incident and their use of the written course evaluation instead not only reflects how the relationship between students and teachers is never one of complete equality – the teacher has a final power in the examinations and is seen as more knowledgeable than the student – it also makes it pertinent to explore in further detail how such written course evaluations work as a technology of accountability within the framework of the new Education Reforms and students’ freedom of choice. Do they, for example, affect the teacher-student relationship of (in)dependence in any particular way? The 2003 Danish University Act had placed the emphasis on evaluations as a central means to secure and improve the quality of Danish university education (see, e.g., Regeringen 2002a; VTU 2006). In this vein, KVL had introduced a new standardized and electronic course evaluation system parallel to the Education Reforms. Whereas previously at KVL course evaluations had been manual and the teacher responsible for a course had just written a brief report on it to the education council, with the new electronic system, Niels told me, the head of the education council could read the students’ course evaluations directly. It was also now standard practice that the course evaluations included separate evaluations of all the teachers involved in a course. All the teachers involved could afterwards see the students’ evaluations of themselves and each other. As the course-responsible teacher for many years, Niels found that the new standardized and electronic course evaluations gave a stronger incentive to make sure that the students were satisfied with the courses. He felt it was a good thing that the students’ evaluations had been taken increasingly seriously over the past decade or so. He had long used evaluations as an internal instrument to improve his courses, but now that they were directly available to all the teachers and to the education council, he felt that the incentives to improve the courses had been made stronger for everyone. However, he also pointed to some of the dangers, especially, perhaps, that teachers would increasingly lower the level and organize

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the course in order to please the students rather than challenge them in new and difficult areas. Furthermore, while talking about the growing importance of course evaluations, he constantly returned to another and related issue, namely, that the competition between universities to attract students was growing more intense. In contrast to the first decades of his working life at the university, he now felt that their jobs were dependent on their teaching to a greater extent. Now, a specification of student throughput was made by each department, whose budgets depended on this. Therefore, when the new courses were to be planned under the new block structure, some departments and subject areas had entered into rather heavy discussions in order to get as many of their teachers involved in the different courses. In order to attract students and to be able to continue to offer their particular courses, good course evaluations from the students were increasingly important. As a consequence, he said, he found that there was perhaps a growing tendency among some teachers to be over-ambitious with their courses: It’s like it increases this thing about being top tuned and top trained … you experience that you have to do your very best all the time. There can be a tendency to over-plan it, you know, out of fear that the student should have ten minutes where there wasn’t anything, where you would have to be spontaneous … you know the evaluation is there, you know you get the students’ verdict all the time, you know they have to be satisfied with the course and then it tends towards a very tight planning, a very tight course. (Niels, teacher, KVL, 2006)

Tuning, in other words, is not just an issue for students but increasingly also for teachers. The students and teachers enter into a kind of mutual tuning process whereby the students attempt to tune into the standardized policy time put forward by the teacher, and the teacher attempts to adjust and attune to the rhythm of the class, their level and experiential knowledge. However, due to the course evaluations, the teachers in Niels’s description are likely to attempt to attune to what they think will make the students more satisfied, namely, a wellplanned course with no empty time spaces. This teacher’s fear of ‘empty time spaces’ with no distinct or preplanned content seems paradoxical in light of the students’ general experiences with the new block structure, namely, that the courses tended to be too dense. Many of them were craving time for ‘absorption’. Furthermore, the promotion of the teacher as a fit, top-tuned performer, prepared to the fingertips, risks supporting the very kind of student-as-consumer conduct, with the student as just a passive re-

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cipient of knowledge, that most teachers hope to prevent. The use of course evaluations seemed potentially to support the very same kind of student figure production. Indeed, when I explored the course evaluation questionnaires handed to the students at several different courses at KU’s Faculty of Natural Sciences and KVL, there seemed to be a clear emphasis in questions addressing the teachers’ performances and planning of the course, while questions about the students’ learning process and efforts were not so prominent. Likewise, in the oral course evaluations I participated in during my fieldwork, the planning and structure of the course and the teaching methods used were the focus, while the students’ own involvement, learning process and responsibility in making the course rewarding and successful were only sporadically touched on, if at all. As noted by Andersen and Søndergaard (2006), who found similar results in their study of the course evaluation designs at one faculty at Aarhus University, such evaluation practices place the responsibility for teaching and learning on the teachers’ shoulders, rather than emphasizing that the course of education is the mutual responsibility of students and teachers. The friction between Niels and Kathrine clearly showed how accountability is constantly negotiated at the intersection of the teachers’ professionalism and students’ experiential knowledge. Students’ experiences are essential to obtaining good education. However, as this section has shown, the new emphasis on ‘putting the student at the centre’ of the education system through choice and the growing emphasis on their evaluations may have extensive consequences. As students’ choices and voices as expressed in evaluations seem to become more directly linked to the individual teachers’ job, the teacher is more likely to aim to attune to what he/she expects are students’ wishes. The potential downside of this is that the teachers then risk going against their own aim of engaging students in ‘inquisitive learning’ and instead create incentives for students to become ‘acquisitive learners’ or ‘student consumers’ who view education as a question of receiving a ‘product’ from a provider and, in return, express their (dis)satisfaction through evaluations or by voting with their feet.

Conclusion A recurrent and essential question in the politics of education has been if or to what extent the growing quest for efficiency through

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standardization, planning and modularization is compatible with the aim of educating students as independent, critical and freethinking. This chapter has attempted to explore this question by taking as its point of departure an education reform in which a new block structure and more ‘activating’ teaching methods were key components. Two different frictional events between a student and a teacher in a nature course at KVL have each in their own way opened up discussions of how the student – as a learner – seems to figure in these processes of reform. The first event mainly revolved around the issues of time, independence and freedom in students’ studies; the second led me to explorations of how students’ freedom of choice was combined with new forms of accountability between student and teacher. With the Education Reforms, students were incentivized to become ‘incessantly active and efficient’. Through shorter modules and more diverse and activating methods of teaching and examination, the student was to become more active, responsible and efficient in his or her own learning processes. Indeed, the learning of efficient time management seemed to be a central (but implicit) effect. Inspired by Tim Ingold and Henri Lefebvre, I have discussed this issue of efficiency as a question of making the student tune (into and up) his or her study rhythm and sense of ‘subject-oriented time’ to fit the prescribed time frame and rhythm of ‘standardized policy time’. By subject-oriented time, I mean the time felt as intrinsic – and not as externally imposed – to one’s studies, that is, where the process of exploration and learning is perceived to have its ‘own’ time in that the learning subject becomes one with the explored subject and performs in an ‘intrinsic’, subject-oriented rhythm. Indeed, the chapter has shown how students balance and combine these different temporalities in rather idiosyncratic ways. The subject-oriented time may well be in concordance with (and internalized through) the standardized policy time of a module. However, with the growing time pressures and shorter modules, many students are experiencing ‘arrhythmia’, or temporal discordance, in that they feel they have no time for ‘absorption’ in standardized policy time. Roughly put, the time pressures seem to work to support the production of a particular kind of student learner figure, namely, an acquisitive learner who is narrowly oriented towards what is necessary to pass examinations. In contrast, most of the ideals of teachers (and of many students too) about a good university education include a rather different student figure, namely, an inquisitive learner who is driven by curiosity, a desire for ‘absorption’ and an interest in learning for its own sake.

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This tension between inquisitive and acquisitive education is wellknown in the education literature. However, this chapter has shown ethnographically how people balance, engage with and negotiate this tension. Crucially, it shows how, in combination, diverse reform initiatives – freedom of choice, shorter and denser modules, more exams, the increased emphasis on course evaluations and the growing pressure on teachers to attract and satisfy students – seem to promote a foregrounding of the figure of the ‘acquisitive learner’. In this sense, the new block structure and the ‘teaching to the test’ tendency is moving in the opposite direction of the teachers’ own aspirations for their students to become inquisitive in, reflective of and responsible for their discipline. Furthermore, this acquisitive kind of learning does not seem to provide students with the kind of competences to ‘learn how to learn’, which is one of the government’s core ideas about how best to prepare students for the knowledge economy. Through education, the student is to become entrepreneurial, selfdirected, risk taking and response-ready to the ever-changing demands in society (Brown 2006; Henry et al. 2001; Hermann & Kristensen 2004; Ong 2005; Regeringen 2002a, 2005, 2006a; VTU 2003). This chapter, however, has shown how many students, faced with a freedom of choice and increasingly strong incentives to be ‘efficient’ and pass their examinations at the prescribed time, seem to become anything but self-directed, independent, creative and risk taking. Whereas this chapter has focused on the frictions embedded in students’ participation in class and in designing and influencing their own course of education, in the following chapter I take a closer look at student participation in an institutional setting and discuss how they are encouraged to or prevented from getting involved in the shaping of their educational programmes and university. I explore how appropriate and institutionalized participation is negotiated in the context of the growing internationalization and emerging rationales about education as a form of personal property and investment. Again, we see how perceptions of the ‘active’ or ‘passive’ student play a central role in the contestations of particular reform processes. The chapter takes its point of departure in a frictional event in which a group of fee-paying Chinese students complained about low-quality products. Through this event, as we shall see, institutionalized notions of being a ‘co-owner’ and a ‘consumer’ were brought into play, re-shuffled and negotiated in new ways in relation to notions of being ‘passive’ and ‘active’.

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Notes 1. In a similar vein, Foucault has shown how, in state institutions like schools, prisons and the military up until the nineteenth century, temporal and spatial divisions were increasingly introduced to discipline people, optimize their activities and make them more compliant and controllable (see, e.g., Foucault [1975] 2002). 2. When stating that at university ‘you don’t have a class to follow’, Betina refers to the ideal in the Danish Folkeskole (primary and lower secondary school) of creating ‘classes’, that is, more or less consistent groups of pupils of the same age who are taught together for nine to ten years. Except for elective courses, this is also the case at the gymnasium (upper secondary school). The rationale has been to create a strong and safe community in which the children can learn to read, write and so forth, as well as develop as social beings (see, e.g., Anderson 2000).

5 Ownership and Investment

If the lectures are not interesting and don’t meet our requirement, we believe it reasonable not to attend, especially [if] there is no improvement after complaints. As customers, we believe we have rights to reject low-quality products! – Chinese students’ complaint to head of department, RUC, February 2005; enclosed in complaint to the minister of science, November 2005

Negotiating Institutionalized Participation In spring 2005, an amendment was passed by the Danish Parliament to internationalize Danish universities by encouraging Danish students to study abroad and foreign students to come to Denmark. The amendment required Danish universities to charge tuition fees from certain non-European students who had previously studied for free. Half a year after the passing of the amendment, a group of Chinese students in a master’s degree programme at a Danish university sent a written complaint directly to the minister of science about the ‘low quality’ of their programme. As the opening quote indicates, in their complaint the Chinese students referred to a notion of education as a ‘product’ and of the student as a ‘customer’ with certain ‘rights’. These notions, however, were in sharp contrast to the ideal of the student as a ‘co-owner’ or ‘partner’ explicitly promoted at this spe-

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cific university, Roskilde University (RUC). In commenting on the Chinese students’ complaint, the rector of RUC said to me: With foreign paying students, new relations arise between them and the university. They act as customers or clients, while we want to turn them into … ehm … to be a part of the university and … to have a certain ownership of it. This university is to a very large extent based on students and student participation. (rector, RUC, December 2005, emphasis added)

The ‘ideal student’ always seems to be presented as an ‘active’ one, but as shown in the historical chapter, such ‘activity’ may range from emphasizing dialogue, equality and broad and critical ‘co-citizenship’ to emphasizing freedom of choice, possibilities for ‘complaint’ and more utilitarian and economic-oriented notions of ‘employability’. To the rector of RUC, the customer/client is seen as someone almost external to the university, whereas the student co-owner, as an active participant, is a member of an institutional community. He/she is part of the university and takes part in its development. The Chinese students, as the rector emphasized, were both foreign and fee-paying. And with this combination, the quote implies, new participatory lines are likely to confront the institution. In short, ideals of appropriate participation within the institution are up for negotiation. In their classic discussion of ‘institutionalization’ processes, the sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966: 65ff.) argue that institutionalization happens as actors typify their own and others’ habitualized actions; they pass on these typifications to new members and younger generations, who then come to experience the typifications and patterns of conduct as a somewhat external reality or objective world. Institutions, in this wider sense, are to be understood as patterned conduct – or, in my particular focus, as ‘patterned participation’ – which, over time and in a particular context, has been established as the appropriate way of going about things (see also R. Jenkins 1996). Therefore, as Berger and Luckmann argue, for the institution to persist, any new member has to be socialized or ‘educated’ into recognizing the patterned conduct as a necessary and ‘“permanent” solution to a “permanent” problem of the given collectivity’ (1966: 87). If we translate these wide institutional thoughts into the more particular setting of a single and physically materialized public institution, namely, Roskilde University (RUC), where the Chinese students were enrolled, the problem of student participation here has (traditionally) been given a particular solution, one that finds its

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embodiment in the figure of the ‘co-owner’.1 In other words, this institution officially conveys a particular ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March & Olsen 2004) in the sense that certain institutionalized conventions and traditions about what a person with a certain self-conception (e.g., the ‘co-owner’) in a given situation should perceive as the appropriate and rational way to go about things. The different assessments of the customer/consumer2 figure are grounded in conflicting notions of desired and appropriate conduct. A key item here is whether or not a customer is a ‘passive’ or an ‘empowered’ and ‘active’ individual. As we have seen several times in previous chapters, a common criticism of the Danish reform process is that it turns students into passively receiving consumers who gain influence by complaining or voting with their feet rather than by involving themselves in democratic processes in governing bodies. However, in public welfare reforms in Denmark and elsewhere, the consumer figure is often introduced and legitimized on the basis of a different kind of political rationality in which the consumer is perceived as ‘active’. The welfare reforms in the United Kingdom provide a particularly telling and clear-cut example. In her criticisms of the welfare state in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher articulated a contrast between the (desired) active consumer and the (undesired) passive citizen: ‘the “consumer” was the non-exploitative, non-fraudulent user of public services who had an interest in service quality, responsiveness and “value for money”’ (Clarke et al. 2007: 30). Later governments (Conservative and Labour), in a continuation of Thatcher’s thinking, launched the demanding and sceptical ‘citizen consumer’ as a new ideal type for the U.K. citizen (ibid.), and in 2003 this notion was explicitly introduced to the university student, who, as an adult ‘consumer’, should drive up quality through increased freedom of choice3 (see Tlili & Wright 2005). Due to freedom of choice and cash-mediated relations with the university, the student consumer was expected to become more demanding and critical regarding the services the university offered. In Denmark, as we saw in chapter 3, the public ‘student user’ figure took shape in the 1980s and has been increasingly supplemented by notions of the ‘student consumer’, not least through the combination of increased ‘freedom of choice’ and different competitive ‘marketization’ initiatives, the introduction of tuition fees for certain foreign students mentioned above being but one of them. Critics of current university reforms use the ‘customer/consumer’ figure as a negation of the ideal student, which in such cases is often construed within a

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participatory line of ‘co-citizenship’ and emphasizes a general broad education rather than a narrow, ‘utilitarian’, vocation-oriented education. However, ‘the customer’ was not a figure that any Danish student I met during my fieldwork actively and explicitly identified with. It mainly seemed to be a figure or position that people talked about and that they did not explicitly embrace and talk from. At RUC – as we shall see – the ‘co-owner’ is a concept that, to a large extent, is attributed meaning by opposition to the ‘customer/consumer’. The latter was a figure of negation until the Chinese students, who were among the first fee-paying students on full-time studies in Denmark, filed their complaint with the minister of science. Even though the ‘customer’ figure in Danish public welfare systems has been much talked about in recent years, it is still, as Greve (2003) argues, relatively under-researched and often seems to be understood in rather one-dimensional ways – not least within the education sector. In this regard, the Chinese student case opens up important explorations. It is evident that figures are at work in relation to other figures, but the task and challenge, as pointed out by, among others, Strathern (2008; see also Jiménez & Willerslev 2007), is to explore the particular relationship between them. Empirically, the ‘co-owner’ and ‘customer’ clearly work in relation to each other, but how, exactly? Are they to be understood as temporally successive (and epochal) figures? Are they radically different from one another and, as such, mutually exclusive? Or are they versions of each other that can and do co-exist – and if so, in what forms? Put in more general terms, in this chapter I aim to explore the relationship between the growing competitive market logic (which in certain ways provided the foundation for the 2003 Danish University Act, the internationalization amendment and the university’s own attempts to internationalize and attract more foreign students) and the co-ownership ideal of education in which participatory egalitarianism and a formation of democratic co-citizenship are essential components. By paying attention to the negotiation of ideas of appropriate participation, I explore the figuration processes of ‘the student’ as these take shape at the intersection of the political rationalities articulated with the Amendment of Internationalization, the institutional ideals of participation at Roskilde University and students’ own desires and ambitions regarding their course of education. Let me now outline the general and for the most part publicly known story line of the amendment, the fees and the Chinese students’ complaints.

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A Complaint from Chinese ‘Student Customers’ The Danish Parliament passed an amendment to the 2003 Danish University Act in spring 2005 (Folketinget 2005). The official aim of the amendment was to promote the internationalization of Danish study programmes, as had also been suggested by the OECD (2004). A scheme to offer free places and grants was set up to attract the best-qualified students from around the world. To finance this scheme, the Danish government argued that, instead of all students, regardless of place of origin, studying for free in Denmark, it was necessary to introduce full fees for certain non-European students.4 An important argument for the amendment was that Danish taxpayers should no longer pay for the increased number of foreigners, especially Chinese students, studying in Denmark. So when in the summer of 2005 a major Danish newspaper made it public that a particular Danish university, Roskilde University, had increased its intake of Chinese students by 80 per cent in the preceding year, certain politicians accused the university of strategic money making and abuse of state subsidies (Svanholm 2005e; Aarslund & Svanholm 2005).5 The reason for the accusation was that 2005 was the last year before the amendment took effect and thus the last year that universities would receive state funding for these kinds of Chinese students. The university denied the accusations and explained that it had accepted the Chinese students as part of a long-term internationalization strategy prepared before the amendment had been passed. However, a few days later, the same newspaper revealed that the Chinese students had in fact paid a fee equivalent to about *13,500, even though the university was at the same time receiving state funding for the students (Svanholm 2005c). The university rector explained that the fees were charged for extra services that were not covered by the state funding, and that such fees had been made legal by the Danish University Act of 2003. Furthermore, he argued that, before approving the fees, he had asked the Ministry of Science for permission. In his words, the ministry had accepted in a telephone conversation that the university could charge fees. The ministry, however, denied having approved the fees, and instead the minister asked the state attorney to investigate the legal aspects of the university charging fees. Three months later, a group of fee-paying Chinese students from the same university heard about the still ongoing investigation and, as ‘students directly involved in the affair’, as they put it, they found it important to provide the minister with what they saw as ‘related information’. Therefore, eight of the students wrote an official com-

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plaint about their study programme directly to the minister of science, which hit the headlines in a national newspaper (Svanholm 2005a, 2005b). Claiming to speak for more than a hundred Chinese students in the particular master’s programme, they complained that the programme was of low quality: ‘We feel totally disappointed by the quality of the education provided … it [is] not worth the amount we paid. … We have evidence showing [that] the charging of tuition [fees] has directly resulted in the poor educational quality’ (Chinese students’ complaint to minister of science, 6 November 2005). The students felt they had ended up in a ‘Chinese ghetto’ and that ‘the programme had been deliberately established only [to collect fees from] Chinese students’ (ibid.: 3). They complained that the university department had lowered its admission standards in order to recruit students and make more money. Also, they complained about cancelled lectures and inexperienced teachers with poor English-language skills. They said that the programme did not contain the courses and the internship in a business enterprise that they had expected, and that the title of the degree had also been changed after they had enrolled. By providing the minister with this ‘related information’ and arguing that the education programme was not worth the money they had paid for it, they hoped to be reimbursed. When confronted by the press with the students’ complaint, the minister announced that he would look into the situation because, as he said, ‘we should be able to deliver a commodity with which Chinese students too are satisfied’.6 He thus embraced the same market logic as evoked by the self-identified ‘customer’ students. The ‘we’ he alluded to was obviously not the ‘we’ of the university or department responsible for the international programme, but the ‘we’ of a national whole or identity offering services in a global market for education. The minister announced that he wanted the university to give him an account of the whole process concerning the quality of the programme. Two days after the publication of the students’ complaint, the state attorney issued his decision concerning the legality of the fees. He ruled that the university had charged the fees illegally. Fees could be charged for extra services, but only if these were voluntary, which had not been the case with the Chinese students. Furthermore, some of the expenditures for which the university had charged fees were covered by the ordinary state subsidies. Therefore, the university had to reimburse the students in part. Afterwards, one of the Chinese students expressed her satisfaction with the legal process and the decision in the national news. She said: ‘It really gives us a good experience, a true experience, of this Danish

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democracy – it’s not only about the theory, it’s the real fact’7, and she continued: ‘I am incredibly relieved and happy – today I can feel the Danish democracy which I have heard so much about’ (Svanholm 2005d). With the reimbursement, the complaining students felt that they had obtained some satisfaction for unfair treatment (in terms of what they claimed to be low-quality education) and that the reimbursement and the ministry’s request for an account from the university was proof of the workings of a truly democratic society.

Breakdown of ‘Modern’ Domains and a Move into the Agora? There are several interesting elements and discussions in this story. Moral and legal issues are intertwined, and student participation in national policy processes, institutional governance and their own courses of education – that is, all three participatory areas outlined previously – are up for negotiation and contestation. With the Chinese students’ complaint, an unprecedented room for manoeuvre opened up for students (as ‘customers’) in Denmark. Even though the students’ argument about ‘low quality’ could not be used directly in the legal investigation into the fees, the students did succeed in articulating the link between ‘fees’ and ‘quality’ in a manner that made the minister respond, contrary to normal procedures, by demanding an account from the university. It cannot be said whether the minister’s interference was mainly due to the vast media coverage of the issue of the fees, whether it was grounded in a fear of losing the important Chinese share of a global market in education8 or whether it was also an attempt, as some of my informants argued, to divert the public’s attention away from a personal financial mistake whereby the minister had accepted some gifts without declaring them. The public signal in any case was that, with regard to international programmes, commerce had become a central criterion for good education, and that education could therefore to some extent be seen as a ‘product’ and thus potentially as a property right. The university rector and the head of department of the international programme concerned saw both the ministry’s and the Chinese students’ actions as undermining the university’s traditions of autonomy and student participation. First, the students should have fully exhausted the university’s internal quality assurance systems before going public and complaining to the minister. Second, and this the leadership perceived as even worse (since the Chinese students could

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be excused on the account that they were foreigners and not familiar with the Danish system), the ministry had wrongly interfered with university traditions of local management by publicly responding to the Chinese students’ complaint and demanding an account from the university. The rector and the head of department said to me: In public administration, custom would prompt this case to be returned and treated locally. … It’s not normal to say: we will take this case, and deal with it because someone has managed to get the newspapers to write about it. (head of department, RUC, November 2005) The complaint should have gone to us in the first place, and the ministry should have sent it back to us as soon as they had received it – indicating that it is the university’s job to deal with this. (rector, RUC, December 2005)

At a general level of social analysis, the Chinese students’ action in complaining as customers and the ministry’s interference in what the university leadership perceived to be their internal academic business seems to be a good example of what Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) have described as a move of universities into the agora – that is, a space where ‘the state has become a transgressive institution, penetrated by but also penetrating market, social movements and individual responses by consumers and citizens’ (ibid.: 23). The criteria of a new global and commercial ‘world’ were intertwined with ‘internal’ academic quality measurements in the evaluation of the programme. The notion of autonomy, as we saw in chapter 3, has for centuries been an important conceptual feature of university education and research (be it in terms of economy, jurisdiction, government and/or academic practices and knowledge production). Thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Weber are, each in their way, exemplary proponents of what today is often conceived of as a somewhat ‘classical’ or – as Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) point out – ‘modern’ position where science and the university are believed to belong to a particular sphere or domain in society distinct from the domains of ‘politics’ and the ‘market’ in particular. ‘In the lecture rooms of the university no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity’, Weber (1970: 156) stated in 1918, while arguing that science, as a vocation for the scholar, should be cultivated for the sake of science itself – not in the service of personal, economic or political interests. The forms of ethics and rationality that characterize, for example, science and politics are, in Weber’s view, incommensurable. They simply belong to different spheres.

