Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free discussion and action, tolerating and even encouraging ‘subversive’ thought and activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society within which it operates?’ (Thompson 1970, 166)
E.P. Thompson posed this dilemma between managerial authoritarianism and free action fifty years ago, in response to student occupations at the University of Warwick. Since then, higher education on his side of the channel has emphatically grasped the managerial horn of the dilemma. English universities grew in ‘authoritarian efficiency’ during the eighties and nineties; they began packaging degrees as ‘intellectual commodities’ with the introduction of tuition fees in the late nineties; they further bolstered ‘the requirements of management’ by introducing top-bottom research assessments in conjunction with market-simulating mechanisms, in the early noughties; they were effectively privatized in the early twenty-tens, with the introduction of full-cost tuition fees.
Dutch higher education stands a mere decade behind England, which serves as a mirror of its possible future. Indeed, the prospects for a Thompson-style renewal in the Netherlands seem bleaker than in noughties England, where universities had a long tradition of independence from the state, where the institution of the ‘chair’ was non-existent, and where institutional hierarchies were flatter than they are in the Netherlands today. But the Dutch university system was not always structurally authoritarian.
