The Entrepreneurial University: A Discursive Profile of a Higher Education Buzzword

The growing orientation of public universities towards the corporate sector has had a significant impact on higher education discourse. The rhetoric of the free market, manifested most tangibly in business-related lexis, is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by academic leaders, politicians, the media, as well as parts of higher education research. Within this rhetoric, enterprise and enterprising, as well as entrepreneur and entrepreneurial stand out as keywords carrying significant ideological loads that reflect the struggle over the re-positioning of universities vis-à-vis the market. The textual data that this paper is based on, gleaned mostly from the Internet, show these expressions to be ambiguous in denotation and rich in connotation, making them susceptible to processes of semantic appropriation to suit particular agendas. Prevailing motifs and representations are identified through a combination of the computer-supported survey of web-based material and the qualitative analysis of sample texts. Entrepreneurial University 3 The Entrepreneurial University: A Discursive Profile of a Higher Education Buzzword A university, like all other human institutions (. . . ) is not outside, but inside the general social fabric of a given era. It is not something apart, something historic, something that yields as little as possible to forces and influences that are more or less new. It is, on the contrary – so I shall assume – an expression of the age, as well as an influence operating upon both present and future. (Flexner, 1930, p. 3) The aim of this paper is to chart the discursive territory around a set of keywords that have come to play a central role in higher education (HE). These keywords are entrepreneurial, entrepreneurship and entrepreneur(s), as well as enterprise and enterprising. The social, political and educational context in which they have moved centrestage is a complex mesh of trends including the reduction of government funding, the consequent necessity to raise money from external, frequently corporate, sources, deregulation, increased competition and internationalisation, and the replacement of collegial by managerial (or, as critics would have it, managerialist) governance structures. More detail on this background will be provided in the Section headed Socio-Political Context. The most significant trend for the matter at hand, however, is the changing relationship between academia and business. Once two separate social domains, the two have been moving closer together and are now melding at various points of contact. What better linguistic expression of this than a previously unthinkable adjective-noun combination: the entrepreneurial university. New ties between universities and business are constantly being established, and existing ones strengthened. They are the result of intensified exchange processes between universities and their commercial environment. These exchange processes generally have both a financial dimension, following a "money-for-expertise" formula, and an interpersonal Entrepreneurial University 4 one, as businesspeople are appointed to positions in university management or on boards of trustees, for example, or faculty take on consultancy contracts. Exchange invariably leads to new social and discursive practices, such as "selling", "advertising", or "managing". They are imported into the academic domain, where, previously, the prevailing norm was characterised by non-utilitarian knowledge creation and consultative, committee-based governance, as well as by its concomitant non-commercial discourse. While it is true that at various times in the past, and in different ways, reality often diverged from this ideal – witness the traditional role of universities in educating professional cadres (Barnett, 1990, p. 66) – the extent to which business is now making inroads into academe is quite unprecedented. Within universities, "manager-academics" (Deem, 2003; Deem & Johnson, 2000; Johnson, 2002) are the key drivers of this development. According to Trowler (1998, p. 32), "it is among senior higher education managers that the managerialist arguments are articulated in their most unalloyed form". By way of an example, here are recent comments by the current Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive (thus his official title) of the University of Surrey. "Unalloyed" indeed: Modern universities are businesses and, like any business, to achieve sound finances they must develop appropriate services and products for which their customers – the government, business, charities, students and the public – should be prepared to pay a fair price. (Dowling, 2004) "Entrepreneurship", both as activity and discourse, is one of those "imported" practices. As the corpus and textual analysis will demonstrate, it is deployed by academic leaders and administrators as a carrier of key values that they want their external stakeholders to associate with the organisation, and their internal stakeholders to both believe in and implement. The organisation of this paper is as follows. I shall begin by outlining the sociopolitical context that the concept of the entrepreneurial university is embedded in, before Entrepreneurial University 5 discussing the concept of keywords as well as the data and method used to build the "discursive profile" of the keywords in question. Having examined key usages of the term, in both prominent academic texts and a large, computerised reference corpus, the paper then moves on to extract the term's semantic prosodies from the results of a search on the World Wide Web. Following an analysis of key motifs and rhetorical devices used in connection with the "entrepreneurial university" in three texts, the final section integrates the findings from a critical perspective. Before proceeding, I would like to declare up-front where I stand on this contested terrain, taking, as van Dijk (1993, p. 252) advises critical discourse analysts to do, "an explicit sociopolitical stance". Some of the changes effected under the banner of entrepreneurship I would certainly regard as beneficial. Institutional cultures fostering innovation, for example, strike me as a more than welcome change from the hierarchical overbureaucratisation that used to be (and some would claim still is) the hallmark of so many universities. Other developments, such as research being subjected to commercial pressures, I object to because I regard them as a threat to disinterestedness, independence and objectivity. The blurring of boundaries between universities and the for-profit sector also jeopardises the freedom of the former to criticise