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It is this ‘modern’ differentiation of society into separate domains – for example, the state, market, media, politics and science – that Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) argue is increasingly being transcended, broken down and replaced by more fluid and dynamic associations, with overlapping, crisscrossing and shifting boundaries between public and private.9 In their view, current reforms of universities are part of a general process of social de-differentiation with which the processes of knowledge production take on new forms and are embedded in new kinds of relations where commercial and political interests intersect with academic ones.10 Their concept of the de-differentiated agora is interesting. However, basing my work in anthropology, I find that the notion becomes most relevant as a methodological device, rather than an empirical fact of epochal transition in society, as Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) maintain. ‘Agora’ literally means ‘assembly’ or ‘place of assembly’ and as such connotes the connecting of a variety of different elements (people, things, practices, values, etc.) into some kind of larger network that takes place in a particular moment and setting.11 In line with my notion of ‘figuration work’, doing fieldwork in the agora would therefore entail exploring the actual figuration/assembling processes of diverse components (see also Brichet & Nielsen 2006/7), of what exactly, in different frictional moments, become the components of, for example, the ‘student customer’ figure, and how this figure is defined through external and internal relations with other figures and components. In order to explore these questions and the ‘student customer’ figuration as it took form and place in the frictional event of the Chinese students’ complaint at RUC, we need to have a better understanding of the ‘co-owner’ figure, in contrast to which the ‘customer’ seemed to emerge. In the following sections, I shall therefore first unfold the institutional notion of the student ‘co-owner’ and then go on to explore how this figure, even though officially the ideal student figure at RUC, is in many ways contested and perceived to be under threat by both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ pressures.

The Student as Active and Responsible Co-owner Since figures take form in a more explicit way at moments of friction, Roskilde University’s response to the 2003 Danish University Act is a good place to start the exploration of the ‘co-owner’ figure. Like most of the other Danish universities, RUC perceived the act as a

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potential threat to its traditions of governance and democracy. When first presented with the government’s draft university law in 2002, the Senate at RUC set up a working group to identify – and thus hopefully better secure – the unique RUC characteristics or ‘family silver’, as they jokingly called it (see Brichet 2009). As some of the most essential elements, the working group pointed to the principles of inter-disciplinarity, problem-based group work, house communities and the educational structure of two years of basic studies and three years of degree studies.12 As they said: ‘It is our thesis that these pedagogical and organizational principles create the particular RUC identity because they institutionalize a feeling of ownership in the people who in their daily life associate with them’ (Thomsen, quoted in Brichet 2009, emphases added). Inasmuch as these principles or, in the vocabulary of governmentality, ‘governmental technologies’ revolve around pedagogical as well as organizational ideals, the ideal of student co-ownership comes to include participatory and responsible conduct not only towards one’s own course of education, but also towards the house communities that are so unique to RUC, as well as the overall governance of the university. RUC was founded in the wake of the late 1960s student revolts, and with ‘progressive’ students as important motive powers, it was established on the then new principles of student participation, interdisciplinarity and problem-based group work (E. Hansen 1997). The initial intention at RUC was to centre the studies as well as the research around the project work in different ‘houses’, which to begin with had quite extensive autonomy (E. Hansen 2002). A house, therefore, was seen as an academic community. In cooperation, the teachers and students of the house were expected to decide on different themes for the project work and, as the historian Else Hansen has pointed out, the intention was that ‘the teachers’ research, which was to deal with the same subjects as the students’ project work, should take place in cooperation with the students’ (ibid.: 8). In this way, a classic craft apprenticeship was attempted, but in a new and interdisciplinary manner adapted to the fact that university education was no longer the reserve of the few (ibid.). Over the years the houses have gradually lost their autonomy. Disciplinary departments have been established, and more formalized programmes and teacher-led courses now fill up around half of the students’ course of studies. However, the ideal of a vast extent of student participation and co-ownership is still somewhat treasured, and the ‘house’ structure is still seen as an important element encouraging students to becoming ‘active’ and democratic co-owners.

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Figure 5.1. A typical ‘house’ at Roskilde University. From the introductory folder ‘Roskilde University’, 1st edition, August 2003, p. 3.

Especially during the two years of basic studies, when students are affiliated with only one house,13 the house provides the physical, social and academic framework for their study lives. A house typically consists of a mix of group rooms, offices for teachers and administrative staff, a kitchen where people can prepare and keep their own food, a common classroom, toilets and printing facilities (see figure 5.1). Even though students might stay overnight in the house during periods of intensive studies (e.g., when finalizing a group project), the houses are not to be mistaken for student residence halls. Most students live in the nearby town of Roskilde, or in Copenhagen, which is a thirty-minute train ride away. The houses are, as mentioned above, meant to be academic and social communities with a certain amount of autonomy. As stated in an introductory folder handed to me in 2005, the house is to form a ‘home base’ for the students’ study lives and provide a close relationship between students and teachers. The ‘house democracy’ is a central pedagogical principle for learning and practising ‘co-ownership’. It plays a significant role during the two years of basic studies, but it seems to lose student support once the students start their specialized degree programmes and are more affiliated with particular departments. In the houses (especially of the basic studies), students set up different house committees, and at the often weekly house meetings students and staff discuss everything from educational planning and evaluations and the or-

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ganization of seminars and parties to everyday issues like cleaning and buying furniture for the house. Each house has its own budget – passed on from former house students – and it earns money from, for example, running cafés and parties at which students sell beverages and cakes to students from other houses. Through house democracy, the students have to decide which activities or possessions they want to spend their money on (e.g., furniture, cafés, newspapers, etc.). The university’s attempts to socialize students into ‘active co-ownership’ are visible already in the first weeks for a first-year student. During these weeks, the freshmen are told about the history of the university (especially how the participatory pedagogies are essential and unique and were in place before the physical institution), while older students introduce them to the collaborative difficulties of project and group work and train them in how (possibly) to practice ‘house democracy’, that is, how to run the house meetings and decide what kind of committees are to be established to make the house function well. In 2005 the rector told the freshmen in his welcome speech: The university must have active, critical, demanding and inquiring students. … Students from other universities say they ‘go to school’. I don’t believe that a RUC student has said this. To study is different from going to school. You have to be active in the learning process yourself. To a large extent, you have the responsibility yourself – not the teachers. You have the tiller, you decide the course. You have the responsibility – we help you. Today we bid you welcome as newcomers. Tomorrow you are RUC. Use it – it is yours. (rector’s welcoming speech, RUC, 2005)

It is telling how the form of the 2005 rector’s welcome speech differed from, for example, the matriculation speech at the University of Copenhagen (see chapter 2). Whereas the freshmen at the University of Copenhagen were invited to the nineteenth-century ceremonial hall in which the rector in black robes spoke from the rostrum and welcomed them with a handshake, the 2005 rector at Roskilde University had a tradition of giving a relaxed welcome to the freshmen in their respective houses during the introductory weeks. He seemed to be the visitor, not the students. In a similar participatory vein, on the university website, the 2005 freshmen were told: As a student you are not a customer in the shop, not a consumer of teaching – rather, you are a participant in a production of new knowledge that can only succeed if you yourself make an effort and take responsibility. ‘University’ originally means a community of professors and students. The basic studies are a suggestion for what such a community could be today.14

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In other words, the integrative or communitarian aspect of participation is clearly emphasized at RUC. In line with Humboldtian thinking, the student is to be part of a larger community of knowledge, and not just a ‘school pupil’, ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ receiving a somewhat pre-defined education product. In terms of students’ learning process, the academic staff members are to function as ‘advisers’ or ‘tutors’ – and are explicitly called this – rather than ‘teachers’. Students are to take responsibility not only for their own and others’ learning, but also for the running of the houses and the governing of the university as such. As the 2005 rector said, ‘the students are the university’. In other words, as co-owners, the university belongs to the students.15 At least, this is the ideal. But as we shall see in the following, many of the most dedicated and self-identified ‘co-owner’ students perceived the co-ownership tradition – the unique ‘RUC spirit’, as some of them called it – to be under growing pressure from internal as well as external developments. Marilyn Strathern has argued that ‘[o]wnership is powerful because of its double-effect as simultaneously a matter of belonging and of property’ (1996: 531), and it seems to be exactly this double-ness that takes centre stage in the frictional debates about appropriate participation at RUC. In fact, ownership seems to be a central participatory component of the ‘customer’ as well as the ‘co-owner’ figure, though as part of and as summoning up two different ‘worlds’ or lines of participation: namely, a ‘co-citizen’ line and a more ‘instrumental’ ‘employability’ line. Put differently, ‘ownership’ here seems to oscillate between addressing a relation of belonging and a relation of belongings – or, following Davina Cooper (2007), between a relation of a part to a whole and a subject to an object.

Ownership as Subject-Object Relation and as Part-Whole Relation In her discussion of ‘ownership’ and ‘property’ relations at the Summerhill School – a private boarding school in Suffolk, England, known for its pupil-staff democracy, anti-authoritarian pedagogy and strong emphasis on the child’s freedom and self-regulation – Davina Cooper (2007) argues that there is a crucial tension between two central property regimes. On the one hand, at Summerhill, private ownership is stressed as important to the development of independent, responsible and self-governing students. Some public things/areas are turned pri-

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vate in order for the pupils to respect and take care of them; in this vein, one boy who cleaned an area of the school playground of nettles claimed and was given the cleaned space as ‘his’. Pedagogically the children have great freedom in that they are expected to make their own independent decisions about how to learn and what classes to attend. On the other hand, collective ownership is essential in the sense that the school, not unlike the traditional RUC ideal, is run as a democratic community where staff and students with an equal voice at the School Meeting set community rules, resolve disputes and decide on the organization and priorities of the school. At the school, therefore, ‘personal life’, the individual exercise of choice and preference, are intertwined with ‘civic life’ in terms of collective forms of identification, activity and governance. However, the tension, Cooper furthermore argues, is not simply between private and collective ownership, but between what she calls ownership (in her vocabulary, ‘belonging’) as organized around a subject-object relationship and around a part-whole relationship, respectively. The subject-object relationship of ownership revolves around a person’s or group’s mastery of a thing. The thing owned can be separated – legally, physically, emotionally – from the one who possesses it. As Cooper says, ‘this relationship provides the standard legal definition of ownership or property, centred on fungibility, mastery, and commodification’ (2007: 629). This severable subject-object relation revolves around notions of rights, (il)legal conduct and questions of belongings. In contrast, ownership as a part-whole relationship revolves around norms, appropriateness, communal identity and social relations of belonging. This kind of relational ownership has a noninstrumental and non-severable quality. It should be understood, in Cooper’s words, ‘as characteristics of a larger entity that are authoritatively recognized and that produce external as well as internal effects’ (ibid.: 628). In other words, ownership in this latter sense is a particularly constitutive relationship between part and whole. It works by pointing to the core attributes of what the Summerhill School is, meaning that questions of inclusion, membership, belonging and loyalty to a certain institutional ‘whole’ therefore become essential. At first sight, the RUC notion of ‘co-ownership’ has a strong emphasis on ownership as organized around a part-whole relationship. The house democracy and participatory pedagogy of project-based group work is intended to create an ‘RUC identity’, as the working group stated above. Students are to become part of a particular whole – namely, the universitas of RUC. ‘The house’ here plays an

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intermediate role as both part and whole. Irene, a third-year history student and a self-identified co-owner, provides a good example of the workings of the part-whole ownership relationship through the ‘house’. She said: ‘[T]he house sometimes feels like a second home. Personally, I have experienced an enormous sense of belonging to my house. It’s great to feel at home.’ To Irene the ‘house’ had become a kind of ‘home’ in that she felt ownership of it and responsibility towards it, a physical place she put work and effort into, but also a social space and community to which she felt she belonged and in which she became actively involved. In the part-whole logic, ‘the house’ and ‘the university’ cannot be severed from ‘the student’. As both a physical place and a social community, ‘the house’ comes to condensate the ‘whole’ university through the conveyance of a sense of belonging with the ‘co-owner’. The house is a collective property that students make ‘their own’ by decorating it and using it as a home. Students cook their food in the kitchen, play games in the common room and relax on the sofas in breaks between working on projects in the group rooms and attending classes. During the last phases of project writing it is not rare for students to spend the night in the house, and group rooms come to momentarily belong to one or more project groups, who may decorate and leave their bags and books in the room. By adding their human activity and creativity to the physical house, the ‘student coowner’, like Irene, becomes both physically and emotionally unseverable from ‘the house’. In this sense, the house at one and the same time becomes a condensation of the ‘whole’ and an extension of the ‘co-owner’. A series of part-whole relations are thereby established – co-owner:house:university – and, as we shall see later, at a larger social scale, the co-owner finds its equivalent in the co-citizen, with the house/university becoming an intermediate part of a co-citizen: society relation. Due to the part-whole relationship in which the co-owner is the house, which in turn is the university, any mistreatment of the physical house is, for the co-owner, likely to come over as an assault on the co-owner’s very person and as a threat to the house and university community as a whole. Morten, whom we briefly met in the previous chapter, was a fourth-year student and self-identified co-owner. Since being a freshman he had been very active in student politics at RUC, and he angrily complained to me about a proliferating, and to him undesirable, attitude and conduct among his fellow students. He found that students are typically heavily engaged in their project groups, but fewer and fewer participate in the house meetings; they

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are rarely on campus, but work with their groups at home and do not care to participate in creating a common study environment. When they do come to campus, he said, they often do not clean up after themselves in the houses. I really think that the fact that one leaves one’s dirty plates and doesn’t care if you hit the waste bin or not … in reality, this reflects that you’re a customer in a shop … where do you leave your dirty plates on the table? You do that if you’re a customer in the shop, in a restaurant. (Morten, student politician, RUC, 2005)

In line with Irene’s description of the house as a ‘second home’, Morten here points to a minimum standard of ‘housekeeping’ in order for the house to be a home of one’s ‘own’. To Morten, the indifference towards the house as place and community and the self-centred focus on one’s own projects and nothing else were signs of a process of the ‘customerization’ of the student. In a similar vein, Irene argued that ‘active students feel ownership. Non-active students feel the same ownership of the university as when they go to Føtex [a supermarket]’. By ‘active’, Irene is here referring to active involvement in the house community, in the running of RUC, in classes and just generally in creating a common study environment. While the customer in the supermarket may feel he/she has individual property ownership (as a subject-object relation) of the products he/she buys, he/she does not convey the same notion of belonging (part-whole relation) to the place or to a particular community as evoked by the term ‘co-owner’. In other words, to Morten and Irene the customer figure foregrounds a severable form of ownership that encompasses indifference to the physical place and no sense of belonging to a larger social community. However, as we shall see in the following, the lack of the partwhole universitas ownership may be connected to at least two different kinds of subject-object property relations. In one version, the ‘university’ is seen as the (legal) property of a paying collective subject – namely, the state – and ‘education’, accordingly, is considered a common good of benefit to society as a ‘whole’. Here a citizen:society part-whole relation is still relevant, even though the student:university part-whole relation seems to be downplayed. In another version, the university seems to be no longer ‘owned’ by any clear-cut collective subject. Rather, ownership is distributed between a range of different stakeholders such that the individual student – with the growing emphasis on ‘freedom of choice’ and the introduction of, for example, ‘tuition fees’ – engages in a new kind of con-

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tractual relationship with the university education providers. Here, a conceptualization of ‘education’ as intellectual capital and as the personal property of the student seems to be growing in importance, whereas the student:university:nation state part-whole relations are potentially decomposed into subject-object relations between individual students and their mastery of their own intellectual capital. Both approaches are therefore in sharp contrast to the co-owner notion of education – upheld by, for example, Morten – and its emphasis on a series of part-whole relations.

Co-citizenship, Employability and Intellectual Capital as Personal Property Morten’s vision of university education – and thus his view of RUC’s ‘internal’ understanding of ‘co-ownership’ – resembles the notion of ‘co-citizenship’ put forward by Hal Koch in the post-war period (see chapter 2). On principle I support an education model that, when I talk to people, seems to be outdated. Why do you have an education? I think you do it because it gives you something as a person to participate in a society. When people ask me what I shall become [blive til], I feel like answering them, well, I’ll become a better citizen. I’ll become capable of acting in a democracy in a harmonic way – and in a family too, for that matter. But if I say this, they look at me and say ‘unemployed’. This is a good description of the schism between an internal understanding of education and [the education rationale that] is increasingly gaining a footing. (Morten, student politician, RUC, 2005)

As noted, Koch, like the official RUC policy of ‘ownership’, promoted democracy as a form of life and participation as a question of attitude or mentality rather than laws and procedures (Koch [1945] 1981: 13; Korsgaard 1997: 52–53). The integrative dimensions of democracy are emphasized in that the ‘co-citizen/co-owner’ is to become part of a particular community through socialization and upbringing, and conflicts are first and foremost to be dissolved and integrated into a common whole through reasoned debate. Furthermore, participation is expected to take place in various ways, both formal and informal. Students are to become active citizens who engage in democratic debates at the university as well as in wider society. Morten’s words show that he considers that this ‘co-citizen’ line of participation at RUC is increasingly being accompanied or re-

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placed by an ‘instrumental’ one grounded in a particular notion of ‘employability’. He argued that a growing proportion of his fellow students behave and think of themselves as small enterprises – as ‘me as Student Inc.’, he called it – where they seek to ‘brand themselves as individuals with a unique educational path’. So whereas the co-owner/co-citizen is concerned about the workings of larger wholes (the house:university:society), Morten presents two different and to some extent overlapping figures against which the co-owner takes shape, namely, the ‘customer’ and the ‘student incorporated’ figure. To the first figure he attached the components of ‘selfishness’ and ‘indifference to the community and physical place’. These components were, in the latter, accompanied by a view of education as a strategic individual investment to become ‘employable’. Allan and Carsten, two third-year students, may help us nuance and conceptualize this difference a bit further. Though not identifying with the notion of the ‘customer’ themselves, Allan and Carsten would probably be the kind of students Morten would consider students conveying a ‘customer attitude’ of indifference to RUC as both a physical place and a social community. They had not chosen RUC for its pedagogical and student participatory principles, but more because the offers and combinations of subjects suited them well. They had never involved themselves in any student political work, rarely came to the house meetings during their basic studies and often ended up writing projects with each other while sometimes, they told me, keeping their ideas secret from other potential but undesired group members. In the classes I attended with them they almost never said anything, and Allan explicitly explained to me that, as long as he had a good answer to the assignments himself, he saw no reason to speak up and engage in the class discussions. When I asked Allan and Carsten if they felt ‘ownership’ of RUC and perceived it as ‘their university’, as students like Morten and Irene had told me they did, Allan dryly responded: Allan:

Well, it’s not our university. It’s just a place where we study.

Author: Whose is it then? Allan:

The state’s and the citizens’. We just get skills through education.

Author: Mmm – but many students have told me that to them the house democracy has been essential to giving them a sense of ownership. Allan:

Hmpf, but it was only a small percentage who attended [the house meetings in the ‘basic houses’]. Everybody else sees this as a study offer. There are certain offers and one chooses what

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one wants, and if you don’t get it here you go somewhere else. I have thought about shifting to Copenhagen. They have other offers. So I don’t feel ownership of the university. It is only a small active core who has that feeling of co-ownership. We pick and choose in terms of what kind of education we want, and people have different reasons for choosing RUC and for choosing to go elsewhere. Carsten: Yeah, we have both considered going elsewhere to study.

