The Central Europe University on the Way from a Temple to a Factory

FRYDEL, Kazimierz¹ & TUBIELEWICZ, Andrzej²

Ul. G.Narutowicz 11/12, 80-952 Gdansk, Poland, Gdansk Technical University
¹ kfr@sunrise.pg.gda.pl
² atu@sunrise.pg.gda.pl

1 Polish University against a background of the European centres of education

In the Renaissance the European university emancipated to a great extent from the influence of the Church, mainly due to the reformatory movements involving communities of numerous universities. It is possible to say that the university became more secular, and more open to the earthly needs to which it was exposed. There took place a transition from theocratism to antropocentrism [2], which is expressed in the syllabuses of that time, in form of the liberal arts. The completion of the emancipation process occurred in the Enlightenment when the spirit of rationalism prevailed and an astonishing advancement was noted not only in physics and mechanics but also in the development of the humanities and social sciences.

Today's position of the university in Western Europe proves that unusual vitality and capability to cope with the needs of the surroundings under conditions of very great changes which the environment has experienced for over 800 years have been bestowed on the institution meant in the Middle Ages as a corporate body, dependent on the Church. One may say that its vitality is comparable only with the vitality of the Founder.

One might also ask a question about the reason for this situation, and what features of the university have contributed to such a state of affairs. Undoubtedly, to a great extent, its structure. Structure meant as a compendium of principles of proceedings based on cumulative experience which increases an opportunity for an institution to survive and develop.

The organisational structure of the present-day university in many West-European countries is similar to the structure of a large trade corporation, a profit-making organisation able to exist, acknowledged to be safe. This structure seems to be connected with the form of government of the medieval university in name only. But, this is true the name can be derived from the word denoting the human body, an organism, where all its members cooperate with one another to perform a great mission.

This might suggest that both the university of the past and the university of today have built their structure so as to enable a cooperation between respective sections to accomplish a common mission, which once was the service to an unknown God, then to the truth, and today to a particular man. And for the reason that the mission was to last and is to last till the end of the world, there has been adopted a structure that has existed since the creation of the world.

Today's West-European university is financed by various sources, but in the case of a state university the financial support is not more generous than funding the university in the middle-ages. And like the scanty sources coming from alms or donations that made the university community of that time live an ascetic life, also today the limited financial means can nowhere ensure the highest living standard to professors of the state universities. Such are the facts. The situation can improve in wages by a significant inflow of private money obtained by the university, for instance, from tuition fees for studies.

But under such conditions the university will resemble a private industrial-trade corporation not only in its organisation, but also in its financial system.

The West-European university has remained open to ideas, staff and students, and also to the management methods. The administration authorities of countries in various ways interfere in the autonomy of the university, but in general, they respect it, because they trust this institution based on long experience. And according to history lessons, a political government has hardly ever taken control of university staff employment or recruitment of students, or interference in direct management of a university.

Unfortunately the situation of the Polish university is completely different, not on account of a period of over a hundred years' lack of sovereignty, but for the reason of a fifty-year-period of communist domination in Polish ideology and one does not know how much time the clear of communism will take. One may say that the natural evolution of the Polish-European university was blocked by the communist disaster in our country, and after that time our national culture, along with the universities was subject to a monstrual treatment called indoctrination. An effective government and communist party control over the people during the Stalin rule and the repressive measures taken at the universities resulted in developing some servile postures and in disposing research workers to fulfil the communist party orders, as well as in lack of respect for law and scientific truth, particularly in the humanities. After many centuries the Polish university made a step back: it refused under pressure to serve the truth and started to serve an ideology but this time a false one.

The fall of Stalin did not cause many changes. The state offered security, stability and foreign trips in return for a formal declaration of loyalty to the ideology. But the cruel experiences of the Stalin rule and a feigned policy that followed led to self-censorship in scientific circles. In fact promotion involved only those people who renounced independence. This world of make-believe activity became a normal situation to such an extent that recovery of autonomy by universities at the beginning of the 1980s did not make any significant changes.