the latter: the hand that feeds is less likely to be bitten. I agree with Ronald Barnett's assessment (2003, p. 73) that "through the ideology of entrepreneurialism the university's particular place as a critical forum is undermined". With Trowler (2001, p. 197), I see "the importance of active resistance to what is becoming an increasingly hegemonic discourse located in managerialist structural roots". Thus, in unpacking educational enterprise discourse I am hoping to make a contribution to universities' emancipation from these discursive hegemonies. The Socio-Political Context The significance of keywords derives crucially from the social, cultural and political Entrepreneurial University 6 environment in which they are embedded. It is imperative, therefore, that this environment be described and drawn upon as an interpretative resource. There is widespread agreement in the HE literature that in recent decades universities around the globe have been undergoing substantial changes (though HE researchers disagree in their evaluative stance, an issue I do not have the space to explore further here). These changes have been conceptualised as occurring on three layers, the "national-structural", "organizational" and "professional-subjective" (Parker & Jary, 1995, p. 320). There are repercussions on all aspects of the classic triad of teaching, research, and administration, and in various strata of organisational practices. Over-arching and elusive concepts like institutional culture, image, professional identities and academic value systems are affected as much as the more hands-on aspects of governance and financial management. As Barnett puts it, "all the conceptual and operational underpinnings of the university crumble" (Barnett, 2000, p. 1). Among the various trends and developments that make up this scenario of uncertainty and upheaval (for a succinct overview see Peters & Roberts, 2000, pp. 128-129), the "incursion by markets" (O'Neill & Solomon, 1996, p. 82) is probably the dominant force. Several interlocking factors combine to make universities more responsive to "the market". First, widening access (or, as critics would have it, "massification") without a matching increase in government funding produces budget shortfalls. Second, because of budgetary constraints, commercial funding streams are becoming more important, whether generated through spin-out companies, consulting contracts or sponsorship deals, and this leads to "the spread into universities of norms and institutional forms characteristic of commercial society" (O'Neill & Solomon, 1996, p. 82). Managerialism is one of these norms (Deem, 1998; Trowler, 2001). Though marketisation and managerialism are not the same thing, they tend to be mutually reinforcing phenomena and have, in fact, been referred to as "twin strategies" (Blackmore & Sachs, 2003, p. 478). Entrepreneurial University 7 While there is a trend in higher education towards "the adoption of a free-market or corporate-business perspective" (Webster, 2003, p. 85), there is a parallel trend in knowledgeintensive industries towards an increased reliance on scientific expertise and "collegial" forms of organisational control (Kleinman & Vallas, 2001, p. 453). Instead of seeing current changes in the HE/business relationship exclusively as a case of (one-sided) "colonisation/appropriation" (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, p. 93), they are perhaps more adequately conceptualised, as Kleinman & Vallas (2001) argue, as a process of convergence. However, this convergence is "asymmetrical (. . . ) because although codes and practices circulate in both directions, industry ultimately appears to have an upper hand in this process" (Kleinman & Vallas, 2001, p. 451). Another contextual factor that must not be ignored is the part played by governments and the parliaments in which they command majorities. They initiate, support and sustain change in the HE sector not only through creating the requisite regulatory framework and allocating budgets, but also through promulgating a pro-market educational agenda in parliamentary debates, media appearances and official policy documents. The apposite keywords appear as central nodes in the argument. Witness, for example, the statement by David Blunkett, then UK Secretary of State for Education and Employment, who said, referring to an earlier comment by Prime Minister Tony Blair, that "in the knowledge economy, entrepreneurial universities will be as important as entrepreneurial businesses, the one fostering the other. The 'do nothing' university will not survive – and it will not be the job of government to bail it out". There are two other facets of the socio-political environment which ought to be touched upon here. Firstly, one needs to recognise the international scale on which academic entrepreneurship is being promoted. The World Wide Web search that provided input to the present study revealed relevant documents not only from Western Europe, North America Entrepreneurial University 8 and Australia, but also from Eastern Europe and Asia. They included a speech entitled Towards an Entrepreneurial University by the President of the National University of Singapore, accounts from Estonia (Aarna, n.d.), Brazil (Scavarda do Carmo, n.d.), China 4 and the Philippines, as well as an outline describing an EU Tempus Tacis Project designed to develop a strategic plan for the University of Nizhni Novgorod (Russia) under the heading of Becoming an Entrepreneurial University, the latter being a prime example of the deliberate dissemination of the concept, in this case from West to East. This confirms Etzkowitz et al.'s (2000, p. 313) claim that "it appears that the 'entrepreneurial university' is a global phenomenon with an isomorphic development path, despite different starting points and modes of expression". Secondly, in addition to being diffused across regions and cultures, the cluster of phenomena made up of marketisation, managerialism and entrepreneurialism is by no means restricted to higher eduation, but has affected diverse social domains, including art (Wu, 2002), health care (Poole, 2000), and public services generally (Flynn, 2000). This, in turn, needs to be seen in the still wider context of the "enterprise culture" (Keat & Abercrombie, 1991), which was identified, in the British context, as a "central motif in the political thought and practice of the Conservative government" (Keat, 1991, p. 1), but has since also been described as a constitutive element of New Labour's "Third Way" discourse (Fairclough, 2000, pp. 43-50). In this respect, the entrepreneurial university is indeed, to use Flexner's (1980, p. 3) phrase, "an expression of the age". The "Profiling" of