Rather than ‘owners’, students are here seen as ‘choosers’. Since the state and the taxpayers fund Danish university education, these are the true ‘owners’ of the university (i.e., the third democratization argument outlined in chapter 2). Ownership, accordingly, is thought of in terms of a legal subject-object relationship grounded in monetary exchange rather than in being part of a larger community of knowledge in which one invests time and energy. The universities provide services and offers that the student puts together in a particular course of education as he/she prefers. Allan and Carsten have clearly embraced the ‘freedom of choice’ logic, which, as we saw in chapter 3, has been of growing importance in Danish university policies in recent decades. Rather than addressing a belonging to a ‘whole’, participation is here reduced to a question of individual influence on one’s own course of education – ‘exit’ and ‘choice’ more than ‘voice’ seem to be the main means of participation. As third-year students, Allan and Carsten were not (yet?) too concerned about the ‘usefulness’ of their studies in terms of prospective job opportunities. They were not focused on future career plans, but said to me that they just followed their interests in the here and now. Although they conveyed the features of ‘self-centredness’ and ‘communal indifference’ that Morten characterized as ‘customer attributes’, they did not seem to fit his description of the ‘student incorporated’ who seeks to brand him- or herself by assembling a unique course of study. Since Allan and Carsten did not sympathize with the ‘co-owner’ category themselves, I asked them if they could identify with any of the other notions of the student put forward in the public debate – ‘customer’, ‘consumer’, ‘user’, ‘partner’. Allan replied that he found them all weird and that he did not really understand any of them. He did not see himself as a customer or consumer, since he was not paying to study and, just as importantly, had to put work into the studies to get something out of them. It was not just a ready-made commodity one could buy, he said. Allan then explained that the biggest problem in his view was that students in public debates were

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often described as spongers off the state (samfundsnassere), as young people who abuse public money to sit in cafés and enjoy themselves while spending too long on their studies. This he just did not accept. Students do not abuse the system. ‘We’re an investment in the future’, he said. ‘We get an education that will be of benefit to society afterwards, when we start working.’ Allan and Carsten here seem to convey a particular kind of ‘gift’ exchange relationship between state and student: as a public good, the state gives the student a ‘gift’ of university education, but it does so with the expectation of getting some kind of return, today often framed as a contribution to the generation of growth and welfare in society. As in Marcel Mauss’s ([1950] 1990) classical thinking about gift relations, such educational ‘gifts’ are therefore never completely ‘free’ but install a reciprocal relationship of exchange between the giver and the receiver: through receiving, the receiver enters into a part-whole relation based on social norms and duties that should compel him/her morally and socially to give something in return for the gift received. Public education, in this sense, becomes a sort of part-whole investment in which the individual should convey a sense of belonging and civic obligation to a larger nation-state community. Consequently, one important question has been greatly debated in Denmark and elsewhere over the years: To what extent, then, should the state as the ‘payer’/’giver’ decide and influence the exact distribution of educational capital? To what extent should the state – or other actors – decide how many students are to take which kinds of degree?16 Carsten and Allan were quite clear on this point. It is of most benefit to all, they argued, if students themselves gradually make their own educational priorities. In their view, education should be done con amore, be driven by the students’ own curiosity and interests, and not regulated by what the state or someone else believe will be relevant to the job market in five to ten years’ time. No one can look into the future, so students should just be allowed to choose for themselves. In the end this will be the best investment for society, they emphasized. In a politico-historical light, this understanding of university education as a common good and social investment has strong roots in the post-war period, when university education was increasingly seen as an important contributor to national prosperity and access accordingly widened (see chapter 3). This consensus over educational policy, which gained a hold in the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s, was framed by what Henry, Lingard, Rizvi and Taylor (all Austra-

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lian-based researchers with an interest in global educational policy developments) have called a ‘macro-economically focussed human capital theory’ (2001: 30). That is, public investment in education was meant to provide the nation with a strong workforce and accordingly with economic growth. The student thus became important human capital for the state to invest in through widened access and increased educational expenditure. Contrary to Allan and Carsten, who in a sense articulate the ‘macro-economic’ human capital thinking, Morten’s description of the emergence of a ‘student incorporated’ who seeks to brand him- or herself as an individual embodying a unique educational path seems to emphasize a slightly different property argument, namely, the kind of post-Keynesian17 and neoliberal revival of human capital theory described by Henry and colleagues as ‘micro-economic’ rather than as purely ‘macro-economic’: The new consensus in educational policy that accompanies globalization, of which the OECD has been a major advocate, is held together by a micro-economic focussed human capital theory that is unlike earlier forms of macro human capital theory. While the latter argued rather crudely for a supposed link between levels of educational expenditure (inputs) and economic growth and competitiveness (outputs), the new micro approach in contrast emphasizes the specific skills of individuals thought necessary to participate effectively in a knowledge based global economy. From a policy perspective, education and the provision of multi-skilled individuals who are flexible and adaptive to rapid change and uncertainty have become central elements of economic policy in all OECD countries. (Henry et al. 2001: 99)

With the central political imaginary of the world as a ‘global knowledge economy’, education policies in many countries increasingly emphasize employability as a continuous task and responsibility of the individual. Through the provision of growing freedom of choice to put together the most ‘relevant’ education, students are made personally responsible for making themselves attractive in the job market. The role of the government therefore becomes to provide incentives for people to develop themselves and their capacities in a manner favourable to the national economy. The Nobel Prize– winning economist Gary S. Becker has argued that today, ‘human capital is by far the most important form of capital in modern economies. The economic success of individuals, and also whole economies, depends on how extensively and effectively people invest in themselves’ (Becker 2006: 292). In line with the University of Co-

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penhagen rector’s matriculation speech in 2006, in which he likened a course of study to a race for knowledge (see chapter 2), different nations are now viewed as contestants in a global competition to generate and attract the most qualified, creative and innovative people from all over the world (for a discussion of the emergence of the ‘competition state’, see, e.g., Cerny 2007; Pedersen 2011). These individuals, in turn, should be mobile, interdisciplinary, flexible and able to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. In this vein, they should conceive of their course of education as a personal investment that can improve their chances of a successful career (see, e.g., Brown 2006; Brown, Lauder & Ashton 2008; D. Robertson 2000). Whereas many Danish students like Allan and Carsten think of education as a public good/investment, and their predecessors in the post-war period even argued for their studies to be conceived of as ‘work’, with an attendant state-paid ‘student salary’ (see chapter 3), the Danish reform initiatives linked to the 2003 law – for example, the introduction of fees for certain foreign students and suggestions, on the one hand, for a ‘money follows the student scheme’ and, on the other hand, for student reimbursement to the state if he/she leaves to work in a foreign country shortly after graduation – seem to give a certain impetus to the ‘micro-economic’ thinking regarding human capital (see also Regeringen 2002a; VTU 2003: 11ff., 89–90; Nielsen 2010). The creation of a part-whole ownership of a disciplinary community, a particular university or even a country is in this perspective relevant to the extent that it may attract the best-qualified students, make them invest their intellectual capital in the university/country and provide them with incentives to stay put. The ‘branding’ and ‘ranking’ of Danish universities as belonging to the world’s ‘elite’ – which in turn is expected to attract students and give them a high-currency degree – is becoming increasingly important (cf. Brown, Lauder & Ashton 2008). In this vein, the individual, the university and the state no longer seem to stand mainly in a partwhole relation of belonging to a common community of knowledge production. Rather, as exemplified in the University of Copenhagen rector’s 2006 matriculation speech, they are all structured through the same competitive line, as self-maximizing entities whereby their respective success depends on their ability to obtain an important share of the market for education and jobs. From this standpoint, education – as human and intellectual capital – is to be seen as the personal property of the flexible, calculating and self-responsible lifelong learner.

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Morality, Exchange Systems and the Power of Money This development towards education as a form of personal property in a global knowledge economy is central in relation to the frictional event of the complaining Chinese students at RUC. With growing internationalization and the political emphasis on university education as a personal investment and as property to be acquired across national boundaries, education has been rendered available for a contractual, cash-mediated, subject-object form of ownership in a quite new manner. In countries like Australia, New Zealand and the U.K., where fees have been introduced for all students, the competitive and individualized rationale has been perfectly clear: since education is a personal investment with an individual payoff in terms of expected higher salaries (for highly qualified work), then it is only fair to demand that the individual contribute a substantial proportion of the costs of their own education (see, e.g., Henry et al. 2001: 59–60; Tlili & Wright 2005). Whereas non-paying Danish students could be said to invest their time and effort in the course of education, the Chinese students had personally paid a fee to attend a programme at a foreign university with the hope of improving their language skills and gaining valuable international experience in a Western country. As Wei Shen (2008) has shown, today most Chinese students abroad are self-financed and – in line with the new theory of human capital – they indeed tend to see study abroad as an ‘investment in their education and future’. As noted, the fee-paying Chinese students at RUC called themselves ‘customers’. However, the question is what kind of ‘customer’ figure they came to embody in this process. In terms of the Chinese students’ modes of participation, two elements were highlighted as essential in my interviews with the rector, the head of department and a teacher in the international programme: the Chinese students’ foreignness and the fact that they had been charged fees. The Chinese students came from a different educational tradition and had no experience of the sort of ‘democratic’ and student participatory ideals promoted at RUC. They were not accustomed to involving themselves in class, doing project work in groups, participating in the planning and execution of the teaching, entering into dialogue with teachers or putting forward criticisms and suggestions for improving the programme more generally. Both the teacher and two of the Chinese students, Jung and Wang, who had been among the driving forces in writing the complaint to the minister, described the Chinese students to me as inherently ‘passive’ in

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general when it came to becoming involved in class discussions and the development of the content of courses. Indeed, to make criticisms of ‘the authorities’, Jung said, is seen as ‘aggressive’ and inappropriate behaviour in China: I just think, we students also have some responsibility on this case, because we didn’t … Chinese students just are not good at raising hands and saying, ‘Stop.’ Or, ‘You should not do that, you should …’ We just come to accept what you give us. Actually, during many lectures I was so dissatisfied and just left. Okay, I took the first hour, then I just left, because it was a waste of my time. I think, maybe, I should have raised my hand and then said it. [pause] But I did raise [it] many times. … Because I think I’m more experienced and my English is much better. But it’s like always me, so, okay, I don’t do it. … We are not so aggressive to say no. (Jung, Chinese student, RUC, December 2005)

In her choice of vocabulary, critical participation is interpreted as a question of being ‘aggressive’, of rejecting something or commanding a change – it is not proposed as an ‘equal dialogue’ taking place in a respectful tone, as is associated with the notion of co-ownership at RUC. The university’s perception of itself as a ‘democratic’ university was foreign and difficult to realize for many of these Chinese students. In this light, the complaint of the eight students to the minister of science and their use of the public media to put pressure on him and the university seem somewhat surprising and extraordinary. Jung and Wang explained that it was because they were older, more mature and had work experience prior to this term of study that they were confident enough to complain when they felt the programme did not offer them the classes, the title and the internship in a Danish company that they argued they had been promised prior to their enrolment. The Danish university leadership said that many of the misunderstandings were caused by the inadequate and in some respects incorrect information provided to the students by a Chinese agent, and that the students had not explored the programme descriptions properly before enrolling. The students said that they had made a contract with the agent about what to expect from his job, but that no definite written contract was made between them and the university – only in terms of the programme plans and course materials presented to them through the agent. Both Jung and Wang said they had tried to find information about the programme on the university’s own website, but that none had been available, so they had trusted the agent (the university leadership and the teacher, however, argued otherwise).

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In any case, by talking about ‘customer rights’, ‘products’ and ‘value for money’ and by filing the complaint with the minister, the students seemed to be echoing the micro-economic human capital rationale, so vividly espoused by the OECD, and the fees appeared to be an important initiating force in the complaining process. Likewise, a public statement from one of the eight students shows that her emotional debt to her parents, who had paid for her studies, had indeed played an important role in her speaking out about her dissatisfaction: ‘I do it [complain to the minister] for my parents’ sake’, she said to the newspaper. ‘They have worked very hard. It would be a lack of respect to them if I just accepted these conditions’ (Svanholm 2005b). In addition to foregrounding the importance of the fees, however, this sentence also directs our attention to the gap between the entrepreneurial, autonomous student advocated in many current policies and the diverse social realities that particular students find themselves in. The sentence shows how monetary exchange does not just produce a particular relationship between an institution and an isolated (capital-maximizing) individual. Rather, personal indebtedness, moral obligations and norms of participation – that is, kinship relations, as well as pedagogical traditions and norms of appropriate student conduct (see also Fong 2011) – become intertwined and influence what appears to be a neat ‘customer-provider’ relationship. The rector, the head of department and the teacher identified ‘money’ as an important element in promoting the participatory transition from ‘passively receiving students’ to somewhat ‘demanding and complaining students’. ‘The problem’, the teacher said, ‘lay in the cultural clash between a Danish consensus-based, conflict-solving method and the existence of a “customer”-based relationship.’ As a powerful social technology, money is here perceived as destroying and interfering in an otherwise democratic and participatory sociality: It’s a kind of poison, money, in this relationship because you don’t have this student-teacher exchange [of relaxed dialogue], you know, but you have some … ehm, if the students have bought a product so you always have to, you have to give this product … when you start to have money involved, then things change. The professors and the institution are under a different pressure. (teacher, RUC, December 2005)

Pushed to extremes, in this interpretation one particular ‘social technology’ (student fees) with an attached ‘political rationality’ (marketization) is being promoted as the main source of particular forms of student participation. Monetary exchange is construed as having an almost intrinsic (in his view, ‘poisonous’) power or intentionality

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that forms students’ participation in their course of education, the governance of the university and wider society in a particular individualistic and calculating direction. In this vein, the teacher distinguished between ‘two spheres of relations’, one based on contractual, monetary exchange and the other on consensus and democratic relations between ‘equals’. At RUC, he stated, most often students and teachers find solutions through informal dialogue and consensus. If the students want to complain, ‘that’s fine’, he said, ‘it’s part of the democratic culture … and then we follow the rules’. In other words, complaining is not in conflict with co-ownership as long as students follow the ordinary democratic procedures and fully exhaust the internal institutional instruments of complaint before taking matters outside the university. This, the teacher and university leadership said, the Chinese students had not done before going to the media and filing a complaint with the minister. The students had thus acted not only in an inappropriate but also in an immoral and disloyal manner to the ‘whole’ of RUC. Now, this discussion about morality, the power of money and the existence of different ‘spheres of exchange relations’ is well-known from the literature in economic anthropology (see, e.g., Bloch & Parry [1989] 1996; Bohannan [1959] 1996; Gregory 1982). Bloch and Parry ([1989] 1996) identify two overall understandings of money. On the one hand, money and profit-oriented exchange is praised for having a liberating power, for generating individual freedom and for extending the domain of trust to larger circles of exchange. On the other hand, monetary exchange is often also associated with the ‘growth of individualism and the destruction of solidary communities’ (ibid.: 458). Here, money – as in the teacher’s analysis above – is seen as a threat to the moral order in that its introduction into a previously non-monetary exchange pattern is understood to promote ‘economic’ relationships that are inherently calculating, impersonal, instrumental, transient and amoral. In both understandings, Bloch and Parry emphasize, money is seen as having an intrinsic or inherent power to transform sociality – a transformation that has often been described as a shift from ‘traditional/pre-capitalist’ to ‘modern/capitalist’ societies or from a ‘gift economy’ to a ‘commodity economy’ (see, e.g., Bohannan [1959] 1996; Gregory 1982). Whereas gift exchange, in Gregory’s definition, addresses an exchange of ‘inalienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal dependence’, commodity exchange characterizes ‘an exchange of alienable things between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence’ (Gregory 1982: 12, emphasis added). In this vein, commodity

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exchange is identified as a short-term phenomenon based on legalistic obligations between mutually disinterested parties. Gift exchange, on the other hand, entails long-term moral obligations of reciprocity and is seen as a means of creating and sustaining social relationships (see Bloch & Parry [1989] 1996). We see here a clear resonance between Gregory’s distinction between gifts and commodities and Davina Cooper’s distinction between the relational form of part-whole ownership and the severable form of subject-object ownership. However, whereas in Gregory’s account the ethics of sharing related to ‘gift’ exchange and the ethics of private ownership related to ‘commodity’ exchange are seen as mutually exclusive and temporally successive in a given sociality, the part-whole and subject-object relation, as presented by Cooper, allows for their simultaneous and complementary existence, as well as the unsettled character of their balance in social formations. In this respect, Cooper is in line with Bloch and Parry ([1989] 1996), who take a critical position regarding the sharp distinction between gift and commodity exchange, as well as analyses in which ‘money’ is seen as having an intrinsic transformative power. The ‘meaning’ of money, they argue, is a social or cultural construct and depends on the wider transactional system in which it works. Therefore, monetary exchange does not necessarily imply a marketized and impersonal commodity principle of exchange. From this perspective, rather than being the ‘cause’ of the Chinese students’ conduct, the ‘fees’ could be seen as a ‘condensed symbol’ of a certain instrumentalist line of education, a line that is neither totalitarian in the sense that it constitutes the Chinese students’ entire subjectivity, nor particular in the sense that it only belongs to fee-paying students. Indeed, if we follow Foucault and work towards a more nuanced pluralization of causes by ‘eventalizing’ the complaint of the fee-paying Chinese students – that is, if we re-discover, as Foucault says, ‘the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on, that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal, and necessary’ (Foucault [1978] 1994: 226–27) – then the customer and co-owner figurations come to appear less self-identical, uniform and mutually exclusive than proposed by, among others, the teacher above. Therefore, rather than seeing the Chinese frictional event as a mere ‘clash’ between two separate national, pedagogical and monetary ‘cultures’, in the everyday life of students and teachers, there seems to be a constant oscillation between the part-whole and the subject-object lines of ownership – between individual and collective belonging and be-

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longings. As we shall see in the following, a series of frictional situations leading up to the Chinese students’ complaint to the minister are not exclusively identifiable as either co-owner or customer conduct. They might, in fact, be seen as both. Therefore, figures do not come over as one-to-one relations between a concept (signifiant) and an activity (signifié). Only through the gradual and ongoing figuration work of different actors (e.g., the students, university leadership, reporters and the minister) are the various activities and relations given the figure of, for example, a ‘customer’ in their respective accounts. Even though, as a conceptual whole, the customer figure here appears singular and uniform, it is, as we shall see, relative to its shifting external relations and internal components.

‘Eventalizing’ the Student Customer Figure In my interview with Jung and Wang, two of the main driving forces behind the complaint to the minister, it soon became clear that a relation between the customer category, the technology of fee payment and an individualistic, subject-object form of ownership in no way becomes self-evident or necessary. Indeed, with their account, the figuration of the customer student is displayed as a process in which certain elements emerged and came to be assembled in particular ways. It seemed to be through these mutable figurations that certain possibilities of student conduct emerged. Jung and Wang explained that the complaint to the minister was only the last in a series of attempts to communicate the dissatisfaction of their class. Previously they had expressed their dissatisfaction by talking to teachers, filling out course evaluations, writing a letter to the head of department and attending a meeting with the latter and the teachers. All of these activities, in one perspective, could indeed be seen as ‘co-ownership’ conduct – that is, the ‘active’ participation of critically reflecting students who engage in dialogue and argumentation about the form of the programme and the teaching, and who do so as part of a larger community or whole. The students, however, did not feel they belonged to any kind of ‘whole’ of ‘RUC’. In fact, they felt as if they were in a ‘Chinese ghetto’ (an experience they seem to share with Chinese students in other countries [cf. Shen 2008; Spurling 2006]). They felt isolated and had almost no contact with other Danish students and teachers, for example, those on the Danish parallel programme. This was not their idea of an ‘international’ environment.

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When I asked Jung and Wang about the notion of the ‘customer’ they had put forward in the written complaint to first the head of department and later the minister, they did not reject or modify their identification with the category. However, their definition of it displayed a relation of dependency between the university and its students that the part-whole co-owner vocabulary seemed somewhat to eclipse and downplay. They explained that in their view all students are customers – not only fee-paying foreign students but also non-paying Danish students, since, in the latter case, the state pays the university for each student. The personal cash mediation between the foreign students and the university was, in other words, not the distinct and defining component of the category ‘customer’, since money flows to the university according to the number of its students anyway. Accordingly, Jung and Wang said that they did not expect their position or rights to be any different or any better than those of the non-fee-paying Danish or foreign students. On the contrary, it was because they felt they had been granted fewer rights and poorer information and services than non-paying students that they had spoken up and complained. They compared their own situation with other foreign and Danish students and found themselves worse off, with less knowledge of the Danish university system, their rights and opportunities. In other words, they downplayed the so-called cultural and monetary differences and focused on common opportunities and rights. The international programme had been accepted by the study board for the Danish parallel programme but was later run through a steering group consisting of the head of department and the teachers in charge – not the study board, in which students have half the seats. The teacher I interviewed stated that he had tried to encourage the Chinese students to elect some representatives to participate in the meetings of the programme’s steering group, but that none of them had wanted to volunteer. Jung and Wang had not heard of such an offer, they claimed, and they said that they had not received any thorough introduction to the university’s traditions of student participation, the governance system or the system of complaints. Furthermore, to Jung and Wang the criticisms they voiced in the course evaluations had not led to the expected changes and as such had not proved to be a means of student participation or co-ownership. The teacher explained to me that at best only around 50 per cent of the students had responded, and since these were positive overall the teachers had not changed any major aspects of the courses. Jung and Wang felt ignored, and on behalf of the whole class they and a

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handful of other students decided to write a complaint to the head of department. This was followed up by a meeting with the head of department and a teacher. The latter two told me that at this point they had complied with some of the wishes of the students and tried to explain why the rest of their requests were not feasible. But once again the expectations about the meaning and power of a social technology conflicted: when the head of department and the teacher did not receive any further complaints from the students, they thought things had improved and that the students were satisfied with the explanations offered and changes agreed to at the meeting. But the students were not satisfied. Apparently, the meeting did not have the same status for them as for the head of department and the teacher: ‘It was only a meeting’, Wang said to me, and he explained that they had expected a written reply to their complaint as a follow-up to it. None was ever produced, but at that point they no longer felt up to confronting the head of department or the teachers about the matter, and the latter therefore thought that everything was now all right. Only when, months later, the Chinese students heard about the legal investigation into the fees did they decide – helped by a Danish politician of Taiwanese origin running for the government party in an upcoming local election – to write directly to the minister to provide him with ‘related information’. They hoped this would enhance their chances of reimbursement for a programme they felt they had been trying to change for a long time. The paradox is that, on the one hand, it was mainly through this drastic action of complaining that, in the view of the university leadership and the teacher, the students’ activities somehow tipped over into immoral and disloyal ‘customer’ conduct. On the other hand, as the rector said to me, it was also through these activities that the students showed that they were not just ‘passive’ and ‘receiving’ students. Furthermore, to the students the reimbursement and the minister of science’s request for an account from the university gave them, as one of them stated, a ‘true experience of Danish democracy’. Obviously, this student’s notion of democracy is more linked to what she experiences as an efficient complaint system at the state level rather than, for example, to a question of direct democracy or ‘co-ownership’ at an institutional level. Therefore, depending on how one conceives of democracy (e.g., as a question of everyday participatory democracy or the effectiveness of complaint system), RUC could be seen to have both succeeded and failed in providing some of these Chinese students with the tools to become critical and engaged student participants at the university and in the wider society.

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Conclusion Taking its point of departure in the frictional event of the complaining fee-paying Chinese students at Roskilde University, this chapter has shown how ‘ownership’ plays a crucial role in the institutional negotiation of ‘appropriate’ student participation. Ownership, I have argued, may connote both a ‘part-whole’ relationship of belonging and a ‘subject-object’ relationship of belongings. The frictional event indicates that the balance between the two seems to be in the process of changing – not least as university reforms worldwide aim to internationalize and increase student mobility and freedom of choice. At Roskilde University, the principles of student participation and ownership are particularly strong and explicitly embodied in the figure of the ‘co-owner’. Here, ideally, the student is to be given and to take ‘ownership’ of his or her own study, the programme and the institution at which he/she is enrolled. However, the growing mobility of students within and across institutions and nations seems to open up a space for new power relations between students, teachers, the university leadership and the ministry. With the dominant political imaginary of worldwide competition in a global knowledge economy, education is increasingly being thought of as the personal property of the individual student. In a growing number of countries, students are therefore being asked to contribute a proportion of the costs of their own education. In this sense, the student is being incentivized to view his or her course of education as a personal investment. Student participation and ‘ownership’ are thus potentially being directed towards a ‘subject-object’ relationship (that is, to a person’s mastery of his/her individual possession) at the expense of ‘part-whole’ relations of belonging where, through democratic participation and ownership, the student comes to feel responsible not only for his or her own course of study but ideally for the development of the programme, the institution and the wider society too. The British sociologist Basil Bernstein has proposed that democratic formation can be explored in terms of at least three different elements or rights (Bernstein 1996: xix-xxi; Moos 2007): (1) individual enhancement, that is, the individual’s acquisition of critical understanding and competences for acting in a democracy; (2) inclusion in a community in which the individual is valued and respected; and (3) the formal provisions for student participation, that is, the right ‘to participate in procedures whereby order is constructed, maintained and changed’ (Bernstein 1996: xxi). Whereas RUC’s notion of co-owning students emphasizes all three participatory areas, the in-

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ternational programme in which the complaining eight Chinese students were enrolled seemed either to lack or to fail to convey fully most of these elements to the majority of the Chinese students. This was partly because of conflicting traditions of teaching and learning (the majority of the Chinese students were described as inherently ‘passive’), and partly because of poor information and a lack of integration into the Danish university system and the ‘whole’ that is RUC. Whereas the Chinese students may have been given some formal provision for different kinds of student participation (by being offered seats in the steering group, being asked to fill out course evaluations, etc.), their actual inclusion in a wider community, as well as the enhancement of their democratic competences, seemed to be lacking. Unlike the Danish students, who during the two years of basic studies had been thoroughly introduced to the RUC system and traditions – some embracing them, others criticizing them – and who had long educational careers behind them in which they had been encouraged to be independent thinkers, the Chinese students did not bring with them the same competences and experiences. In this sense, the event shows, in line with Clarke and colleagues’ (2007: 119–20) analysis of the U.K.’s introduction of the notion of the citizen consumer, that involvement and inclusion are essential in making students knowledgeable about the possibilities, constraints and conditions of the university. Only by remembering the integrative side of democracy – and not just by focusing on the instrumental side of aggregating and adjusting to individuals’ or groups’ more or less selfish preferences – can what the institution considers the potentially ‘unmanageable consumer’ be turned into a ‘reasonable’ one (ibid.). In this respect, as Tlili and Wright (2005) have shown in relation to the U.K. student consumer, the Chinese students’ adoption and use of the ‘customer’ category seemed to work as a tool of empowerment for students who otherwise felt disconnected from the wider university community and ignored or misunderstood in their requests or expressions of dissatisfaction. However, the figure of the ‘customer’ is by no means uniform, nor do personal money transactions appear to be a sufficient element for a social figuration to be seen in terms of customer conduct and commodity exchange. Indeed, the understanding of the participatory actions of the complaining Chinese students depends on the relation into which one puts them – that is, on the participatory lines they are understood to actualize. Compared with the ‘passive’ acceptance of authority by their fellow Chinese students, one could argue that the complaining students indeed conveyed a sense of ‘active ownership’.