For, how can one explain today's situation, taking into consideration that 10 years after a period of great autonomy, when a change of the political system followed:

• the universities do not take interest in opening their doors to Europe and keep them closed before a virtual participation of foreign staff in the activities of our universities (a formal obstacle is lack of a scientific degree of assistant professor /doc.hab./);

• the universities do not even intend to open their doors to their environment (even the technical one!) and to make it possible for exchange of staff between the university and the surroundings (a formal obstacle is again the fact that specialists from the outside do not have scientific degrees (doc.hab.), because they were not interested in wasting 10 years to be granted formal degrees) ;

• the universities are not willing to take responsibility for the staff. They prefer to leave it to the State or to some other institutions with their bureaucratic system of checking the staff qualifications;

• the universities cannot find in their authorities any place for managers from the outside.

The above concerns, in principle, the universities. Private higher schools of education, in which it is necessary to pay tuition fees, it is obvious, that their doors are more open to the surroundings, to students, to the employment of professors from other countries, and to managers from the outside of the university. However, employment is generally given to the same staff as it is practised by state universities, and for this reason the requirements mentioned above, to some extent, also apply to them.

2 Challenges to be met by universities

A radical change of the living conditions of people in highly-developed countries whose progress was primarily possible by the development and the dissemination of the computer science techniques, and use of global economy, provides a new meaning to investments made in the human capital. Today, in the times of new economy, when the intelectual capital dominates the production, knowledge, professional skill, and human growth become a strategic factor for an organisation to succeed.

This makes it necessary to modify the whole system of education at universities to adapt it to the conditions and needs of the changing community. It will be necessary to pass from conservative teaching to one that leads to changes, novelty, another approach to the current problems of thinking and global activity. New technologies require different qualification and competence and particularly such elements of creativity as knowledge, inspiration, and ideas, and capability for abstract thinking and a wide look into conceptual work.

This situation is a new challenge to the universities whose syllabuses should favour the scientific and engineering culture and the atmosphere of advantageous effects of entrepreneurship, innovation, and team work. The training of future managers, engineers, humanists should also conform to such requirements of the current labour market as functional elasticity, ability for multi-functional work, and communicative skills. A reflection of the changes taking place in higher education is the appearance of numerous new subjects and specialities apart from the traditional disciplines making it possible to train highly-qualified specialists, particularly engineers and managers of innovative postures. This tendency in the changes related to studies calls for stronger and stronger cooperation between universities and research institutes and enterprises, developing in students not only knowledge but also professional efficiency [3].

3 Trends in Transformation of the Polish University

To meet the challenges of the Polish university particularly the state one, the university should follow the way that the European university has experienced, which has resulted in its opening to the surrounding problems. Unless this is attained the university will not be competitive.

A conclusion of the present speculations is not optimistic. It necessitates:

1. A change of the regulations by the parliament;
2. implementing new management instruments in universities.

The current autonomy should be corrected by appropriate amendments to give the university more responsibility. According to the authors the university should be more responsible for its funds. This problem is closely connected with the use of some necessary partial tuition fees for studies at state universities and a change of the student's relationship to the university from an applicant to a client. These questions have frequently been raised for the last twenty years, but unfortunately the suggestions made above have always been rejected by a form of consultation of a definite majority of senates and faculty councils. It is likely that a change in the law will have to be made against the will of the educational bodies of the universities.

The main problem of the report is the determination of some directions in the changes related to the management instruments applied by universities. Generally speaking, the proposition made by the authors concerns the implementation of new management tools for universities, for instance, missions, strategies, or more effective organisational structures, that is, instruments applied successfully by western universities. However, in the authors' opinion the changes in regulations are of primary significance, for under conditions with no improvements, the above management will be the same fiction as we see it today in the form of competition for university professors positions.

Both with regard to mission and strategy one may say that the process of formulation is more important than the effect itself. The point is to involve all the university community in this process in form of a debate or a series of debates organised by various departmental units. The formulation of mission and strategy by a limited group of top management members, followed by a transfer of their decisions down for execution, is completely useless, and does not constitute an element of self-organisation and self-control of human actions undertaken individually and by groups in course of the accomplishment of a strategy [2].

The formulation of the mission and the strategic objectives should be an expression of merit favoured by the community of a given university, while the formulation of the strategy - result of an analysis of the capabilities to realise the merit. A good tool here is the SWOT analysis: an analysis of positive and negative points of a university, and some potential risks that result from its surroundings [7].

An analysis of the strong and weak point of a school should be related to a widely-understood potentials that are at its disposal, namely:

• the staff,
• the material (technological) base,
• the organisational structures and procedures of operation,
• the current and the prospective students,
• culture and the religious merits.