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They did not wish to be isolated in a ‘Chinese ghetto’, but wanted to be part of the same ‘whole’ and with the same rights and opportunities as their fellow Danish students. They therefore put forward suggestions for improving the programme. However, compared to the ideal of Danish ‘co-owner’ students, their participatory conduct was more customer-like than co-owning. The reason for this was exactly their lack of a sense of belonging and ‘loyalty’ to RUC. The social technologies with which the Chinese students engaged – ‘informal dialogue’, ‘course evaluations’, ‘written complaints’, ‘official meetings’ – could all be seen to establish what Strathern (2002) has called ‘oscillation’ and Jiménez and Willerslev (2007) call moments of ‘reversibility’ and ‘creative potentiality’ in the sense that, to use Strathern’s words, ‘what are summoned are worlds or value systems at once seemingly different from yet also comparable to each other’ (2002: 92–93). Put differently, the different technologies had the potential to elicit and give form to the co-owner as well as the customer figure (or other figures) and thus summon up both a line of integrative participation oriented to the ‘co-citizen’ and a more instrumental or economic line of aggregative participation. They could work to convey what I, following Davina Cooper, in this chapter have called a part-whole relationship, that is, a sense of belonging to a wider community, as well as a subject-object relationship in which students aim to acquire the right titles and diplomas necessary to maximize their intellectual capital as personal property. More generally, throughout the process there seems to have been a constant oscillation between the private property regime of the ‘customer’ and the collective regime emphasized by the ‘co-owner’: education necessarily takes place as both an individual and a communal endeavour. Whereas money was a key element of the customer figure for the teacher and the university leadership, the Chinese students set aside ‘fee payment’ as a relevant defining component of the ‘customer’. To them, all students, whether personally paying or not, were customers and should therefore have the same rights and opportunities. In this light, figuration work revolves around the effort to ‘foreground’ one figure while eclipsing the other as the unmarked ‘background’. As Strathern (2002: 92–93) has pointed out, figure and ground promote an unstable relationship – it is never a definitive matter what is to count as figure and ground. They may be reversed in different settings and moments. As the analysis of this event made clear, the oscillation between – and thus entanglement of – different figures (and their co-produced worlds) is not to be understood as a process of shifting back and forth

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between two (or more) self-identical and uniform figures. A figure, as shown, appears as an absolute entity on a certain ground, but it is at the same time relative to its components and to other figurations. It is in this sense that figures, to use Haraway’s words, always involve some kind of excess or ‘displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties’ (Haraway 1997: 11). They are therefore not to be understood as literal and self-identical. Rather, a figuration is shaped in its entangled (in Barad’s sense) relations to other figurations. In the following chapter I move from the particular institutional setting of the university to a national one and take a closer look at the forms of participation of ‘politically active’ students and how they in different ways attempt to engage in the shaping of Danish universities as well as of society writ large. In doing so, I explore the conflicting notions of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ students in yet another way. The chapter starts with an event that actualizes the friction between different student factions emphasizing parliamentary approaches and more activist methods, respectively. A key issue in the chapter is how different student political activities in various ways balance the possibility of ‘students’ figuring as one student body with one voice, while recognizing that there are also many individual student bodies with different desires and voices. Importantly, the chapter shows how students’ political figuration work is tightly connected to attempts to, so to speak, ‘scale’ the student figure in particular ways – that is, locating the student as a particular kind of participant in particular kinds of ‘wholes’, characterized by particular temporalities in participation, at the expense of other ‘wholes’ and forms of participation.

Notes 1. The ideal student figure at RUC was interchangeably referred to as ‘co-owner’, ‘owner’ and ‘partner’. I have chosen to use the term ‘coowner’ in order to signal the emphasis on institutional ownership while at the same time being able to distinguish between this RUC (co-)ownership ideal (with its emphasis on the communal and consensus-oriented aspects) and divergent kinds of, for example, more individualistic, impersonal and possessive forms of ownership. 2. Like my Danish informants, I use the two notions of the student as ‘consumer’ and ‘customer’ interchangeably. 3. The fact that many users and staff in the U.K. public sector seem reluctant to identify and sympathize with the notion of the ‘consumer’ (Clarke et al. 2007: 66–67) points to the potential mismatch in policy

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

processes between political rationalities, social technologies and people’s subjectivities, thus demonstrating the benefits of exploring the actual negotiations of different figures in everyday practices rather than (over-)emphasizing the social power of political discourses and policy vocabulary. Increasingly, Clarke and colleagues argue, the previous U.K. political focus on the ‘consumer’ has been downplayed in favour of an emphasis on freedom of choice (ibid.: 156). More precisely, tuition was to be charged for students from outside the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA) who were not enrolled in an exchange programme or had been allocated free places and grants. To attract the exceptionally gifted non-European students, a number of scholarships were established (seventy-five in the first year). Hitherto all students, whether from Denmark or abroad, had received free full-time university education, and the state paid the university socalled taximeter subsidies (i.e., output payments given to the university each time a student passed an exam). Tv2 Lorry, 28 July 2005, 7.30 PM. DR News (TV-avisen), 7 November 2005, DR1, 6.30 PM. DR News (TV-avisen), 9 November 2005, DR1, 6.30 PM. In China, different websites were established in this period on which Chinese students and the education exchange bureaus publicly graded and even blacklisted particular foreign universities. Others have argued that the boundary between public and private interests often only becomes semi-permeable, in that often business can interfere with government but not vice versa (Crouch 2004: 98). Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) argue that a new society has coevolved with a new kind of knowledge production. They call this society and mode of production ‘Mode 2’. ‘Mode 1 science’ designates the production of reliable disciplinary knowledge from within an autonomous sphere of science, whereas ‘Mode 2 knowledge production’ characterizes the result of more interdisciplinary work carried out in close connection to a context of application (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott & Gibbons 2001). The agora was the ancient Greek town square. The activities of the agora included trade, theatre, judicial acts, political processes, civic administration and religious ceremonies. As a public meeting place, it was a site of negotiation and interconnection, a place where the spheres of politics, trade, religion, education and so forth intersected. At RUC, the students start with two years of broad ‘basic studies’ in humanities, natural science or social science. The aim is to secure what they call a ‘gradually qualifying selection of subjects’ through which students are introduced to a variety of disciplines before choosing which two (and only exceptionally one) specialized degree programmes to combine for the last three years of the so-called candidate programme. The houses originally consisted of about sixty students, five to six teachers and a secretary. A house today normally consists of around one hun-

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14. 15.

16.

17.

dred students, four to six supervisors and a secretary. After the two years of basic studies, when students start the specialized degree programmes, they are often attached to several houses/departments. Quoted from www.ruc.dk/ruc/studieguide/basisstudier/begrundelser (accessed 10 February 2005). This understanding of student ownership works within the same participatory line as the 1968 student slogan ‘our university’, which has recently been revived by, among others, the international network Reclaim Your Education (including its Danish group). In 2009 student protests in Austria consisting of month-long protests and university occupations included the central student slogans ‘Bildung statt Ausbildung’ (education/general training instead of vocational education) and ‘Unsere Uni’ (our university). See http://unsereuni.at/?lang=en. (accessed 10 March 2010). For decades, politicians have argued for the necessity of more students in the natural and technical sciences, but have refrained from direct intervention due to traditions of university autonomy in quality assessment and enrolment. The 1994 introduction of the taximeter system – through which universities and programmes received basic funding according to the annual number of passed exams – gave universities the incentive to get students to pass their exams, but it has not worked to redistribute the number of students between the different subjects. However, this task seems to be addressed in a new way with the introduction of an accreditation board in 2007, which, as an independent body – but under ministerial order – now evaluates to a greater extent the ‘relevance’ and not just the ‘quality’ of any programme for the job market. The British economist John M. Keynes (1883–1946) argued that the state should pursue an interventionist economic policy (e.g., increased public expenditure and tax relief) to regulate the business cycle and mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions. Keynes’s interventionist theories were influential during the 1950s–60s but lost popularity in the 1970s, when laissez-faire economists like Milton Friedman criticized the Keynesian belief in state-regulated markets. The fact that Friedman won the Nobel Prize in 1976 (and Hayek in 1974) could be seen as a token of a more general shift in Western political thinking in favour of unregulated market economies that took shape with the 1980s politics of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

6 Bodies and Voices

A Student Figure to ‘Collect Up’ the People? Donna Haraway (1991a, 1997) has pointed to how the force and amplitude of a figure – like her trans-boundary ‘cyborg’ – depends on its ability to embody some kind of collective yearning. A figure, she says, can ‘collect up’ the people and reflect back their hopes. It can embody ‘shared meanings in stories that inhabit their audiences’ (1997: 23) and may thereby give a sense of possibility, fulfilment or damnation. In a similar vein, Anna Tsing (2006) has argued that some figures may work as what she calls ‘exemplary figures’ – a notion that resembles the ‘social type’ discussed in the book’s introduction. Exemplary figures, Tsing states, are protagonists that can help both people and the analyst to understand principles of social collectivity and the subjugations and future possibilities of a larger political or economic system – in Tsing’s case, the workings of global capitalism in terms of supply chains and subcontracting (Tsing 2005, 2006, 2010). ‘The industrial worker’, she argues, was an exemplary figure of the left in the nineteenth century in that he conveyed an image of both exploitation and revolution. He experienced and embodied the dark side of capitalism, but by evoking a growing class consciousness, as a figure he could and should lead people into a new and better future by opening their eyes to the signs of exploitation and illness in society. The ‘worker’, in other words, was meant to ‘collect up’ the people, give a sense of possibility, and embody and articulate certain stories about the state of society.

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In light of the historical analyses in chapter 3, one could argue that, during the 1960s and 1970s, ‘the student’ was elicited as a new leftist ‘exemplary figure’ of revolution and prosperity, not least by the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1964, 1968). Due to social transformations from heavy industrial work in bourgeois society to what Marcuse called a one-dimensional consumer society, ‘the worker’ seemed to have lost his revolutionary force. This force, however, could be found in student movements across the world, Marcuse argued. In this way, the student became an exemplary figure of fearless and morally superior resistance to the devastating power of capitalism, a figure of subversion, prosperity and salvation. Its embodied story about the contemporary political and economic world successfully ‘inhabited’ and ‘collected up’ large groups of people – not least students themselves. Even though the hitherto most widespread student revolts and activism worldwide took place in the 1960s and 1970s, students have continued to prove themselves a potentially powerful and often critical subversive group in different societies. Time and again student demonstrations have been the spark igniting wider social protests (see Altbach 2006; Boren 2001, 2007). From China (1989), Indonesia (1998) and South Korea (1987) to Iran (1979, 1999), Prague (1989) and South Africa (1976), ‘the student’ has been identified as a key figure in subversive and revolutionary activities. These cases, as well as recent and massive protests in Chile (2010–), Cameroon (2005–6) and Quebec (2012), show how even though education politics may be a core issue, the protests are often also directed at circumstances and social conditions that go way beyond narrow educational and student political issues. Therefore, the very labelling of critical activities as ‘student rebellion’ or ‘student protests’ – when protesters might just as well have been identified or have identified themselves as, for example, ‘citizens’ or ‘advocates of democracy’ – is often a central part of the ongoing work of political figuration. Protesters may seek to emphasize their student identity in the hope of conjuring up a strong figure that can ‘collect up’ more students and a sympathetic public. Governments or other authorities, however, may use the label to reduce the protests to a question of a few rebels’ immature actions or to render critical masses governable and available to sanctions or punishment. By identifying and acting on a ‘figure of rebellion’, they may succeed in turning a potentially ‘exemplary figure’ into an ‘adverse figure’. In the 1960s Marcuse wanted student movements worldwide to join forces. Today, the Internet provides a new platform interlinking

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the efforts of different critical student networks. At the international level, the activities of the so-called International Student Movement,1 an international platform for communication between (mainly leftist) politically engaged student groups that works against the ‘marketization’ and ‘neoliberalization’ of the education system, show that new kinds of co-ordinated and globally oriented student protests are now possible. In April 2009 the International Student Movement and their Reclaim Your Education network called for a Global Week of Action against the commercialization of education. At the end of the week, students on five continents in more than twenty countries, including Denmark, reported having protested.2 One of their slogans – ‘One world, one struggle: education is not for sale’ – indicates that today what I called in chapter 2 the students’ ‘dual citizenship’ in the university community and a national society is possibly being extended in new ways into a form of ‘triple citizenship’, including a kind of ‘global citizenship’. In light of student protests in Denmark and elsewhere against the conceived general marketization of universities, it is tempting to ask whether the student of today could indeed emerge as an ‘exemplary figure’ showing the pitfalls, exploitation and illness of ‘capitalism’. The power of Marcuse’s social analysis and figure production in the 1960s was enabled, on the one hand, by the critical activities and growing self-consciousness of students themselves, and on the other hand, by Marcuse’s own critical analysis and understanding of the contemporary world, which in turn provided ammunition for the students’ struggles and understandings of the world. This double hermeneutic movement – as Giddens (1984: 347) calls the phenomenon of social theories not only describing but also helping to produce ‘reality’ – between Marcuse’s and the students’ analyses and enactments of the 1960s political world was particularly powerful. Could student movements around the world today enact and embody accounts of reality that are as powerful as in the 1960s and 1970s? Could a student figure be elicited that would ‘collect up’ (the) people and embody ‘shared meanings in stories that inhabit their audiences’, to use Haraway’s phrases? This, of course, is an empirical question that can only fully be answered by future developments. This question, however, has been the key source of inspiration for the enquiries in this chapter. In this chapter, I explore how ‘politically active students’3 in Denmark organize and engage themselves to influence and take part in wider political negotiations, especially on Danish university reform. What are their forms and methods of participation? What are their

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aims and visions? How do they figure the student through their words and actions? How do they (attempt to) create a link to the larger group of non-politically active students? And to what extent are different student figures able to ‘inhabit’, ‘collect up’ and ‘reflect back’ the hopes and visions of a larger Danish student body – and perhaps more generally, of a larger group of people? As in the former chapters, I start by unfolding a particular frictional event, demonstrations against the 2006 welfare reform, in which the National Union of Students (NUS) and the so-called 3% Network of students were key actors. My main concern here is not to attempt to ‘measure’ the effects of the students’ various efforts. Nor is it to seek some hidden ‘truth’ about what ‘really’ happened during, for example, the welfare reform negotiations. It should be clear by now that – like other interactionist-oriented researchers (cf., e.g., Järvinen & Mik-Meyer 2005) – I aim to analyze social reality as it emerges in and through the interactions of different actors and, in my case, to explore how these interactions convey particular kinds of patterned participation and figure production. In other words, the student as a politically active figure in society is to be understood as an effect or function of constant and ongoing ‘ontological politics’ (Mol 1999), that is, of the enactment of contested and unequally supported realities in which some actors deem ‘unrealistic’ what others find necessary and pertinent. Crucially, the Danish students’ diverse political activities should therefore not just be explored as a response in content to, among other things, the government’s reform proposals. Indeed, their negotiation and promotion of different forms of participation play a central role in the conjuring up of different student figures in society. In this chapter, I show how important two interconnected and overlapping components of contestation are to the figuration work undertaken by politically active students in different student organizations and student networks: on the one hand, the balance between students’ parliamentary and activist/extra-parliamentary approaches, and on the other hand, the balance between what student politicians themselves call a student-as-such approach (i.e., student politics as focused on clearly narrow student educational issues) and what I in response call a student-as-citizen approach (i.e., student politics as including critical involvement in all kinds of political issues, including more general ones in wider society). More generally, the chapter shows how students’ attempts to influence the wider educational debates and policies have increasingly included and promoted a particular kind of single-issue, campaign-oriented and ad hoc flexible

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student participation. This development gives rise to questions about the kind of inquisitive and critical engagement students today embark upon. Through an exploration of another student network initiative, the Reboot ’68 conference, I end the chapter by returning to the question of whether students today, forty years after the student revolts of the late 1960s, aim to (and potentially could) promote new collective student revolts, and if so, in what ways, with what methods and with what goals.

Welfare Reform Protests: Conjuring Up a Student Body with One Voice? In April 2006 the Danish government proposed a far-reaching reform of the Danish welfare system. For several years economic advisers had been arguing that the shrinking workforce, the growing number of old, non-working people in need of public services and the increased global competition to attract and keep jobs and businesses in Denmark made it necessary to introduce thorough reforms of the public sector. In 2003 the government set up a so-called Welfare Commission to analyze the anticipated welfare pressures in society and put forward proposals that could reduce the expected growth in public welfare costs while increasing the Danish workforce. In their final report of December 2005 (Velfærdskommissionen 2005), the Welfare Commission suggested, among other things, the introduction of user fees at hospitals and for certain master’s students at Danish universities. The government rejected all fee proposals on the grounds that such central public welfare services should be free for all to promote educational equity and prevent creating greater inequality in society. However, agreeing with the aim of making students start and finish their studies more quickly, the government put forward alternative proposals: a lowering of the study grant for students who begin their study more than two years after they finish upper secondary education; a reduction of study grants to the prescribed period of study (as opposed to having an extra year); an increase in the amount of money the student is allowed to earn before taxes while receiving study grants; a new restricted time limit for the writing of the final thesis; and a change to the taximeter funding for the universities so that they only receive funding for students who finish within the prescribed period of study plus one year (Regeringen 2006b). In a similar vein, reductions in unemployment benefits and early retirement

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benefits were suggested. The logic was clear: economic incentives were expected to get more people into the job market more quickly and for longer. The National Union of Students (NUS)4 strongly criticized the proposed reductions. Reductions in study grants, they argued, would be counter-productive, creating further inequality in the education system and forcing students to take up even more work in their spare time, which in turn would lead to longer study periods. Like the students in the 1960s, the NUS agreed with the political aim of making – or, as they phrased it, helping – more students finish their studies quicker. With reference to their brochure, Shorter Study Periods, of June 2005 (NUS 2005), the NUS argued that better teaching, better study environments and more supervision would be more efficient in lowering the time students took to finish their degrees than the proposed pressure on students’ finances (see, e.g., NUS, press release, 4 April 2006). Similar arguments were also put forward by the opposition in Parliament, who were greatly opposed to the government’s proposals to force direct economic incentives on students. Except for small groupings of conservative students, most of the politically active students were against the proposed welfare reforms and the changes to the study grants and taximeter funding. However, there were strong disagreements and constant negotiations over how to express their dissatisfaction and how to best influence the law-making process. Many organizations and networks of school pupils and students, including the 3% Network from the University of Copenhagen, decided to join forces with participating trade unions in a national demonstration against the welfare reform proposals on 17 May 2006. They wanted to show their general dissatisfaction with the government’s proposed welfare reductions, partly in respect to study grants, but also more broadly with regard to the proposed reductions in unemployment and pension benefits. The NUS and most of the university student councils, however, did not want to join the common demonstration officially. A spokesperson for the National Union of Students publicly announced that the NUS would stick to the parliamentary road. As student organizations that were independent of political parties, they wanted to focus on the specific education policy aspects of the reform proposals and believed their ongoing parliamentary work could be more effective. The minister of science expressed his satisfaction with the National Union of Students’ choice of parliamentary participation and invited them to a lunch meeting with him in the ministry on the very same day as the planned demonstration. At first the NUS decided

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to accept the invitation, believing that they could have an important impact. However, they also feared that their attendance could create dissatisfaction among the students who planned to protest on the streets. They therefore, one of them conveyed to me, only accepted the invitation on the condition that their participation would not be announced publicly. When the ministry nevertheless, in a press release (VTU, press release, 17 May 2006), announced the time of and participants in the meeting and stated that the students were coming to deliver fifteen concrete proposals for reducing the study period, the National Union of Students intensively debated whether to call off the meeting again. The ministry, some of the students thought, had opportunistically abused the old NUS brochure from June 2005 on Shorter Study Periods (in which fifteen initiatives for reductions in study times had been proposed5) to signal that not all students supported the demonstrators and to present the NUS as supportive of the minister’s overall political goals. With a large group of students planning to join the demonstration, the National Union of Students was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, they did not want to pass up the opportunity to talk to and influence the minister to withdraw the proposals for reductions in study grants. On the other hand, if they went to the meeting and thus ignored the participation of potentially thousands of students on the streets, they risked splitting the student body into two opposed strands. Not only did they risk making the National Union of Students unpopular with a large group of students, such a split within the student body could also weaken their own negotiating power by challenging their position as ‘the interest organization’ and ‘voice’ of Danish university students. To find a way out of their dilemma, the National Union of Students decided to have an emergency meeting with some of the students from the 3% Network. The latter consisted of students from the University of Copenhagen and had been a driving force in the planning of the welfare reform demonstration. The network was established in 2005 in protest against cutbacks in university funding, which in its view had amounted to an annual reduction of 3 per cent in recent years. To avoid opposition and conflicting signals within the student body, the network activists and NUS representatives then decided that one of the 3% Network organizers should join the NUS representatives at the meeting with the minister. The NUS now publicly emphasized that they were coming to the meeting with particular ‘demands’ rather than just to ‘negotiate’. To glue together the different student efforts, the National Union of Students publicly

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announced that they were putting forward demands to the ministry that ‘angry students put forward on the streets’ (NUS, press release, 17 May 2006). The students, they said, would ‘continue their work both inside and outside of Parliament until the planned reductions in the study grants were abolished’ (ibid.). After the meeting with the minister, the National Union of Students could publicly announce that the meeting had not led to any concessions to their ‘demands’. Therefore, the 3% Network demonstration organizer could now join the around forty thousand people in the planned demonstration with the message that the students’ struggle continued on the streets. In light of the lack of success of the ‘parliamentary’ route, the planned demonstration had become a logical next step. An internal conflict situation in the student body had been turned into a situation in which the parliamentary and activist strategies of different student groupings would seem complementary rather than contradictory, not least to the majority of the demonstrating students. Furthermore, to the wider public the students were demonstrating to form a visible and quantifiable student ‘body’ that had a correlative representative and parliamentary ‘voice’ in the work and announcements of the National Union of Students. A student figure with ‘one body’ and ‘one voice’ had successfully – however momentarily – been conjured up. On the following days, 3% Network activists in Copenhagen and a so-called Humboldt Movement at Aarhus University continued their protests against the welfare reform proposals and occupied different departments of their respective universities. In Aarhus the student council echoed the National Union of Students and stated that they agreed with the activist students’ criticisms of the welfare reform proposals, but that they did not support their methods because they feared these would weaken the students’ position of negotiation (Rye 2006). A split in the body of politically active students once more became publicly visible.

Activism, Parliamentary Work and the ‘Student-as-Such’ or ‘Student-as-Citizen’ In the final Welfare Agreement ( June 2006), agreed upon by the Liberal-Conservative government, the Social Democrats, the Danish People’s Party and the Social Liberal Party, the reductions in the study grants were abolished. However, other social technologies were introduced to incentivize students to start university at an ear-

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lier age and finish more quickly.6 Many of the NUS students who had played an important role in lobbying against the welfare reform proposals and who took part in the ministerial meeting on the day of the welfare demonstration were confident that their parliamentary work indeed had made a difference. One of them, explaining to a newspaper why the student council of which he was chairman was not participating in an ongoing student occupation of a department at the university, explicitly said that the NUS’s parliamentary work had introduced some of NUS’s own ideas for reducing the study periods in the political negotiations on the final welfare agreement (Rye 2006). In contrast, as we shall see in the following, some of the more activist-oriented students, like Mads, a member of the 3% Network, believed that the ‘public pressure’ put on the politicians through the big welfare demonstration and through student activities like the occupation of certain university departments being intensely covered in the media had been much more effective. As already noted, I take no particular interest in attempting to ‘measure’ to what extent the students’ parliamentary and extra-parliamentary work, respectively, was more or less important to the final agreement. Rather, what I find interesting is how the welfare reform demonstration as an event conjures up and articulates particular figures and points to certain patterns in the aims and methods of the politically active student. In the following I therefore explore in greater depth the strategies and forms of participation promoted by the National Union of Students and the 3% Network, respectively. The NUS’s reluctance to participate in the 2006 welfare reform demonstration and their prioritization of a ‘student-as-such’ and parliamentary approach seems symptomatic of the participatory line it had pursued in preceding years. Dorthe, one of the leading NUS politicians before, during and after the negotiations over the 2003 Danish University Act, described to me how in the new millennium, and particularly when negotiating the draft of the university act in 2002, the NUS had intensively worked to promote and organize itself as a ‘professional interest organization’ as opposed to the ‘more leftist’ and ‘more grassroots-like organization’ that, in her view, had been characteristic of the NUS in earlier times (see also chapter 3). And as a ‘professional interest organization’, many NUS students told me, lobbyism and parliamentary negotiations were to be the organization’s main means of participation. During the negotiations over the draft university law in 2002, the NUS had for the first time been active in lobbying all the political parties represented in Parliament, and not just, as in earlier times,

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being in contact with certain left-wing parties. They had gradually built up what they felt was a profitable relationship with the minister of science and met with the ministry on a regular basis – in the most intensive periods, every week. As Dorthe told me, they ended up being a relatively ‘confidant collaborator’ of the Ministry of Science, despite not always having identical interests. In terms of organizing demonstrations or other activities, Dorthe and one of her fellow NUS student politicians, Karen, explained that the NUS had burned its fingers several times during the negotiations over the 2003 Danish University Act. The NUS had ideally wanted to include parliamentary as well as extra-parliamentary initiatives to engage more students in the debate. In terms of the latter, they felt they had not really succeeded. First, university students are generally difficult to mobilize, they said. Second, some of the demonstrations, co-organized with other pupil and student organizations, had turned out to convey what the NUS experienced as an overly general and leftist critique of the government. This was a problem, Dorthe and Karen said, because if the NUS wanted to be recognized as a ‘serious interest organization’ for Danish students, they had to maintain a non-partypolitical attitude, stick to a ‘student-as-such’ orientation, go into dialogue with politicians and be ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’. During the negotiations over the 2003 Danish University Act, Dorthe argued, the NUS had ideally wanted to return to a truly collegial governance system more like the one before the 1992 law (with which university leaders had first gained increased power; see chapter 3). However, this was never something they explicitly fought for, since they believed it to be politically unrealistic. Most NUS students I talked to felt that it was thanks to this pragmatic strategy and a well-coordinated parliamentary effort between the different student councils that the government had in the end agreed to write into the 2003 Danish University Act a provision that students should have a minimum of two seats on the new governing boards (whereas academic and administrative staff were only given a minimum of one seat each; see chapter 2). Elaborating on the balance between ‘idealism’ and ‘pragmatic realism’, Dorthe said: Sometimes we throw our more idealistic considerations overboard in order to say, well, if we are to represent the students in the best possible way, then we have to play the game on the game’s premises … had we [demonstrated on the streets in earnest] and been very critical, then we wouldn’t have had a meeting with the ministry every third week. Then it’s a different game one plays. Then the rules for collaboration are different. (Dorthe, student politician, NUS, 2005)

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Parliamentary work is here compared to a ‘game’ that can be matched with public demonstrations and other actions only with difficulties and at some risk. To Dorthe, a ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’ approach is about entering into ‘collaboration’ (and not just promoting resistance), thinking in terms of compromises and working out what one is likely to obtain in practice. It is about ‘playing the game by the rules’, she said. During the welfare reform negotiations, the NUS seemed to pursue and hang on to this ‘pragmatic’ and ‘professional’ approach, which they felt had previously provided such good results. In contrast to the NUS’s strong belief in the effects of parliamentary work, many of the 3% Network protesters conveyed a rather different attitude. Mads, one of the 3% Network organizers of the welfare reform demonstration, said: My view on this has to some extent been a bit contemptuous towards those people who only want to sit and negotiate … honestly if people have the illusion that if I go and negotiate with Helge Sander [the minister of science] and put forward some good arguments, then he’ll abandon the whole of his government’s development plan for Denmark … really, I simply don’t believe in it. It can make sense to talk with him and you can obtain certain things but if you don’t put pressure on him in public opinion, he won’t move. (Mads, 3% Network, 2006)

Mads’s argument, re-written in my analytical vocabulary, is that the publicly visible and collective activities in which all students – and not only a few student ‘representatives’ – are able to take part can ‘collect up’ not only more students but potentially also gain the sympathy of ‘the public’ in a radically different manner than what parliamentary politics is often capable of. Since the study grant proposals were part of a larger political scheme, one has to seek to mobilize activity and sympathy in the larger public in order to influence the process. Mads and many other activist-oriented students I talked to argued that student politics should not revolve too narrowly around ‘studentas-such’ issues. The student organizations, many of these students argued, should also involve themselves in, and view the students’ situation and condition in relation to, more general social and political issues. Student campaigns within the university can and should be linked to more general social struggles. Furthermore, these students argued, the broader social struggles and activities attract and include many more students than the narrow and what they often described as ‘technocratic’ student-as-such political campaigns are able to. In this regard it is interesting, if not statistically significant in any way, that when, during the welfare reform demonstration, I inter-

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viewed nine different students who had not been involved in the planning of the demonstration but just showed up to support it, they all stated that they participated because it was a demonstration directed towards general welfare reforms. They were primarily protesting against the wider economic logic of the reforms, and most of them said that they would probably not have shown up had it only been a demonstration against reductions in study grants. It was not that protests against such reductions were unimportant, they said, but the connection with the wider and more general political rationalities of public government made it more urgent and essential for them to show their dissatisfaction and their sympathy with what they saw as some of the more vulnerable groups in society like the sick or the long-term unemployed. In this vein, one could argue that these students had been mobilized as citizens, as part of a common Danish society, rather than as students ‘as such’. In contrast to the student-as-such figure promoted by the National Union of Students, broader political initiatives like the welfare reform demonstrations work to conjure up and make space for a different student figure, a figure that, in response to the ‘student-as-such’ concept, one might call the ‘student-as-citizen’. What is important to my discussion here is that the established student organizations that are independent of political parties (the NUS and the student councils) and the flexible student networks, respectively, seem to build up their legitimacy, activities and ‘voices’ around very different understandings of student ‘representation’ and student ‘interests’. A pertinent question, therefore, is to what extent students can be seen as one group with one set of interests. As we saw in the historical chapter, the question about whether or not students are a unique ‘social group’ or ‘class’ with particular collective interests in Danish society and within the university was already being debated in the early nineteenth century, when a new student selfconsciousness emerged. Today, the National Union of Students (and its member student councils) calls itself the ‘voice of the students’ and identifies itself as an ‘interest group’. The idea of an ‘interest group’ is, as Marilyn Strathern has pointed out (2004: 31–32), conditioned by the notion of a ‘perspective’, that is, of making possible and promoting a single view of the world and of conjuring up a group of people as one ‘body’ with one ‘voice’ that expresses their particular ‘view’ and ‘interests’. But how are collective ‘interests’ identified? When is a voice ‘representative’? And to what extent is ‘representation’ dependent on the active recognition of common interests by the larger body of ‘group members’?

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Figuration as/through ‘Representation’ and ‘Interests’ In his article on ‘“Interests” in Political Analysis’, Barry Hindess (1986) points to how in some analyses collective ‘interests’ are assumed to be a logical consequence of an actor’s or group of actors’ location within a (more or less stable) structure of social relations so that ‘the interests of a class or social category are supposed to be a function of its position in relation to other classes and categories’ (ibid.: 113). This structural understanding is, of course, particularly evident in some Marxist-inspired analyses in which ‘class interests’ are seen as more ‘real’ than other defined interests. If the class interests remain unrecognized by the members of the class themselves, some Marxists argue, it is because of ‘false consciousness’, which can be remedied by providing the members of the class with a ‘true’ analysis of the world. Thus, the ‘class-in-itself’ would move in the direction of a ‘class-for-itself’ whereby the members share a common class and group consciousness. However, Hindess (in contributing to John Law’s actor-network theory–oriented volume on a ‘new sociology of knowledge’) argues that collective ‘interests’ are not simply structurally determined or given. As a result, no interests or representations can objectively be deemed more ‘real’ than others. Interests are open to dispute and depend on the discursive forms of interest assessment available to and employed by different actors. Such assessments, Hindess argues, are not uniquely determined by one social category or location, but will always be influenced by a variety of different conditions. In terms of student politics, smaller party-political student organizations, like the Social Democratic Free Forum or the Conservative Students, have time and again claimed that students are a heterogeneous group that cannot and should not be represented through a single organization (this view was also put forward by the so-called moderate students vis-à-vis the student councils in the wake of the 1970 university law; see chapter 3). At regular intervals, they criticize some of the student councils for being undemocratic or for excluding other student organizations through strategically organized electoral registers and by virtue of having economic privileges. In response, the student councils argue that since, in contrast to the party-political student organizations, they do not have prefixed principles or ideologies, all students can join, form and influence the councils’ work. Furthermore, they argue, through democratic electorates and open council meetings, the student councils are grounded in the so-called student subject councils (fagråd ) for each programme, which means

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that mandates are (ideally) carried up from these student subject councils to the faculty level, to the student council at university level and lastly to the NUS at the national level. The students involved in activist or extra-parliamentary kinds of political work, like the 3% Network, did not necessarily see themselves in opposition to the NUS and the student councils.7 Indeed, the University of Copenhagen Student Council supported the 3% Network’s activities financially, and some of the most dedicated 3% Network members, like Rikke, had also been involved in student council activities. However, the 2006 welfare reform event made it particularly clear that ‘representation’, the identification of ‘interests’ and not least how to promote them is no simple matter. As was the case in 1968 when the then rector of the University of Copenhagen invited the students’ representatives to collaborate (cf. Nissen 2008), the welfare reform event points to the difficulty of settling representation. Who are most representative of ‘the students’, the NUS/student councils or the activists/demonstrators? When I asked Rikke and Mads, two of the leading figures in the 3% Network from the University of Copenhagen, about the representative status of their activities vis-à-vis the University of Copenhagen Student Council’s work, the ambiguity and dilemmas of ‘representation’ were unfolded in the following way: Rikke: [The Student Council] has a democratic legitimacy and it’s important that we recognize the Student Council also because they are grounded in the local ‘student subject councils’ [fagråd ], which we aren’t. Mads: Yeah, nor is Green Agenda [another student network] – as a political science project that runs for the university elections and has like thirty members and tries to speak on my behalf. And they can’t. I don’t have any influence on them … Rikke: That’s also why the 3% Network said – well, I argued for it – that we don’t feel like we represent everybody. We represent ourselves … we acknowledged that the Student Council represented all students [from the University of Copenhagen]. Mads: And you don’t have to be more than ten persons, and you don’t have to speak on anyone’s behalf if you make an exciting and fun action that comes out in Politiken [a national newspaper], then you’ve put a focus on the issue you found wrong. Rikke: Precisely! And then you anyway, in some kind of underlying manner, come to speak for a lot of students because there are damned well a lot of students who think that this is wrong, but can’t act upon it.

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Mads: And they join our group room on the Internet and do all sorts of things … There was a great flow. Each time we circulated a flyer, then new people would sign in on our Internet group, some then signed out later. Rikke: Yeah, precisely, and then there was just more and more people … I think it’s generally good if people have a sense of belonging to what you are doing. It’s so cool that there are 180 or 200 or 300 or whatever membership number we reached in the 3% Network. It’s so cool. It gives … well, you can always say, if we are talking legitimacy, right, that we represented – in terms of how many people who read our e-mails and were likely to participate in activities – in long periods far more students than the Student Council.

In the conversation, Rikke and Mads convey two overall and to some extent conflicting understandings of legitimate representation and participation. On the one hand, Rikke and Mads argue that the University of Copenhagen Student Council represents all students due to its democratic structure, whereas the 3% Network does not represent anyone but the network itself. On the other hand, however, they also suggest that, in a way, the many (full-time or ad hoc) participants in their activities and in their group room could be seen as providing them with a stronger representative status than the Student Council. The ambiguity of the 3% Network’s and the Student Council’s representative status here seems to revolve around their different abilities to ‘collect up’ people. In this case, ‘collecting up’ may be seen to include what Klandermans has called ‘activity mobilization’ (i.e., mobilization of people to participate directly in particular activities) and ‘consensus mobilization’ (i.e., the creation of supporters and sympathy from a group of people) (see Klandermans, quoted in Mikkelsen 2002: 24). In a way, Rikke and Mads argue that the 3% Network was better at promoting both ‘activity’ and ‘consensus’ mobilization. They had not only made many students actively involved in their activities, but had also, mainly through the open Internet group room, been able to convey their reform criticism to more students than the University of Copenhagen Student Council. Furthermore, as noted, Mads was firmly convinced that the network’s more visible, media-covered and collective activities like demonstrating or occupying buildings are generally better at promoting supporters among students and more generally in ‘the public’. Evidently, if ‘activity mobilization’ and the number of students involved in different kinds of political activities is seen as the parameter of political legitimacy and representation, then the University

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of Copenhagen Student Council, with its independence from political parties, has indeed faced challenges for decades. Many of the most active student politicians spend many hours organizing seminars, handing out flyers, making presentations and in different ways trying to inform and engage their fellow students in current student political issues – often, however, with poor results. At the University of Copenhagen, participation in the Student Council’s so-called Common Student Council meeting (fællesrådsmøde), in university elections and in the work of the governing bodies, from the study boards to the old Senate and the new governing boards, have gradually decreased since the heyday of student political involvement in the late 1960s and 1970s.8 Today, in some cases it is difficult to attract students to run even for the study boards on which they have half the seats and direct influence on their own programmes. A quotation hanging in one of the offices of the NUS points to this prominent dilemma of the student politician: ‘Student politicians are like football players. You have to be good enough to know the game but stupid enough to think that it is important.’ This quote was recounted to me with a smile by Dorthe, the NUS student politician, for whom it referred to the fact that the non-politically active students are most often indifferent to and do not find the parliamentary work of student politicians particularly important. In the quotation, student politics is once again likened to a ‘game to be played by certain rules’ (in line with Dorthe’s description above). And indeed, it seems to be this particular ‘playing’ of student politics that often creates a gap between dedicated student politicians and other students. ‘Often they see us as “nerds” or “technocrats” who are just doing it to improve our own CVs and employment opportunities’, Karen, the NUS student politician, said when asked about how other students responded to her student political work. However, Karen, like Dorthe, strongly rejected this description. Of course the personal experience of working in an interest organization and building up a network were essential. But had this been their only motivation, they pointed out, they would have found other organizations or interest groups in which their efforts and long working hours would be more valued and recognized by the people whose interests they worked so hard to promote. The challenge for the student organizations seems to be that the ‘professional’ parliamentary work and lobbyism, on their own, often suffer from exclusiveness and a lack of general mobilizing appeal to the broader student body. On the one hand, a certain kind of exclusive ‘expert knowledge’ about larger and sometimes rather technical educational policy matters is necessary if students

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want to influence different national and institutional policy processes through their lobbyism and parliamentary work in governing bodies. Also, they have to take the organizational procedures seriously in order to obtain recognition as an interest group from university leaders, national politicians and other interest groups. On the other hand, to the larger student body, lobbyism and parliamentary work often remain opaque, lack transparency or are simply invisible. Likewise, the technical or procedural discussions, which I felt sometimes dominated the Common Student Council meetings of the University of Copenhagen Student Council, were likely to come over as incomprehensible, tedious or even ridiculous to newcomers. In this vein, it is obvious that the ‘discourses of interest assessment’ – to use Hindess’s (1986) vocabulary – available to many of the non-politically active students and the student politicians, respectively, are different. For example, almost all students seem to agree upon broad issues like obtaining more ‘flexibility’, ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘better teaching’. However, in relation to more specific and technical matters like the use of external examiners, Dorthe said, there are often important differences to be found. The ‘ordinary student’, as Dorthe, using quotation marks, called the non-politically active students (which indeed signals that ordinarily students do not involve themselves in university politics), will often prefer ‘more teaching’ if it comes down to choosing between spending scarce resources on teaching or on expensive external examiners. The student politicians, on the other hand, are likely to see things from a more fundamental and general viewpoint and will often fight hard for the right to external examiners, since, she said, this is an essential factor in guaranteeing quality and securing the students’ legal rights. Such differences in the assessment of interests and the definition of ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ are the reason why not all mandates can be carried up all the way from the local student subject councils ( fagråd) to the university student councils and lastly to the NUS. Therefore, rather than legitimizing ‘representation’ and the identification of student ‘interests’ through ‘activity’ or ‘consensus mobilization’, a different kind of figuration work must sometimes be brought into play: ‘We have to make sure that the student representatives put forward opinions that in a way are in agreement with what the student would say had he or she possessed this knowledge, which he or she does not’ (Karen, student politician, NUS, 2005). Students’ ‘collective interests’ here are identified and made representative through the conjuring up of a kind of generalized ‘enlightened student’ figure – a ‘student’ who, with the right amount of knowl-

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edge and expertise added, would recognize certain interests as his/her own. The legitimacy of the identified ‘interests’, therefore, is drawn from a kind of ‘latent’ or ‘hypothetical’ mobilization of consensus. The subtle premises for this argument are an understanding of students as one body with one voice – that is, of students as a group-initself with more or less ‘real’ interests that can be identified through ‘enlightened’ debate. The importance and necessity of this kind of ‘representational’ figuration work notwithstanding (especially since many students appear to be inaccessible for ‘activity mobilization’ and explicit ‘consensus mobilization’ due to political indifference), most student politicians seem very much aware of and concerned about the pitfalls of it as well. The problem is, of course, that it does not embody any shared meanings. Most students would not directly ‘recognize’ these ‘interests’ as their own. And unrecognized interests, as Hindess (1986) states, do not provide actors with reasons for action. In other words, this kind of ‘latent’ or ‘hypothetical’ consensus mobilization may indeed work to conjure up a notion of a ‘people’, a ‘body with one voice’, and make the NUS/student councils capable of deeming certain interests more ‘legitimate’ or ‘real’ than others, but it does not seem to ‘collect up’ people in earnest. In contrast, the activities offered and promoted through the 3% Network seemed to ‘collect up’ and mobilize students successfully against the perceived cutbacks to and reductions in the education sector. As we shall see in the following, this participatory energy can be understood as a token of a more general development in the patterns of student participation. In fact, many students have identified a shift in the forms and levels of student political activities around the time (2005–6) when the 3% Network was active. The new generation of students, they argue, are more active. But in what ways, exactly, are they ‘active’? What kind of ‘collecting up’ do activities like the ones instigated through the 3% Network reflect and promote? And how do the established student organizations adapt to such changes?

Flexible, Ad Hoc Participation and a New Generation of ‘Active Students’ Like many of the most dedicated student politicians/activists, Rikke had experiences of pupil politics in high school, where the tradition for extra-parliamentary work is stronger and the pupils more easily mobilized. However, in joining student politics at university, she felt

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the University of Copenhagen Student Council to be far too rigid and technocratic. At one point, she had been involved in the Student Council’s Presidium (i.e., their executive committee), but had experienced there what she described as a very ‘negative culture’. At the time, she said, older and more experienced students were accustomed to telling off or even ridiculing the newcomers – ‘Presidium bashing’, as she called it. So even though in principle the Student Council could be changed and formed according to active students’ desires, in the Presidium there seemed to be a ‘right’ way to go about things. New ideas, Rikke said, were frequently impeded, criticized or just ‘killed‘ through long discussions about the adequacy and correctness of, for example, a few sentences in a written presentation. Therefore, she had also involved herself in alternative student groupings, not least the 3% Network. Both Mads and Rikke found the 3% Network liberating and fun. Here they could create things from the bottom and do whatever they felt like doing. With its ad hoc groupings, each covering different areas according to what people wanted to do, the 3% Network, Rikke and Mads told me, attracted other and more ‘idealistic’ kinds of students. They found that there had been a strong identity creation among the active students – it was ‘cool’ to be a 3% Network member, Mads said. Rikke saw the 3% Network as an important sign of the new participatory energy that she felt had emerged within the student body around the years 2005–6. In a similar vein, another prominent student politician/activist who had also been involved in the 3% Network as well as the University of Copenhagen Student Council in 2008 told a newspaper: When I started at university [four years ago] you almost didn’t dare to make an action [en aktion] or happening because you were afraid of ending up with two participants and being a laughing stock. There has definitely been a change – people have become more active and take more of a stand on their studies. (Villesen 2008b)

Student participation in university elections does not appear to be growing, nor does the number of students interested in parliamentary student work on study boards, faculty councils or student councils. So, if the present generation of students in some ways appears – and in the media (ibid.) are identified as – more politically engaged and active than students a decade ago, it is not least because their participation increasingly seems to be taking on new forms.