The analysis of the surroundings should provide a definition of the expectations related to the major "stakeholders" of the university [2], such as:

• students,
• university teachers,
• institutions and the local communities,
• economical associations,
• the Government.

The SWOT analysis should result in a strategy, that is a method of carrying out a strategic programme, describing how to make use of one's own capabilities to avoid risks from the surroundings. The point here is, the principles of carrying out a mission, which means everything the university has to offer to the environment interested in its functioning. A primary task of strategy should be creating, maintaining and growth of competitiveness which in the case of a university can be called reputation [2]. It involves skills and organisational capabilities in the range of didactics, science-research, programme-informatics, socio-technology, finance, or the position of the graduates in economy and culture. It is mainly the reputation that the most significant service-users, the students-clients will take account of when choosing the university (the servicegiver).

The close relationship between strategy and the organisational structure has already been pointed out by A. D. Chandler. The organisational structure defines how the subordination lines and the communication channels between various managers and departments will function. It has an effect on the information being transmitted along these lines, and also on the mechanism of planning and making decisions [4]. The relationship is determined by such elements as: size of the university, diversity of specializations and demand for graduates, type of teaching processes, standard of the equipment or the qualification of the teaching staff. The authors are convinced that the level of knowledge relevant to these questions is insignificant at universities. The universities have a standardized structure resulting from regulations of the 1980 s, which in fact are very archaic, regardless of the type of school. In Poland there are no universities with both the humanities and technical faculties, i.e. the university. At every university there are enormous senates and faculty councils which as a matter of fact do not deal with financial matters, but devote at least 70 per cent of their official time to the problems related to employment and promotion of staff although scientific degrees are here of the greatest significance. At universities prevail feudal relations, voices of so-called self-reliant teachers with a PhD degree are disregarded, though they counduct 60% of the basic teaching activities, i.e. lectures, seminars, and diploma works, (for instance, at the Technical University of Gdansk, the above mentioned activities are conducted by 150 professors and 550 lecturers with Ph D degree). It should be added that the hierarchical structure of institutes and faculties perfectly corresponds to this climate.

However, there arises a question, how and under what conditions will it be possible to satisfy the requirements set upon the above mission and strategy? Will the strategy created by a compilation of several or a dozen projects of faculty councillor's meetings and outvoted by one hundred members of the senate be a strategy for the university? Of course the structures should be changed, but for what sort of structure?

In the world of business over the last twenty or thirty years there have been trained divisional structures [5] by some large international corporations. They make it possible to take control of relatively varied human activity, to adapt themselves to the surrounding variations, since they are provided with team responsibility and predisposition for working out a strategy and mission. In view of the features the corporations are acknowledged to be vital and safe. This structure has at its disposal some additional research sections, subordinated by the central office.

The organisational structures in a great number of Western universities are similar to the divisional structures, perhaps for this reason. However, in the authors' opinion, without amendments to the law of higher education which does not requiring much work, and a change of atmosphere at universities, there will not be possible any progress. But the changes in the organisation of structures at universities should not be made too fast.

However, the possibility to meet the challenges mentioned in paragraph 2 can become doubtful, but it can prevent another fictitious act. Avoidance of further fictitious acts will undoubtedly be of great significance for culture and the future of our universities.

References

1. DAVIES N. Europa. Krakow: Znak, 1999. P. 396.

2. KOZMINSKI A.K. Mission and strategies of higher educational institutions In Master of Business Administration. Warszawa: Miedzynarodowa Szkola Zarzadzania, 1999 Nr 2. P.18.

3. MARCINIAK S. Innovation and economical development. Warszawa: Osrodek Nauk Spolecznych Politechniki Warszawskiej, 1997. P. 97.

4. STONER J.A.F. & WANKEL CH. Management. Warszawa: PWE, 1994. P.210.

5. STRTATEGOR Management, strategies, structures, decisions, identity. Warszawa: PWE. 1995. P. 320.

6. SCHMOTTER J.W. An Interview with Professor James G. March In Selections. Los Angeles: GMAC, Winter 1995. P. 5.

7. TUBIELEWICZ A. & FRYDEL K. Choice of parameters determining the mission and strategy of the Technical University of Gdansk. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Mission and Strategy of a University. Gdansk: Gdansk Technical University. 1997. P. 239.