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Indeed, what seems to be attracting a new generation of students is a particular kind of ad hoc, eclectic and flexible form of participation. The 3% Network provided new forms of both physical and cyberspace-based integration. Students were connected as both an Internet community and as concrete groups of people getting together to demonstrate, occupy a building, create an event, distribute a flyer and so forth. Each single activity was then tied to the larger network through accounts, links and calendars on the Internet. In the Internet group room, anyone could sign up and log in whenever it suited them. They could organize activities or just pick and choose between the ones already offered in the group room. In their welfare reform protests, the 3% Network was linked to other networks and organizations like the University of Copenhagen Student Council, the Humboldt Movement in Aarhus (which occupied a part of the university) and the national activist network Restart Denmark (consisting of the youth sections of diverse workers’ unions and several of the pupil and student national unions, but tellingly not the National Union of Students). All these networks and organizations were involved in collecting signatures for a petition against the welfare reform proposal, which was also supported and distributed by the 3% Network. In this manner, a range of different activities and initiatives were made visible and available for the students to support and join if they wanted. These tendencies and quests for flexible student participation in the politics of national education eventually also had an impact on the work and organizational structure of the University of Copenhagen Student Council. In 2006 the Student Council reformed its organization so that the areas of ‘politics’ and ‘administration’ became more separated (shortly afterwards, the NUS followed suit). Starting from her above-mentioned criticism of the ‘old’ University of Copenhagen Student Council, Rikke described the changed character and structure of the Student Council’s work in the following manner: There were so many limitations [in the Student Council]. First of all, those Common Student Council meetings [fællesrådsmøder], they could kill any healthy person, I think. Because you sit there for seven hours and you have to go through everything. You can’t just be allowed to be interested in a particular issue … and it was extremely detail-oriented and technocratic. … Maybe the Student Council wasn’t particularly broad [rummelig] at the time. It was only for the elite who would sacrifice all their spare time. Today there is room for those who are good at participating at meetings, as well as those who are more practical and only fight

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for a single issue. (Rikke, active in 3% Network and the University of Copenhagen Student Council, 2007)

Previously, it seems, the active student was expected to identify with and become part of the organization as a whole to a greater extent. He/she was supposed to take part in all discussions and initiatives, and little room was left for more differentiated participation. It seems that, in order to be ‘active’, one should learn to ‘play the game by the rules’ as it was played and defined by the full-time committed students. After 2005–6, in contrast, single-issue involvement, campaigns and extra-parliamentary work were more whole-heartedly prioritized and included. This shift in students’ participation in the Student Council was also pointed out to me by Hans, a former student politician of the 1990s who now, for many years, had worked with the university and Student Council administration. When, two years after the big welfare reform demonstration, I interviewed Hans, he said that previously, when he had been active in the 1990s, the active students in the Student Council practically ‘moved in’, identified strongly with the Student Council and were often engaged in the organization almost full-time. You were ‘old’ in the organization when you had been there for six or seven years, and the active students had a strong identity as student politicians. Now, he said, even the most hard-core student politicians are rarely seriously involved in the Student Council for more than three years. Students’ participation in the Student Council and more generally in student political activities has changed fundamentally, he said: The expectations about being active are very different now. In more leftist 1970-ish organizations you go through the door and say, ‘I want to be active.’ And then you start engaging yourself and serving the organization in whatever presents itself. And the organization’s expectations are insatiable. It never stops. You’ve never given enough. … Today what they give the organization is more measured. They want something particular. They want to obtain something. Obtain some tangible results. … They are very hardworking and goal-oriented. … They make campaigns, actions and send around e-mails and text messages, and then suddenly you have two hundred people there. You wouldn’t think they could do that. We couldn’t ten years ago. But they can. We shall not expect those people to turn up tomorrow as well – they have now had an offer to participate in this action where we are dressed like this and do this and this, and it’s going to be fun and it starts at 10 AM and ends at 5 PM. And then you have not committed yourself to doing anything else. Then people show up. And in great numbers too. But these many people do not turn up the day after … they make a campaign, and it takes from here to there and when

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it’s done they turn to something else. To their studies or something completely different. They don’t just hang around and do whatever is needed. It has to be eventful. They want something out of it. They want to be able to say, ‘I did that.’ (Hans, former student politician in the 1990s, 2008)

Measured, goal-oriented, eventful and transient – that is how Hans describes the tendencies in students’ participation today. The smaller group of more hard-core and full-time dedicated student politicians who find a strong identity and sense of belonging with the student organization still exist, and probably always will. But more students now seem to be involved on an ad hoc activist and campaign-oriented basis. Like Mads, the 3% Network member, many students take no interest in participating in long, technocratic meetings. Furthermore, they seem to fear being ‘caught in a web of obligations’, as one student phrased it. Not only do these students want to be able to shift their attention between different areas of interest, they also want the flexibility to participate in activities when, where and how it suits them. The tendency towards single-issue participation described by Hans and Rikke is not unique to students. The comprehensive Danish Democracy and Power Study (Magtudredningen) conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s showed that, even though general political and democratic participation in Denmark has not fallen over the past forty years, the forms of participation have increasingly changed from collective to more individualized ones. The broad social movements of the 1970s and 1980s have increasingly been replaced by single-issue involvement, single-issue organizations and new kinds of ‘individualized collective activities’ (e.g., political consumerism, the signing of petitions or the donating of money where people act according to a larger collective stream or tendency, but do so individually, when and where it suits them) (see J. G. Andersen 2002; Togeby et al. 2003). Crucially, this flexible, pick-and-choose, single-issue form of participation, despite its politically ‘active’ character, in certain ways resembles ‘consumer’ conduct, that is, if the notion of the ‘consumer’, as described by Clarke and colleagues (2007), is understood to address a certain kind of ‘possessive individualism’ in which one is ‘free to choose’, is self-directed, pursues one’s own interests and has ‘the capacity to dispose of one’s own property as one wishes’ (ibid.: 2). Therefore, it becomes pertinent to explore how, given the tendential line of ad hoc, pick-and-choose, single-issue student activism, the different student networks and organizations attempt to glue

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together and reconcile students’ various engagements and visions. Do students, for example, find it possible and desirable to create a common student identity and movement? In addressing this issue, I return to the question raised in the introduction to this chapter about whether or how ‘the student’ today could emerge as an ‘exemplary figure’ – perhaps showing the pitfalls and disadvantages of current university reforms and of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘capitalism’.

Reboot ’68: Conjuring Up a ‘Body without Organs’ In May 2008, a group of students, some of whom had previously been involved in the 3% Network, student councils and the NUS, used the forty-year jubilee of the 1968 student revolts to organize a conference on the possibilities of conducting critique and promoting change today. ‘Capitalism’ and/or ‘neoliberalism’ seemed to be a common target in their various critiques. Reflecting upon the 1968 revolt slogan, ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible’, the Reboot ’68 organizers asked the around 250 participants (at least three-quarters of whom seemed to be students from the humanities and the social sciences) if today it is still realistic to demand the impossible. Under the slogan ‘Reboot ’68’, they wanted to explore, as they said, the common revolutionary potential of their generation, one that they, in line with Rikke above, saw as more active and responsible than previous generations. In order to do this, they had, first, invited a panel of five young people (mainly students), including a Greenpeace activist, an asylum activist, a student activist/student council member and a young bricklayer engaged in union politics, and second, organized a series of workshops on issues like ‘feminism’, ‘global justice’, ‘student politics’, ‘capitalism critique’, ‘counter-culture’ and ‘radical democracy’. In the ‘student politics’ workshop, the current (2008) vice-president of the University of Copenhagen Student Council (a sociology student in his early twenties) and his equivalent from 1968 (later the president of the National Union of Students and now a research librarian at a Danish university) were invited to make introductory presentations about if or how students can use the experiences of the student revolts in 1968 in their protests today. (Tellingly, this workshop was one of the least attended, with fewer than twenty participants, whereas those on ‘capitalism critique’ and ‘feminism’ had around a hundred.) The 1968 vice-president, with a reference to an old 1968 slogan, advised present-day students to ‘focus on the beach

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under the paving stones’. Here, he referred to the 1968 Paris slogan ‘Sous les pavés, la plage’ (Under the paving stones, the beach), which has been seen as referring both to the ideal of a more fulfilling and free life (the playfulness and freedom possible on a beach) beyond the modern materialist and capitalistic society (the paving stones), and as a method of reaching this playful freedom by using the paving stones in the cities to build barricades and fight the police and the government. The 1968 vice-president argued that although the ‘old’ university (of professorial rule) was long gone and not desirable, the ‘new’ marketized profit university remained to be questioned in earnest. He therefore encouraged the students to fight for the ‘beach’, the ‘impossible’ and ‘not-yet-thought-of’ university. In order to do this, the 1968 vice-president advocated a stronger student political focus on ‘subject criticism’ (fagkritik; see chapter 3), on students’ everyday lives and on the promotion of a general attitude of curious and critical debate, not least among students and teachers. In other words, as a general critical attitude, students’ participation should not just be concerned with student-as-such issues, but naturally include all aspects of their lives. Even though the 2008 vice-president sympathized with this vision, he argued that the student councils of today should mainly focus on the struggle over interests (interesse-kamp). His aim and hope was to ‘mobilize’ students in protest against current university politics, not least the 2003 Danish University Act, which had undermined students’ democratic voices. In his view, this was only feasible by thinking in ‘interests’ and establishing alliances. In response to the 1968 vice-president’s emphasis on critical thinking and subject criticism, he therefore said: We can’t mobilize students with a campaign for critical thinking. ‘Think – god dammit, think’; such a slogan won’t work. We have to be better at thinking in oppositions. ‘The law’ or ‘the ministry’, and maybe also some of ‘the leaders’ are our enemies. But not the teachers. They are against the law as well. (vice-president, University of Copenhagen Student Council, 2008)

In line with the growing tendency towards ad hoc, single-issue participation, he focused on the opportunity to mobilize through ‘campaigns’ and catchy ‘slogans’. Student councils, he said, do not have enough resources to work for ‘subject criticism’. This has to be dealt with locally. Furthermore, in response to some of the participating students’ advocating that student organizations engage in broader

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social and political discussions, like the Iraq War (i.e., a student-ascitizen approach), he said: I do believe in the student as a driving and transforming force in society, but it is as students that we are taken seriously and have legitimacy. … In the seventies they had a stronger idea about how things should be. We really need that to create a strong student movement today. We need some kind of core, a kind of student ideology … a common project or narrative, around which to build up our movement. (vice-president, University of Copenhagen Student Council, 2008)

From his position as a student council vice-president, his hope seemed to be to move students more towards a ‘class-for-itself’, to create a strong narrative that can inhabit and collect up students as such to form a strong ‘movement’. In line with the union-like student-assuch approach of the established student councils and the NUS, he argued that the promotion of a common student identity – that is, one visible and audible student ‘body-voice’ – is the most effective way to conduct criticism and promote change in the universities (and, as a more secondary ambition, in the wider society). However, if the notion of a ‘movement’ is understood to imply a kind of generic social identity generated through collective activities and a common consciousness (J. G. Andersen 2002: 226), it seems questionable whether it is possible to conjure up a general ‘student movement’ with a generic amplitude. Considering the growing number of students with increasingly varied backgrounds and educational aims, their general indifference to university politics and the tendency towards transient ad hoc participation, it could seem something of a challenge to carry through this ambition. Here, it becomes relevant to turn briefly to Gilles Deleuze’s (1995b) discussion of the changing conditions for group mobilization and resistance. Drawing on Foucault’s analyses of discipline power, Deleuze argues that we have increasingly moved from ‘disciplinary societies’ towards what he calls ‘control societies’. Disciplinary societies, he says, operate through institutional sites of confinement (prisons, hospitals, schools, factories, etc.), which physically place people in time and space and discipline them in conformity with distinct, pre-given norms. In control societies, on the other hand, the borders of the disciplinary institutions are increasingly being undermined and their functions distributed. Therefore, whereas discipline and confinement worked through ‘moulds’ and distinct casting, control, Deleuze argues, is characterized by constant and never-ending ‘modulation’, transformation and (self-)development.

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Even though this argument seems too reductionist and epochal in its tone, Deleuze indeed points to an essential question related to current figuration work. As he says, it is through the practices of confinement and distinct casting in disciplinary societies that individuals are likely to be formed into ‘a body of men for the joint convenience of a management that could monitor each component in this mass, and trade unions that could mobilize mass resistance’ (Deleuze 1995b: 179, emphases added). Therefore, if transient ad hoc participation, self-government, flexible network organizations and growing freedom of choice for students (to choose between different universities, courses and political activities – which again include a more transient and changeable sense of belonging, as we saw in chapters 4 and 5) have become increasingly important, the question is whether the vice-president’s focus on and hope of conjuring up one single student-as-such body-voice will in certain senses prove to be obsolete. As Deleuze points out, ‘One of the most important questions is whether trade unions still have any role: linked throughout their history to the struggle against disciplines, in sites of confinement, can they adapt, or will they give way to new forms of resistance against control societies?’ (Deleuze 1995b: 182). Whereas, as a consequence of his position, the vice-president was focusing on student politics and the mobilization of students through one single narrative, the Reboot ’68 organizers seemed to be proposing another path for generating criticism and change. Do we here, perhaps, see some of the new forms of resistance and critical thinking that Deleuze asks to? Let us take a closer look at the Reboot ’68 ideas and visions. Interestingly, if Herbert Marcuse was a great source of inspiration for critical students in the 1960s, the Reboot ’68 students in their criticisms of ‘capitalist’ or ‘neoliberal’ society clearly resonated with the work of thinkers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 2004), Jacques Rancière (1999), Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (2005) and not least Gilles Deleuze himself. Now, the word ‘reboot’ means to reset a computer and cause the operating system to reload. The Reboot ’68 students, however, made it very clear that they did not want to copy the 1968 student revolts. They emphasized that they did not want to repeat what they saw as the errors of their revolting predecessors, namely, the promotion of dogmatism and (Marxist) rigidity in thought. They wanted to maintain a dynamic and flexible room for criticism. In this vein, and in drawing on Deleuze’s vitalistic philosophy, the Reboot students saw ‘1968’ as a ‘revolutionary becoming’, ‘a convergence of different lines of flight that meet in a single spot’ (see, e.g., Deleuze 1995a: 152–53,

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176; Deleuze & Guattari 1984; Deleuze & Parnet 2006: 93ff.). This meant that, rather than focusing on ‘1968’ as a particular historical moment, they wanted to explore it as a field of potentiality, intensity and creativity – a field that they seemed to hope to re-actualize or ‘reboot’ in new ways in the present by providing the multiple criticisms of their generation with a stronger voice – and moving away from being heard as a simple noise (cf. Rancière 1999). As one of the Reboot ’68 organizers said in the closing speech of the conference: To us ’68 represents a revolutionary becoming, a creation of something new … ’68 was and is not about someone taking power. It is about someone beginning to speak so that they are heard. That is what we want to bring with us from ’68: the experiences with creating a space for critique and revolt – a revolt that is already a reality but that today is not heard as anything but noise. (Jochumsen, closing speech, Reboot ’68 conference, 17 May 2008)

Their self-defined task seemed to be to make different voices of protest heard and somehow speak together – not in terms of conjuring up one body with one single and ‘representative’ voice, as is the logic in the work of, for example, the NUS and the student councils, but by creating some kind of synergy and connections between different groups and networks and gaining understanding for the relations between their various points of criticism. Therefore, if the ‘proletariat/worker’ was a figure of resistance in Marx’s thinking, and if ‘the student’ played a similar role in Marcuse’s, these Reboot ’68 students seemed to be advocating a slightly different figure of resistance, namely, a flexible and constantly changing heterogeneous network. This amorphous figure of resistance, in which many different people act in a kind of networked concert with no single leader, representative or narrowly defined agenda, resembles what Hardt and Negri (2004) have described as the ‘multitude’. Or, to stay with the vocabulary of ‘voices’ and ‘bodies’, one could also compare the Reboot ’68 students’ desire to create a dynamic, amorphous and network-based space for criticism with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘body without organs’ (1987, 2004). Such a ‘body’ is directed towards the dismantling of ordinary habits and traits. It has no ‘representatives’, no hierarchical structure and no single organizing agent, but is exactly characterized by a certain lack of organization and is permeated by ever-shifting flows, intensities and unformed transient concerns. In contrast to the 2008 vice-president’s hope of creating one common narrative and student identity, the Reboot ’68 students’ idea of

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criticism does not rely on the production of accounts that can collect up ‘a people’ understood as a uniform (student) body. Rather, it seems, they hope to collect up many different people without reducing or eclipsing ‘the multitude’s’ internal differences.

Critique as the ‘Little Permanent’ or ‘Big Effervescent’ Revolt? The Reboot ’68 students felt they had a better understanding of the workings of capitalism than their 1968 predecessors. ‘We now know’, one of them said to me, ‘that capitalism is changeable, flexible and global, and that some of the liberating aspects put forward in 1968 have been absorbed by capitalism itself, for example, as the freedom for self-realization on the job.’ This understanding is in line with Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) argument that ‘capitalism’ throughout the 1980s–90s incorporated some of the anti-authoritarian criticism put forward in and after 1968. The 1968 artistic criticism against the lack of creative and authentic self-realization in capitalist work-life has – in what they call the ‘third spirit’ of capitalism – been incorporated in the new management discourses as or through new types of flexible and decentralized network organizations. In short, the 1968 anti-authoritarian quest for increased participation and possibilities for creativity and self-realization are now central features in a worklife where entrepreneurship, self-governance and constant (self-)development are desired by but also expected from the good worker. Following a similar critique of capitalism, the closing Reboot ’68 student speaker at the conference said that ‘the political and economic power dictates that taking responsibility for one’s society and oneself is to obtain a good CV, finish your studies quickly and realize yourself through work’. She strongly disagreed with this notion of responsibility. Rather, to her and her fellow Reboot ’68 students, the responsible student/citizen is one who constantly questions the existing frameworks and norms for the ‘possible’ or ‘realistic’ in his/ her everyday life. In this respect, the Reboot ’68 students’ ambitions were high: ‘We want to be the first generation in many years who become critical adult citizens and not just overgrown consumer children and stressed manpower’ (Reboot ’68 programme, 2008, p. 3). For these students, the ‘adult citizen’ is someone who takes responsibility by critically reflecting upon and engaging with all aspects of the world he/she lives in. To be a good ‘responsible’ student/citizen is not a question of narrowly educating oneself and fulfilling one’s

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work duties (as ‘stressed manpower’) or selfishly claiming particular services or commodities (as ‘overgrown consumer children’). In line with the 1968 vice-president’s advocacy of critical and seemingly ‘impossible’ thinking, the Reboot ’68 students argued that, as a new generation of ‘critical adult citizens’, they should think in alternative scenarios that go beyond the boundaries of what those in power deem possible. Whereas in 2005, as we saw earlier, the NUS students Dorthe and Karen took upon themselves the task of representing the student body and advocated a ‘pragmatic realism’ whereby one ‘plays the political game by the rules’ (i.e., think in ‘real possibilities’), the Reboot ’68 students paraphrased the Austrian modernist author Robert Musil and argued for thinking in new ‘possible realities’ and not merely ‘real possibilities’. Put differently, they wanted to conjure up new worlds for students to take part in/be part of. And they not only questioned the ‘realism’ of the established ‘political game’, they also opposed the notion of ‘democracy’ as a question of ‘representation’: Democracy is not about representativeness but about the possibilities for influencing the creation of one’s own life, body and fantasy. Democracy is a daily practice, which is about being able to call into question the society we live in. It’s about the possibility for practising impossible life styles. It’s about conflict and differences and the zest for change [modet til forandring]. (Jochumsen, closing speech, Reboot ’68 conference, 17 May 2008)

This understanding of democracy as a ‘daily practice’ resonates with the notion of democracy as a life-form put forward in the post– Second World War period by Hal Koch in contrast to Alf Ross’s emphasis on procedures and representation (see chapter 2). It also resonates with the notion of ‘the little revolt’ identified by the two student speakers at the matriculation event in 1970 (see chapter 3). As already described, in 1970 these two students saw the ‘revolt with big letters’ as revolving around activities that make the headlines and ‘the little revolt’ as something that takes place in everyday life through subject criticism and the constant questioning and reflection about society and one’s own situation. The two types of revolt are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but neither do they necessarily include or cause each other. The transient, ad hoc, single-issue activism offered by the 3% Network and the campaign orientation of the student councils does not necessarily (aim to) convey and promote a more general and profound critical attitude among ad hoc participating students towards the more profound conditions and naturalness in

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their lives, studies and society. The big revolt seems to draw its power from sensations, public provocations or the ‘collective effervescence’ of a body of people that, as Durkheim argued ([1915] 1995: 228), is bound to be temporary, being an intense and extraordinary state of sociality. Indeed, critique through ad hoc and pick-and-choose activities may potentially work through the very same logic of eventful self-realization, self-government and constant self-development that the Reboot ’68 students, in line with Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), identified as a key aspect of contemporary capitalism. On the other hand, the Reboot ’68 conference also showed how difficult it may be to connect up the many disparate struggles and to combine student politics with other forms of politics. During the last panel debate, the participants vividly discussed how to reconcile their different struggles – how to find ‘the common rhythm’ of their generation, as one student put it. Interestingly, by using the notion of ‘rhythm’, the temporal conflicts in students’ study lives explored in chapter 4 can be seen in a more general and generational context, where a kind of synchronization of the rhythm(s) in young people’s lives is seen as potentially subversive in relation to what the Reboot ’68 students perceived as the devastating features (or rhythms) of ‘capitalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. During the panel discussion with, among others, a student activist and a union-engaged bricklayer, one student argued – in the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s – for an alliance between ‘workers’ and ‘students’. She claimed that students too are ‘workers’ and that, since the reforms of the university are similar to the reforms of other public institutions, they all share in a common struggle. But the bricklayer saw no obvious alliance between them. No students today, as in the 1970s, write reports to help the workers, he said. Rather, academics, in his view, are those who make him bend his back even more times each day. His focus on particular group interests seemed stronger than the vision of a common youth struggle. Likewise, when the student activist in the panel later argued for the re-introduction of internal university workplace democracy, the bricklayer argued against it. The university is only truly democratic, he argued, when the democratically elected Parliament acts as the governing court (i.e., the third democratization argument described in chapter 2). How else, the bricklayer asked, could he, as a taxpaying citizen, exert influence over this public institution? In the end, one of the student panel members said that, since they now were a good-sized group of people who all wanted to make a difference and change existing society, the best way to make their

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diverse protests powerful was to become examples for others to follow by showing them new and different forms of social participation. However, even though in this way some of the participants found it desirable to promote a kind of ‘exemplary figure’ that could inspire people, it remained unsettled if or to what extent these students, as participatory ‘examples’, could and should embody any one particular vision of a new society and university.

Conclusion Taking my point of departure as the frictional event of the 2006 welfare reform protests, I have shown how, in their attempts to influence national educational policies and promote changes in both the universities and the wider society, politically active students negotiate effective participation at the intersection of parliamentary and activist approaches with student-as-such and student-as-citizen approaches. The student-as-such ideal – that is, the idea that student political organizations should restrict themselves to narrow and explicitly student-relevant issues – draws on a notion of students as one body with one voice and is often upheld by the student ‘interest organizations’ like the National Union of Students and its member student councils. In contrast, student-as-citizen approaches evoke the student as a figure of criticism or change in the more general conditions in wider society – an approach that is often advocated by more activist-oriented and network-based students (who sometimes are, and sometimes are not, integrated into or collaborate with a student council). Central questions in the chapter have been how parliamentary versus activist and student-as-such versus student-as-citizen approaches work in different ways to produce particular student figures, and to what extent such figures are capable of ‘collecting up’ one/many people by embodying particular visions or interests. The welfare reform protests showed that the desire of the established student interest organizations to be ‘the voice of the students’ and conjure up a student-as-such figure with one body and one voice is both challenging and demanding – indeed, they always face the risk of appearing as a voice with no body. Their aim to conjure one body with one voice is challenging not just because students may have different assessments of their ‘interests’ and how to best ‘represent’ them, but also because the politically active students disagree about which participatory forms (parliamentary versus activist) are the most effective. Around the years 2005–6, many student politicians

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have told me, a new generation of active and critical students found their way into the Danish universities. These students, however, are often ‘active’ in a new manner that I have characterized as involving ad hoc, flexible and single-issue participation in political activities. In line with this development, the instigation of ‘campaigns’ that include a variety of different activities is playing an increasingly important role in the work of, for example, the University of Copenhagen Student Council. Crucially, the growth in campaign-oriented, ad hoc, transient and flexible forms of participation may work within at least two different kinds of figuration processes. On the one hand, local, surprising and temporary campaigns and struggles can work to bring momentarily into networked agreement the protests of different people, but without restricting their individual initiatives and creativity by focusing on one finite ideology, identity or voice. This seemed to be the figure of resistance and change proposed by the Reboot ’68 network in their hope to make different critiques of contemporary (capitalist/ neoliberal) society somehow speak together. On the other hand, the establishment of campaigns and the inclusion of varied forms of fulltime and ad hoc, single-issue participation in the student interest organizations seems to be linked to a wish to ‘mobilize’ or ‘collect up’ students through one common ‘representative’ narrative of critique and protest. The aim here is to create a common student identity, as well as a new and powerful student ‘movement’. Now, what students in 1970 called a ‘little permanent revolt’ (the promotion of a permanent critical attitude) and ‘revolts with big letters’ (the instigation of media-covered and sensational protest activities) are by no means mutually exclusive. But neither does the one necessarily include or lead to the other. The Reboot ’68 students, in line with the notion of the ‘little permanent revolt’, related their networked critique to the notion of democracy as a daily critical practice in which one may question present-day society and allow for seemingly ‘impossible’ lifestyles. A participatory line of co-citizenship, that is, of democracy as a life-form and permanent critical attitude, here seems to prevail. The student interest organizations, for their part, necessarily place greater emphasis on parliamentary work and, after 2005–6, also on campaigns to mobilize students-as-such. They do not have the resources, one vice-president of a student council argued, to place the emphasis on the promotion of critical thought through, for example, ‘subject criticism’ among students and teachers. Instead, to influence the political agenda and to protest against various university reforms, campaign-organized ‘revolts with big let-

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ters’ like demonstrations, events and university occupations seem to be playing a growing role. In this regard, the chapter has pointed to one provocative question: is the growing student interest in ad hoc, flexible, eventful and pick-and-choose, single-issue participation in a sense working through (and the effect of) the kind of instrumental, self-realizing, pick-and-choose logic that the stereotypical consumer figure is most commonly said to embody? Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have argued that the 1968 generation’s critique of the lack of creative and authentic self-realization in capitalist work-life over time has been incorporated by capitalism so that such self-realization is now a central feature of a work-life in which entrepreneurship, self-governance and constant (self-)development are desired by but also expected from the good worker. Continuing this line of thought, one could therefore ask whether the growing tendency towards ad hoc participation in a certain way reflects the emergence of this particular calculating, self-realizing and enterprising consumer self that aspires to autonomy and does not engage in a more binding way in the development of larger and longer-lasting communities/organizations. Hardt and Negri (2000) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987), each in their own ways, argue that local, amorphous and ad hoc forms of protest are the most effective in reforming and perhaps overcoming capitalism. However, one could also argue that the campaign-oriented, transient, pick-and-choose form of student participation, even though directed towards what are often described as neoliberal reforms, indeed may work to prepare students for a (capitalist) work-life in which they are to be self-directed, autonomous, goal-oriented and entrepreneurial.

Notes 1. See https://ism-global.net/ (accessed 26 March 2015) 2. See http://www.emancipating-education-for-all.org/content/actions-du ring-global-week-action-summary (accessed 15 August 2009). 3. In using the phrase ‘politically active students’, I am referring to students who in one way or another take part in and seek to influence student- or university-related politics or who in their political activities explicitly identify as ‘students’. I do not include students who are (politically) involved in other social areas (e.g., those who work in unions, political parties or non-governmental organizations [NGOs] with no direct relevance to university politics) in which they do not primarily identify as ‘students’.

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4. As a student umbrella organization, the National Union of Students (NUS) invites all tertiary education institutions to join them and as of 2013 has nineteen member organizations, representing about 115,000 students in all. The National Union of Students and its member organizations – of which the student councils of the different universities are the driving forces – are officially independent of party politics. 5. The fifteen suggestions in the NUS brochure included, among others, better and more guidance, inspiring teachers, study places at universities, workshops and study groups throughout the period of writing the final dissertation (NUS 2005). In the brochure, the NUS did not propose or support any of the financial carrot-and-stick methods that were at the centre of the government’s initial welfare proposals. 6. Under the welfare reforms, students who start at university no later than two years after ending their ‘youth education’ (equivalent to high school) can now multiply their grade average (on the basis of which universities enrol most students) by 1.08. The financial incentives to get students to pass their examinations were not introduced with regard to individual students’ financial circumstances, but were instead displaced to the institutions through the introduction of a ‘completion taximeter’, a sum of money given to the universities for students who have completed their master’s degrees. Later, a bonus was added if the students finish within the prescribed time frame. 7. In line with the criticism made by some of the party-political student organizations, in autumn 2008 a national newspaper wrote a series of critical articles about the University of Copenhagen Student Council as an undemocratic organization that monopolized the voice of the student. It was argued that network initiatives like Green Agenda, the 3% Network and the Reboot ’68 initiative called into question the politics and status of the University of Copenhagen Student Council (Richter 2008; Villesen 2008a). In response, however, the networks wrote that they were neither in opposition to nor cut off from the student councils, but worked alongside them and were often financially supported by then (A. G. Jørgensen, Mølck & Busck 2008; Salamonsen et al. 2008). 8. Grounded in basic democratic ideals from the 1970s, the Common Student Council meeting invited all enrolled students at the University of Copenhagen to participate. In recent decades, student attendance at these meetings has gradually decreased. In the 1980s and 1990s, I was told by a former student politician, the students held crisis meetings when attendance dropped to under one hundred and under fifty, respectively. In 2005 and 2006, at the Common Student Council meetings held every third week, around fifteen to twenty out of in all around thirty thousand students at the University of Copenhagen turned up. This, the students said, was quite typical. The student turnout at elections for the former Senate, the present board of governors and the academic councils at the faculty level is generally between 10–20 per cent.

Part III Conclusions and Directions

7 Entangled Figurations

Throughout this book I have discussed how ‘the student’, as a contested figure in a time of extensive university reform, is negotiated and enacted in diverse pedagogical, institutional and political settings. With the 2003 Danish University Act and myriads of associated reform initiatives, power relations between state, market and university, as well as between students, academic staff and leaders, shifted. In the opening quotation of the book, the 2008 University of Copenhagen Student Council president argued that, in contemporary processes of university reform, some uncertainty exists about which ‘box’, as she phrased it, students should be put into: ‘Are we persons passing through the university on our way to the job market? Customers in the university’s education shop? Or are we a part of the institution which is to drive society forward by gaining new knowledge?’ She was therefore pointing out three potential ways in which the student may figure in the university and wider society: as a future worker, a customer and an intrinsic part of the university. Critics of the 2003 Danish University Act, like the Student Council president, complained that with the act the student is increasingly positioned as a customer and that the space and importance of the student voice have been reduced in favour of strong and powerful leaders. Other people – like the rector and the chairman at the annual festival – argued that students have a different but equally strong voice and that the new governance structure is necessary and essential if Danish universities are to be efficient and competitive. Indeed, alongside the management reforms, political aims of putting ‘the stu-

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dent at the centre’ of the education system have gone hand in hand with, on the one hand, more participatory pedagogical approaches that involve students as ‘active learners’, but also, on the other hand, an increase in students’ freedom of choice, a growing focus on efficient complaint procedures and the importance of students’ course evaluations. Therefore, with the reforms, it seems that new forms of participatory or ‘activating’ pedagogy are now combined with a new kind of responsive government that puts emphasis on the university’s (and not least the lecturers’) accountability towards students’ wishes, needs or demands. In order to explore these complex processes of change, I have made two central moves. First, I have developed and engaged in a particular methodological endeavour termed ‘figuration work’. Here, the anthropological field is conceived of as a space of frictional figure production – a continuous process of form shaping that takes place at the intersection of people’s figure production in words and actions (be it in newspapers, law texts, at demonstrations or in the classroom) and my analyses of these events. Second, I have argued for the need to use the notion of ‘participation’, as an analytical concept, in a manner that goes well beyond the usual focus on the provisions for formal student participation in governing bodies. The different chapters, therefore, have explored the multiple, overlapping and competing ways in which students today aim, and are enabled or encouraged, to participate in pedagogical as well as institutional and political settings. Furthermore, as will be argued in chapter 8, using participation as a multi-dimensional concept makes it possible to acknowledge that the opportunity or preclusion to participate in some areas may not only be strongly linked to students’ participation in other areas, but also to the kind of learning they are enabled to obtain. Consider the matriculation speeches by the two rectors at the University of Copenhagen discussed in chapter 2. They not only brilliantly reflect the time of unrest and upheaval that Danish universities seem to be in; they also point to extremes and rather stereotypical images of students’ participation in pedagogical, institutional and politico-economic processes. The 2005 rector’s speech evoked a particular kind of integrative participation – an unseverable and constitutive form of participation in which the students should think of themselves as part of (in terms of feeling a sense of belonging to and responsibility towards) a university community and as socially and morally responsible to larger society. In contrast, the first appointed rector under the 2003 Danish University Act used the matriculation event in 2006 as an opening for students’ participation in

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a worldwide competition for knowledge. Here, student participation becomes a question of aggregative participation in that the student is encouraged to manage him- or herself as a competitive enterprise, a strategic unit set apart from but thereby also commensurable with and in competition with other enterprising individuals. In the media and by many politicians, the 2005 rector’s figuration of the student is often seen as pointing ‘backwards’ to a Humboldtian legacy (and therefore articulated as obsolete by certain politicians and university leaders), whereas the 2006 rector’s figuration somehow seemingly points ‘forward’ in that it is seen to meet the demands of a future of growing competition on knowledge and education. However, in their everyday lives students articulate and navigate between various different rationales about the purpose of getting a university education and what a (good) university student is and should be. Generally speaking, the historical and ethnographic material has shown how students constantly balance and connect integrative forms of participation – including perceiving of themselves as a part of universitas, using participatory democracy at student meetings or conveying a sense of moral belonging and responsibility towards, for example, the university and the nation – and more aggregative forms of participation, including emphasizing the individual’s rights, freedom of choice, university elections, representative democracy or course evaluations. Likewise, participation as a somewhat socially, politically and pedagogically preserving practice – for example, when students engage in rote learning and focus on what is necessary in order to pass the exam and/or fulfil an existing position in society, or when student politicians ‘play the game’ and are not enabled or capable of questioning or changing the ‘rules of the political game’ – is consistently negotiated and balanced with student participation as a more critical, transformative, subversive or even revolutionary pedagogical and/or political practice – for example, when students critically explore and develop a subject matter in an independent and creative way, or when they engage in different forms of critical student protests. In all chapters, tension is apparent between a student figuration with an apparent ontological singularity in knowledge economic market framing and a multiplicity in figuration in which the state of the world appears to become messy, unsettled, multiple. Put differently, the analyses in chapters 4, 5 and 6 seem to convey a sense of the reform processes as epochal in some respects and as heterogeneous and multiple in others. To some extent, one could argue that students’ participation in the shaping of their own education, the

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university and wider society conveys a new and stronger articulation of aggregative and more flexible transient participation as a form of strategically measured, self-realizing and/or pick-and-choose participation of apparently ‘autonomous’ individuals. This form of participation seems to be actualized and foregrounded at the expense of more binding and constitutive forms of ‘integrative participation’, long-lasting commitments and a sense of belonging to, for example, their programme, the student body, the university and the nation. In this vein, one could argue that the student figurations, co-produced with the reforms, convey a certain fractality – that is, a certain degree of self-similarity across scale1 – in that different kinds of ‘aggregative’ and ‘flexible’, ‘short-term’ participation seem to be gaining a footing in students’ participation in all of the explored areas. On the other hand, the ethnographically based analyses have also shown how the figures do not add up in a neat or seamless way, and that they do not convey one uniform or singular world. Indeed, the key differential figurations that were central in chapters 4, 5 and 6 – the inquisitive learner and the acquisitive learner; the co-owner and the costumer; the student-as-such and the student-as-citizen – are intrinsically dependent on each other in order to stand out and take shape. As I have shown throughout the book, a figuration emerges in relation to and as entangled with other figures. The ‘customer’, for example, only stands out in relation to something else, which in the Danish case, as shown, is likely to be the ‘co-owner’. Put differently, one could say that in Denmark the ‘customer’ is often intrinsically entangled with the ‘co-owner’. To be entangled, as noted previously, does not refer to the intertwining or collision of pre-given separate entities. Rather, following Barad’s use of the word, entanglement is taken to address the simultaneous co-production of figurations: the inquisitive learner and the acquisitive learner, the co-owner and the consumer, and the student-as-such and the student-as-citizen emerge, in Barad’s (2007: ix) words, ‘through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’, and accordingly they ‘lack an independent, self-contained existence’. To clarify my argument and offer a potential heuristic for other people to work and think with, I will provide a table – indeed, an assembled figuration – of the key dimensions of the student as a participatory figure today (see table 7.1). The dimensions are organized under the headings ‘Participation as Means and/or End’, ‘Spatiality of Participation’, ‘Temporality of Participation’ and ‘Aim of Participation’. The first dimension obviously addresses the general question of participation as a means to obtain influence or an end in itself, thus

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pointing to the central question of integration and aggregation. The subsequent two headings, accordingly, show how particular forms of participation work to integrate or aggregate the student in particular wholes (spatiality) and do this through the evocation of a certain pace or rhythm in participation (temporality). The last column addresses the aim of particular forms of participation, including the question of preserving and/or transforming existing orders or processes of a particular whole. Figuration work, therefore, could be understood as a process of ‘scaling’ the student, that is, of enacting and articulating ‘the student’ at particular spatial and temporal scales. Or put differently, particular forms of participation ‘spatialize’ and ‘temporalize’ the student in certain ways. Importantly, participation that on one scale figures mainly as ‘integrative participation’ (e.g., the student as part of universitas or ‘absorbed’ in a ‘subject area’) may appear on another as a kind of ‘aggregative participation’ (e.g., as the university set apart from society, or the autonomous individual set apart from others). Likewise, as shown in chapter 6, students’ flexible, single-issue and ad hoc participation may work to actualize integrative as well as aggregative participation, and preserving as well as transformative or even subversive participation. Indeed, the three ethnographically based chapters clearly show how students in various and often conflicting ways (are encouraged and enabled to) take ‘part’ in ‘wholes’ like ‘the programme/discipline’, ‘the university’, ‘a common student body’, ‘the nation-state’ and ‘the global knowledge economy’. One pitfall in conjuring up a table is that, contrary to the intention, the different figurations could be read as successive and isolated, and the elements listed in each of the rows could be understood to represent one (and only one) of the figures. While certain traits are indisputably mainly (or only) articulated with one of the named figures, it is a key point in the book’s analyses that different elements may connect and work in unexpected ways and thus be articulated as different figures at different moments. Table 1 is an attempt to convey the entanglement of the key frictional figurations of the three ethnographic chapters. Throughout the book, other figurations (e.g., ‘the student incorporated’) also appeared, but in order to provide a more distinct heuristic, table 1 focuses on the most central entangled figurations that were enacted in the frictional events explored. In the table, the double arrow symbol is used to convey the entangled character of figures and the contingent articulations of their key elements. This means that a figure does not necessarily embody all the features listed in one row, nor does any individual only fit with one figure.

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Table 7.1. Entangled Key Figurations in the Reform of Danish Universities

Figurations Inquisitive Learner

Participation as Means and/or End

Spatiality of Participation

Temporality of Participation

Aims of Participation

Participation and knowledge a goal in itself; independent exploration

The whole of the discipline/ science (integrated/ aggregated?)

Subjectoriented time; Absorption

To obtain/ generate knowledge; develop as independent and critically reflexive person (developing/ transforming science?)

Acquisitive Learner

Co-owner

Consumer

Instrumental participation; a means to acquire something else ‘external’ to the learning process

The whole of the job market/ larger society (integrated/ aggregated?)

Form of life; an obligation; a ‘part-whole’ relation; representative democracy and participatory democracy

Sense of integrated wholes (the ‘house’, the university, larger society?)

A means; a right; a subjectobject relation; representative democracy; freedom of choice/ complaints

Policy-oriented time; efficiency

To obtain good grades; get a degree; get a job (preserving social and political structures?)

Sense of aggregated wholes (the university, the job market, the knowledge economy?)

‘Loyal’ and long-lasting commitment to the wholes

Flexible and transient participation (commitment to development of self and/or of collective wholes?)

To become an actively and democratically involved co-citizen (transformative/ preserving?)

To enjoy (consume?)/ to become employable; to design a unique course of education, obtain unique profile (transformative/ preserving?)

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Student-asSuch

Student-asCitizen

Parliamentary and extraparliamentary; representative democracy; democracy as form of government

Activist/extraparliamentary; participatory democracy; democracy as form of life

National university/ education politics; one student body with one voice

Long-lasting commitment; become one with student network/ organization

Society writ large; (student) body/‘bodies without organs’

Transient, flexible and ad hoc; (potentially) intensive but short-term sense of belonging

To influence education politics on the basis of ‘student interests’ – ‘playing the political game by its rules’ (transformative/ preserving?)

To transform/ subvert/ revolutionize the university and wider society (incl. capitalism/ neoliberalism)

Furthermore, the entangled character of figures also means that one figure does not simply succeed or replace the other. A student figure like the ‘acquisitive learner’ or the ‘customer’, which some would see as an index or exemplary figure of contemporary neoliberal reforms, is by no means uniform – it is constantly assembled and re-assembled in different ways, in entangled relation with other figurations. Therefore, and contrary to the way ‘social types’ have often been used in the literature (see introduction), any one figure cannot in and by itself be seen as an index or representative of the kind of political and pedagogical transformations that take place at (Danish) universities today. Rather, I argue, one can detect a series of entangled key figurations.

Notes 1. Marilyn Strathern (2004) referred to the ‘fractal’ image when arguing that complexity or the ‘quantity of information’ remains the same, regardless of scale: ‘The single person is as complex to analyse as a corporation composed of many’ (ibid.: xix). Likewise, Roy Wagner (1991)

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has used the notion of ‘the fractal person’ to address relationships that are integrally implied in the person, a notion that has much in common with the kind of unseverable and constitutive part-whole relation of ownership discussed in chapter 5, and that, in this book, is related to integrative participation. However, my use of the ‘fractal’ here draws on its most straightforward meaning, namely, as a figure that conveys a certain self-similarity across scale (which in this study can be seen as the different spatial ‘wholes’ in which the student figures). This notion of self-similarity should be understood as addressing the general lines of differentiation that can be found across the various events. It is therefore not to be confused with a notion of student figures as stable or self-identical entities, which, as already argued, they are not.

8 Participation as Multi-scaled Citizenship

The entangled character of student figurations is not only an important point in terms of understanding ‘figuration work’ as a particular methodological and analytical endeavour in anthropological research. As will be argued in the following, it could also have significant political and pedagogical consequences. In light of contemporary university reforms and growing political requests for active citizenship, it seems pertinent and timely to broaden the focus on participation, as done in this book, and consider the different pedagogical and political spaces that students take part in, together and as a whole. This implicates an approach in which different participatory spaces, as Hickey and Mohan (2004b: 18) phrase it, ‘are not discrete or singular but allow a form of political learning where experiences from one space are transported and transformed consciously or unconsciously in different and new spaces’. Put differently, a more nuanced understanding of student participation as a means as well as a goal in itself – and therefore not only a question of participation in university governance – could make students, lecturers, university leaders and policy makers more appreciative of the fact that participation is ‘a process that involves learning as well as the idea of making a difference’ ( Jupp Kina 2012: 331, emphases added). Here, the fundamental question is touched upon: what are university students today meant to ‘learn’ at university and how and where are they expected to contribute and ‘make a difference’? As noted previously, the educational and formative role of student participa-

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tion in representative or direct democracy within the university institution and wider society has not played an important role in the debates over contemporary university reforms in Denmark. In relation to governance, the focus has been on the question of students’ possibility and ability to ‘make a difference’. Indeed, the learning aspect of participation seems to be primarily, if not exclusively, highlighted and discussed in relation to pedagogical settings and practices (not political ones) – the common argument being that students learn more the more they participate in class and in designing their course of education. In a process of learning, a student is necessarily dependent on others – not least on engagement with lecturers and fellow students. This is a core challenge and premise of teaching and learning: how to establish the conditions for students to develop skills to become strong analytical and independent thinkers who in their explorative questioning of the issues they engage with also contribute to develop the subject matter further and make a difference – to the issue at stake, the discipline(s) drawn upon and larger society. A central question, therefore, that runs through pedagogical and political debates about participation is how to understand the kind of independence, empowerment or even autonomy that students can or should acquire through university education. Independence indeed connotes some kind of setting ‘apart’ of the individual from others. ‘Freedom of choice’ is often said to empower students and make them more responsible for their own education and capable of combining subject areas in creative and independent ways. However, the analyses in this book have shown that this only seems to be true if at the same time students and lecturers are provided with time and space for some kind of ‘integrative participation’ in the subject area and with each other. This means that we must be careful not to confuse the ‘demanding consumer’ or the ‘autonomous, private chooser’ between providers of education with the production of independent, creative, critical or entrepreneurial students (which, today, is often highlighted as a core purpose of universities around the world). This book has shown how students’ everyday participation in pedagogical and political processes, captured in notions like ‘subject criticism’ (fagkritik), ‘the little revolt’, ‘co-ownership’, ‘co-citizenship’ and ‘democracy as a life-form’, is downplayed and increasingly deferred with the conglomerate of new reform initiatives. Faced with myriads of reforms, the student organizations prioritize either parliamentary work (which most often does not attract and ‘collect up’ the wider student population) or the ‘revolt with big letters’, in that

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they seek to mobilize students and obtain media coverage through campaigns, occupations and other public activities against bills and laws. This seems to occur at the expense of concerns and fights for ‘subject criticism’, room for ‘absorption’ and the promotion of the ‘little permanent revolt’ – that is, the ‘revolt’ that takes place in everyday life through the development of a fundamentally explorative and critical attitude. Likewise, in the students’ teaching and learning, subject criticism and the promotion of an attitude in which nothing is taken for granted but everything is to be independently explored and reflected upon seems to be given less and less room in the context of the efficiency demands, new accountability systems between students and teachers and emphasis on students’ freedom of choice. Surely, particular forms of ‘participation’ should not be fetishized and uncritically celebrated as something inherently good and necessary for all (here we could learn from the experiences with ‘participation’ in development work [Cooke & Kothari 2001]). Rather, students – in their participation in pedagogical, institutional and political settings – need to obtain experience and capabilities to decide if, how and when to participate in what. Not to participate, or to protest against participation, is also a valuable and legitimate choice if made on a reasoned basis – for example, if one experiences that participation becomes merely a ‘cosmetic label’ or a ‘co-opting practice’, as Chambers (1994) puts it. Students are ultimately dependent on others in their learning process, and for a public university that is to make a contribution to wider society, it seems vital to recognize and educate students to become ‘competent to participate in the terms of their own dependency’, as Richard Sennett formulates it in his discussion about creating ‘respect’ in welfare policy and practice (Sennett, quoted in Clarke et al. 2007: 145). This, I would add, goes for pedagogical and political processes alike. One way of highlighting and strengthening such an empowering process could be to move towards what can, with inspiration from Hickey and Mohan (2004b: 13), be called ‘participation as multiscaled citizenship’. Historically, as noted, Danish students had a kind of dual citizenship in both academia/the university and wider Danish society. Even though the university today has no judicial responsibility or power over the students, students are still faced with particular rights and obligations to participate within the university as well as larger society (which, as shown, means different things at different times and to different people). By relating the notion of student participation to a question of citizenship, it is possible to emphasize three central aspects. First, the notion of citizenship highlights the

236 ◆ Figuration Work

relational aspect of participation, which involves a question of rights and obligations. T. H. Marshall’s classic definition of citizenship as ‘a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community’ (Marshall [1950] 2009: 149) points to the centrality of an individual’s status and role in a larger community (but it also raises the question of what it means to be a ‘full member’). Here a community is usually taken to be a ‘political’ one (Lazar 2013: 1). However, in relation to students’ participation, this book has shown how pedagogical and political participation should be understood as interconnected issues, and I therefore take citizenship to address questions of students’ rights and obligations in relation to ‘political’ as well as ‘pedagogical’ participation. Second, the notion of citizenship emphasizes that student participation includes and relates to democracy as a form of government as well as a form of life (cf. the Danish notion of ‘co-citizenship’), and, accordingly, that participation both involves a process of learning and of making a difference. Third, the notion of citizenship highlights the importance of paying attention to the interconnectivity in students’ participation across various ‘wholes’ (the university, the nation-state, regionalizing processes like the Bologna Process, etc.) and how different actors and policy makers work to emphasize and promote particular part-whole relations. This book has shown how students at different moments evoke and combine different ‘participatory temporalities’ as well as different ‘participatory spatialities’. Students’ actual participation, in other words, can more than anything be characterized as multiple and multi-scaled. In this light, it seems reasonable to argue that appreciating and enabling multiple forms of student participation, belonging and taking ownership could indeed be of benefit to university students’ learning process and as such to wider society. Allowing for a variety of figures in policy making embodied in a multi-scalar understanding of the student-as-citizen, rather than promoting a more one-dimensional and ostensibly uniform student figure (for example, ‘the consumer’), would not only encourage students to explore and reflect independently upon different forms of participation but also provide them with a more comprehensive understanding of the world(s) they take part in. In this sense, making policy makers, university leaders, lecturers and students more attentive to and appreciative of the entangled character of contemporary student figurations could indeed open up the kind of ‘affirmation of the positivity of difference’ (Braidotti 1994: 111) that was identified as a critical ambition in the book’s introduction.

Participation as Multi-scaled Citizenship ◆ 237

When Anna Tsing (2005) introduced the notion of ‘friction’, she did so in response to the liberal imaginaries of a global era in which the perfectly smooth and efficient market would emerge. Her argument was that such a scenario is not feasible since encounters and interaction necessarily involve ‘sticky’ and ‘awkward’ engagements, creative and unequal qualities, vicissitudes and contingencies – in short, they involve friction. In one perspective friction is perceived to slow down processes; in another it provides the vital impetus for movement, creativity and development. The crucial question is what kinds of frictions the growing importance of market thinking and quests for efficiency in the so-called global knowledge economy will produce and allow for. As opposed to ideals of smooth and fast travel in free spaces, one could argue that friction, if understood as an incessant curiosity-driven debate and a challenging explorative search for knowledge, is and should be essential to any form of participation, teaching and learning. One-sided quests for ‘friction-free’ or hyper-efficient and competitive universities may in this sense indeed turn out to be counter-productive. Perhaps what is needed is to allow friction to become a truly constitutive element of the student figure; that is, to ensure that the student is not just a figure in friction, but indeed always also a figure of friction. This, I believe, would require greater attention to and acknowledgment of figuration processes as neither completely arbitrary nor entirely pre-given, but as processes we all have to work hard for and invest ourselves in, as a right and as an obligation. This, indeed, would be an important step towards greater democratization of what this book has termed ‘figuration work’.

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Index

absorption, 49–50, 62, 130–33, 147, 149 accountability course evaluations and, 144, 146 free choice and, 75, 117–18, 149 of teachers, 115, 118, 142–50, 226, 235 university reform and, 5, 31 acquisitive learning. See under learning activism ad hoc and single-issue, 202, 206–10, 216 1960–70s and, 91–93, 96–99, 189 student networks and, 201, 206 vs. parliamentarianism, 30, 92, 105,191,195–98 actual/virtual, 47–49, 60 Deleuze and, 47–48 Sahlins and, 47 actualization (of virtual lines), 53, 56, 60, 183, 214, 229 aggregative participation, 32, 69, 76, 184, 227–29, 230 line of, 14, 76, 106 See also integrative participation agora, 158–160, 186n11 austerity, 5–7 autonomy student and, 220, 234. See also freedom university and, 11, 41, 88–90, 100, 158–59, 161–62, 187n16 anthropology of policy, 4, 15, 43–44

appropriation. See under policy articulation, 20–21, 30, 39–40, 46, 50, 60, 172, 188, 227–28. See also figuration assemblage, 20–22. See also figuration Barad, Karen, 22, 185, 228 Barker, Joshua, 17–18 Becker, Gary Stanley, 172 Benjamin, Walter, 17–19 Bildung, 61, 88, 187n15 Bloch, Maurice, 177–78 body without organs, 210, 214 Bologna Process, 7–8, 11, 24, 34n2, 64, 79n7, 116, 236 Boltanski, Luc, 213, 215, 217, 220 Braidotti, Rosi, 21–22, 34n4 Brandes, Georg, 107n4, 108n8 Brown, Phillip, 136–37, 141 Cain, Carole, 34n5 capitalism Boltanski and Chiapello and, 217, 220 Deleuze and Guattari and, 220 friction-free, 45 Hardt and Negri and, 220 Marcuse and, 189 student protest and, 6, 45, 98, 190, 210, 215, 217, 220, 231 Tsing and global, 188 Chiapello, Ève, 213, 215, 217, 220 citizenship active, 72, 77, 233

Index ◆ 261

deliberative democracy and, see co-citizenship dual, 59, 190, 235 education for, 72, 79 global, 190 Marshall and, 236 multi-scaled, 33, 233, 235 representative democracy and, 69 state, 69 triple, 190 See also co-citizenship; student-ascitizen Clarke, John, 183, 185n3, 209 class struggle/interests, 81, 83, 90, 98, 107n1, 188, 199–200, 212 commodification of education, 165 society and, 18 co-citizenship democracy as form of life and, 29, 63, 69, 236 Koch on, 69 student co-ownership and, 153, 155, 168, 219, 234 welfare state and, 77 See also co-owner competition state, 75, 77, 173 competence descriptions, 7, 116. See also outcomes competences democractic, 73, 182–83 governance and, 71 ‘relevant’, 11, 65–67, 116, 119, 135, 150 Cooper, Davina, 164–65, 178, 184 co-owner student as, 1, 19, 31–33, 97, 124, 150, 152–55, 160–70, 175, 177–82, 184, 185n1, 228, 230, 234 See also co-citizenship critical thinking co-ownership and, 153–54, 163, 175, 178–79, 181 Danish education and, 67–68 efficiency/pace of study and, 89, 101, 121, 149 Humboldt and, 10 (see also freedom of learning)

independent scientific exploration and, 14, 88–89, 103–5, 120–21 inquisitive learning and, 31, 135–37 little revolt and, 216, 219, 235 political/social involvement and, 82–86, 103–105, 108nn8–10, 189–92, 211, 215–16 subject criticism and, 98, 136, 211, 219, 235 consumer/customer, 185n2 acquisitive learning and, 136–37, 141, 147–48 aggregative/integrative participation and, 183 Benjamin and, 18 complaints and, 2, 31, 159 co-owner vs., 31–32, 151–55, 159, 163–64, 170, 178–79, 183–84, 228 critical thinking and, 215–16 education as commodity and, 157, 164, 176 figure/figuration and, 19, 33, 154–55, 167, 169, 178–79, 183–84, 228–31 flexible participation and, 209, 220 freedom of choice and, 2, 5, 66, 94, 101–2 governmentality and, 41, 43 ownership, 165–68 passive/active, 3, 141, 154 , 163 rights, 152, 176 student as, 1–3, 5, 31–32, 66, 94, 99, 100–2, 104, 151–57, 163, 225 tuition fees and, 153, 170, 176, 180 Danish education system, 63–71 See also university law (Denmark) Dean, Mitchell, 41–42 Deleuze, Gilles assemblage and, 20 on actual/virtual, 47–48 body without organs and, 214 capitalism and, 220 disciplinary society/control society and, 212–13 democracy competition state and, 70, 77 complaints and, 76, 158, 181 efficiency and, 87–90, 93–94, 103

262 ◆ Index

form of government/governance and a means, 29, 68–77, 78n4, 94, 168, 236. See also Ross form of life and a goal, 11, 29, 63, 68–77, 94, 168, 216, 219, 234–36. See also Koch market and, 5, 10, 65–66, 94–95, 154–55, 159–60, 176, 178, 237 participatory, 11, 68, 181, 227, 230–31 as pedagogical concept, 70–71, 161–65 representative, 11, 63, 69, 78n4, 94, 216, 227, 230–31, 234 transparency and, 76, 101, 204 welfare state and, 70, 77 workplace, 9–10, 13, 60, 71–75, 91, 93–95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 109n15, 161–65, 169, 217 democratization governance and, 73, 74, 93 internal university democracy and. See democracy: workplace state democracy and, 73, 170, 217 widening participation and, 73, 90 Dewey, John, 70–71 du Gay, Paul, 42 Dunleavy, Patrick, 5 economy gift/commodity, 171, 177–78 higher education and national, 109n13, 172 knowledge. See knowledge economy education in Denmark. See Danish education system as general formation, see Bildung as investment (public and private), 32, 63, 65, 87, 136, 152, 169, 171–74, 182 as public/social good, 63, 88, 167, 171, 173 See also input; outcomes; competences efficiency accountability and, 142

funding and, 6 in teaching and learning, 30, 61, 66, 87– 90, 100, 103–104, 115–118, 122–31, 135, 138, 148–49, 230, 235 in university governance, 5, 72, 87, 93–95, 99–100, 103–4 employability, 7, 102, 104–5, 136, 153, 164, 168–69, 172 Engels, Friedrich, 17 entanglement, 19, 29, 33, 184, 228–29 equality/inequality fees and study grants, 192, 193 Gullestad on, 28 Post-world war II, 70 students and staff, 97, 137, 146, 153 European Higher Education Area (EHEA), 7, 34n2, 116 event anthropology and, 46–48, 52 diagnostic, 52 Foucault on, 53 See also frictional event figure, 15, 16–22, 33, 34n4, 45, 48, 224–31. See also figuration. figure-ground, 184–85 figuration, 19–23, 33, 34n4, 34n5, 48–52, 185, 228, 237. See also assemblage & articulation figuration work, 14–23, 40, 48, 160, 179, 184, 226, 233 Fitzsimons, Patrick, 5 Fog, Mogens, 93, 110n20 Foucault, Michel discipline and, 151, 212 event and, 46, 53 eventalization and, 178 genealogy and, 51, 80 governmentality and, 41 on subject 56n3 freedom academic, 71, 88, 90–91 of choice, 5, 10, 66, 75–76, 100, 116, 138–42, 170, 185n3, 226–27, 234–35 efficiency and, 124, 129 of research, 117

Index ◆ 263

students’ economic, 9 of study (Lernfreiheit), 59, 61, 83, 88–89, 103–4, 117–18, 165 to teach (Lehrfreiheit), 61, 88–89, 117 Freire, Paolo, 133 friction Tsing and, 45, 56n5, 237 See also frictional event frictional event, 15, 30–32, 45–46, 48–50 Friedman, Thomas L, 59 Friedman, Milton, 100, 187n17 GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), 7–8 Gibbons, Michael, 159–60, 186n10 global knowledge economy. See knowledge economy Gluckman, Max, 15, 52, 57n7 governance/government, 71–72, 78n4. See also new public management; university law (Denmark): 2003 governmentality, 16, 41–43, 56n4, 161 Gregory, Chris, 177–78 Guattari, Felix, 214, 220 Gullestad, Marianne, 28 Hall, Stuart, 20–21, 24, 49 Hallward, Peter, 48 Hansen, Else, 87, 90, 161 Haraway, Donna figure/figuration and, 17–18, 21–22, 34n4, 185, 188, 190 Hardt, Michael, 213–14, 220 Harms, Erik, 17–18 Hastrup, Kirsten, 23, 40, 52 Hertel, Hans, 89, 117 Hickey, Samuel, 233, 235 Hindess, Barry, 200, 205 Hjelmslev, Louis, 89–90 Holland, Dorothy, 34n5 Hood, Christopher, 5 human capital theory, 172–74, 176 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 50, 61, 88–89, 116–17, 123, 159 Humboldt Movement, 195, 207

implementation. See under policy inquisitive learning. See under learning Ingold, Tim, 28, 126–27, 130, 140, 149 input, (teaching-based system), 5, 67, 116, 122. See also outcomes (learning-based system) interests class and, 98, 199–201 consumer and, 101, 154 figures and, 32, 188–91 Hindess on, 200, 204 mobilization and, 204–5, 211 participation and, 12 personal, 170–171, 209 public/private, 186n9 representation and, 199–201, 204–5, 218 struggle over, 211 university and, 39, 159–60 interest group, students as. See student political organisations interest organisation International Student Movement, 190 integrative participation, 32, 69, 75–76, 164, 168, 183, 226–29, 232, 234 line of, 14, 29, 76, 106, 184 See also aggregative participation investment. See education as investment Jiménez, Alberto Corsín, 184 Jupp Kina, Victoria, 13–14 Koch, Hal, 68–71, 94, 168, 216 Korsgaard, Ove, 70 knowledge economy (global) as aggregated whole, 15, 29, 76, 106, 229, 230 competition and, 8, 46, 62, 76, 137, 182 education as personal property and, 174 Lisbon Strategy and, 34n2 student participation in, 150, 172 2003 Danish university act and, 1, 3, 65, 102

264 ◆ Index

Lachicotte Jr, William, 34n5 Latour, Bruno, 34n5 Law, John, 104 learning acquisitive/inquisitive, 31, 135–37, 139, 141–42, 148–50, 192, 228, 230 efficient. See efficiency: in teaching and learning problem-based, 63, 119, 161 as process, 118–26, 132–33, 136–38, 140–41, 147–49, 163–64, 330 as product, 101, 104, 124–26, 141, 148, 150, 152, 158, 165, 167, 176 Lefebvre, Henri, 68–71, 94, 168, 216 Lehrfreiheit. See freedom to teach Lernfreiheit. See freedom of study Levinson, Bradley, 15, 43–44 Lindquist, Johan, 17–18 lines of participation 14, 21, 24, 28–29, 45, 49 lines of tendency Hall on, 20–21 Marcuse, Herbert, 98, 110n21, 189–90, 213–14 Marshall, James, 5 Mauss, Marcel, 171 mobilization activity and consensus, 198, 202, 204–5 control socity and, 212 event-based, 98 student figure/figuration and, 19, 188, 190 student politics and, 205, 211, 213, 219 Mohan, Giles, 233, 235 Mol, Annemarie, 104 Moore, Sally Falk, 43, 51–53 Negri, Antonio, 213–14, 220 Neoliberalism, 5, 41–43, 56n1, 210, 217, 231 Newman, Janet, 193, 185–86n3, 209 new public management, 5, 10, 41–43, 78n4. See also governance/ government

Nowotny, Helga, 159–60, 186n10 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), 41, 63, 99, 156, 172, 176 O’Malley, Pat, 42, 56n4 oscillation, 22, 32, 49, 178, 184 reversibility and, 184 Strathern on, 22, 184 outcomes (learning-based system), 67, 105, 116, 122, 135. See also input (teaching-based system). ownership part-whole/subject-object, 31–32, 164–68 See also co-owner Parry, Jonathan, 177–78 participation active, 67–68, 79n7, 118, 128, 179 activist. See activism aggregative. See aggregative participation definition of, 10–14 deltagelse/medbestemmelse, 12, 34n3 empowerment and, 13, 16, 69, 141, 183, 234 flexible, 32, 173, 191, 199, 205, 209, 213–15, 219–20, 228–29, 230–31 in governance, 6, 11–12. See also governance/ government integrative. See integrative participation lines of. See lines of participation as means/ends. See democracy: as form of government & as form of life multi-scaled citizenship and, 33 parliamentary. See under student political participation preserving. See preserving participation spatiality and temporality of, 53, 228–231 in teaching and learning, 3, 12, 29– 30, 60, 103. See also democracy: pedagogical concept

Index ◆ 265

transformative. See transformative participation widening, 73, 90 See also student political participation Pedersen, Ove Kaj, 70, 77 Peters, Michael, 5 policy appropriation, 16, 43–44 implementation, 16, 43 See also anthropology of policy postplural perception, 19–20 preserving participation, 14, 29, 32, 81, 105–106, 227, 229–31 problem-based learning, 63, 119, 161 quality assurance, 7, 34n2, 67,146, 158–59, 187n6, 204 freedom of choice and, 100, 142, 154 high/low, 8, 27, 31–32, 65, 67, 152–54, 157–58 student participation and, 72, 78n6 Rancière, Jacques, 213 revolt. See student revolt relevance of education, economic, 104 to job market, 65–66, 187n16. See also employability social and political. See subject criticism to wider society, 90 Rizvi, Fazal, 41, 171 Rose, Nicolas, 41–42, 56n1, 56n4 Ross, Alf, 68–69, 72, 94 scale citizenship and multi-scale, 233, 235–36 temporal/spatial, 53, 185, 229, 231n1 Scott, Peter, 159–60, 186n10 Shearing, Clifford, 42, 56n4 Shen, Wei, 174 Shore, Cris, 40 Simmel, Georg, 17–19 Skinner, Debra, 34n5

Smith, Nick; 193, 185n3, 209 social type, 17, 188 state. See competitive state; welfare state student-ascitizen, 32, 58–59, 83, 103–4, 191, 195, 199, 212, 215–19, 228, 230 see also citizenship; cocitizenship consumer/customer, See consumer/ customer co-owner/co-citizen, See co-owner; co-citizenship revolutionary, 19, 26, 82–83, 85–86, 98, 108n8, 110, 189, 210, 213–14, 227 such, 32, see also interests; interest group user, 66, 99–102, 154, 170 student body friction within, 26, 82–83 integrative participation and, 228 representation of, 216 as a ‘whole’, 15, 32, 106, 191, 215, 229 with one voice, 32, 185, 192–195 See also body without organs; student voice student-centred education, 30, 115, 118 student networks, 26, 32, 190–92, 199, 201, 209, 231. See also activism student movement, 98, 189–90, 209–10, 212, 219 Marcuse and, 189 See also International Student Movement; Humboldt Movement student political participation activist/extra-parliamentary. See under activism parliamentary, 30, 32, 92, 99, 105, 185,191, 193, 195–98, 203–6, 218–19, 231 student political organizations interest organization, 82, 84, 95, 103, 194, 196–97, 199–201, 203–204, 217–19 non-party political, 197

266 ◆ Index

party-political, 200, 221n7 revolutionary, 82, 98, 107n3 See also student political participation student protests Danish, 8, 190 international, 6–8, 187n15, 189–90 See also student revolt student representation. See democracy: form of governance/ representative/workplace; interests: representation and student revolt contemporary, 2, 3, 9, 210, 214 the little permanent/ big effervescent, 96–98, 215–17, 219, 234–35 1968 and, 2, 9, 91–93, 109n14 See also subject criticism; student protests; Marcuse student voice, 1, 84, 103, 144, 225. See also student body Study Time Committee, 89, 109n12 Strathern, Marilyn, 19, 48, 155, 164, 184, 199, 231n1 subject criticism (internal and external), 98–99, 136, 211, 216, 219, 234–35. See also student revolt Sutton, Margaret, 15, 43–44 Teichler, Ulrich, 54 Tight, Malcolm, 54 time management of, 128, 131, 135, 138, 141, 149 standardized policy, 31, 50, 126–29, 131, 135, 147, 149

study, 128, 135, 194 subject-oriented, 31, 126, 130–31, 133, 135, 137, 149 task-oriented, 126, 130 tidal, 104 Tlili, Anwar, 183 transformative participation, 14, 29, 32, 96, 105–6, 227, 229–31 Tsing, Anna, 22, 45, 56n5, 188, 237 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 33n1, 41, 79n7 university law (Denmark) 1970/3 law, 93, 95–96, 110n17, 110n19 1992 law, 100–2 2003 law, 8–9, 39–40, 60–62, 65–67, 73–77 Vidler, Elizabeth, 193, 185–86n3, 209 Wagner, Roy, 231n1 Weber, Max, 159 Weir, Lorna, 42, 56n4 welfare state critique of, 154 Danish, 10, 63, 70, 77 democracy and, 77 See also competition state Westmarland, Louise, 193, 185n3, 209 Willerslev, Rane, 184 world making, 21–22, 45 Wright, Susan, 56n5, 87, 183 WTO (World Trade Organisation), 7–8